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Sphere Rendering: Flat Planets
I'm a Technical Artist with over a decade of professional experience in both AAA and independent projects.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process
This is the second post of a series on practical game-design techniques. Here’s the first. In my years designing games, my methods have evolved from Games-Randomly-Emerging-from-the-Inchoate…
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Sol loves to cheat
Adventures in harness engineering
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16×16 Pixel Art Tutorial
Apparently pixel art is cool once again, and if you are reading this blog, chances are, you like pixel art. As my first actual article on the site, I thought I’d make a little tutorial on how to pixel your own 16*16 sprite, that you can use as a favicon for your website or game. There are many ways to go about pushing…
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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
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Navier-Stokes fluid simulation explained with Godot game engine
When I first stumbled upon fluid simulations in game dev I was amazed on how good the effect could be. I really wan...
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Crafting Painterly Shaders
A detailed essay on my research and process of building a shader to mimic paint, watercolor, and aquarelle by exploring various implementations of the Kuwahara image smoothing filter.
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So You Want to Compete with Steam
I get a lot of pitches for "Steam competitors." 99% of them are doomed to failure, but the vast majority are doomed before they even start.
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The 640 K Barrier
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
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Mac Mini G4 – The best « classic » Macintosh for retro-gaming?
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
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Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
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Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two …
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Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
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I did Advent of Code on a Playstation
How far can I get in Advent of Code if I do all the problems in Dreams?
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Hacking Flappy Bird with Machine Learning
This is a hack for the popular game, Flappy Bird. Although the game is no longer available on Google Play or the App Store, it did not stop folks from creating very good replicas for the web. People have also created some interesting variants of the game - Flappy Bird Typing Tutor and Flappy Math Saga.
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Writing a Game Boy emulator
I've always wanted to write an emulator from scratch, but I've held off for a long time because it's probably the most advanced programming project I've ever wanted to do.
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Raspberry Pi Zero Hidden in an Xbox Controller
I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁…
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Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
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The Polygons of Doom: PSX
It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…
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The Secret Button
There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years.
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Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
→日本語で読むWelcome to "Interviews with Demosceners"! This time, we welcome Japanese demoscener 0b5vr, who mainly creates 64K...
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A treasury of Zork maps
Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...
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The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
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The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise
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Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter
This blog post and the companion video both explain an erosion technique I’ve worked on over the past eight months. The video has lots of e...