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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions
C++ remains one of the leading programming languages in game development despite the emergence of new technologies and languages. Its flexibility, performance, and extensive ecosystem make it the preferred choice for building complex game systems, engines, and high-performance applications.
Mono for Unreal Engine
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
Gentlemen... BEHOLD! I Have Decompiled!
Deciphering the postcard-sized raytracer
"He's done it again!" was my first thought as I looked at the back of a postcard sized Pixar flier [1] which was covered in code. In the lower right corner, the blob of statements and expressions had been signed by none other than Andrew Kensler. For those who are not familiar with him, Andrew is the programmer who…
Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol
One of my all-time favorite games is Halo: Combat Evolved that launched together with the original Xbox in 2001. One major part of the game was multiplayer, up to 16 people at a LAN party could play together by connecting four Xbox consoles over Ethernet , referred to as System Link .
Building games that can be understood at a glance
I've been making games on the iphone for a long time, almost since the beginning... and one thing that struck me early on was how differently I discovered iPhone games versus games on other platforms.
A Japanese-based multinational made a CD-based console once
Even today, plenty of disinformation still abounds regarding the WIZ code. A 22.050Khz wobble that was used to identify legitimate CD's. Maybe one day we'll put them to rest... :)
The anatomy of a Godot API call
UPDATE: This article has started an ongoing conversation with the Godot devs. They care about the issues raised, and would like to improve things. Significant improvements will almost certainly be made, although it’s still early days and it’s unclear what will change and by how much. I am encouraged by the response. I…
Perfect Circle
How good are your circle drawing skills?
Texture-Less Text Rendering
How to draw text to a Vulkan renderpass without binding a single texture
Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
I'm an EA FIFA enthusiast. More than that, I’ve played since 1994. Last year, I was talking with a friend about the game and he asked me if I was playing Career Mode. My first answer was: "That is boring ... I want to play the real game and not play as a manager". From that day, he decided to convince me to play…
Secrets of smooth Béziers
I haven’t posted here much lately, and I admit, it’s because I’ve gotten sidetracked thinking about curves again. I did my PhD thesis on curves, so spent years thinking about them, then put that on hold for a while, aside from some work in crunching font file sizes down.
Divide by depth for instant 3D
When I first started working on games, I used high level frameworks that would give you a Camera that just kind of worked. But as I learned more and wanted t...
I built my own Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) hardware dev kit from scratch
How I built a Sega Mega Drive dev kit from scratch: reverse engineering the cartridge slot, a homemade logic analyzer, a RAM cartridge and boot firmware.
Game developer’s guide to graphical projections
Retronator Do It Yourself
500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter
During the last 3 months, I spent some of my time and tokens decompiling a popular first-person shooter. The goal was not to reach a simple proof-of-concept state. Instead, we really wanted an accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation of the game. The avid reader of my blog might have noticed that I had…
How to walk through walls using the 4th dimension [video]
An explanation of how walking through walls would actually look like if you could move in 4D.
The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)
My personal website and blog
Procedural Worlds from Simple Tiles
In the two years after publishing this, I worked on refining this algorithm to power a real-time world generator, called Generate Worlds, and it lets you des...
How I made an Android game from scratch in 23 days
Drone Invaders - a space shootem up with retro graphics and modern gameplay
Hacking the Nintendo DSi Browser
I managed to exploit the Nintendo DSi browser 15 years after it was released in Japan. This post will go over the journey and the technical details.
My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable
It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.
The Two Egg Problem
Analysis of the classic "dropping two eggs from a building" interview question
Explaining my fast 6502 code generator
To learn how optimizing compilers are made, I built one targeting the 6502 architecture . In a bizarre twist, my compiler generates faster code than GCC, LLVM, and every other compiler I compared it to.
Like Game-of-Life, but on Growing Graphs, with WASM and WebGL
Experimental simulation of emergent complexity through graph-rewriting automata.
Writing for Half-Life
(File dated November 9, 1998) PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake […]
Making Direct3D games faster in Wine using modern OpenGL
I play World of Warcraft . Being a Linux user requires me to run this in Wine , a Windows API translation layer. While Wine is continuously improving, its performance in Direct3D games still leaves much to be desired.