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Show HN: Metaballs
Generating gooey metaballs as a single SVG path — locating the tangent points between two circles, spreading and curving the connector with polar coordinates, and handling overlap, after Hiroyuki Sato's Illustrator script.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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How video games use lookup tables
How to implement 1D LUTs to color grayscale thermal vision videos, 3D LUTs for color correct and smart hacks from video games
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Why fastDOOM is fast
During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.
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3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous
the history of 3dfx Interactive
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A video game where you are an operating system
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be an OS?
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Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
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Why I Write Games in C (yes, C)
I am an unusual beast. All my solo project games I've been making recently have been written in 'vanilla' C. Nobody does this. So I think it might be interesting to explain why I do.
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Valve is about to win the console generation
Valve does nothing and still wins
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The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
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Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder
A version of Flappy Bird that runs entirely inside MacOS Finder. It runs at 4 frames a second! That's a lot of frames!!
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How DOOM fire was done
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
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If Looks Could Kill
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
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TensorKart: self-driving MarioKart with TensorFlow
Kevin Hughes' blog
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2D Vehicles
Explore my 1996 vehicle physics prototype, recreated for the web as Motion Lab.
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Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
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I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it
The personal website of Elias Daler about programming, technology and videogames
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Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? (2017)
For me, the most favorite type of a computer program is an emulator. Being able to run code from a completely different hardware architecture always seemed like a magic. The old computers are great on their own, so this kind of connection between historic machines and the modern computing environment feels almost like…
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How to learn chess as an adult (2021)
Becoming the worst best chess player in the world
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Another Update
Hi all - bet you are wondering what is going on at this point. The short answer is I did not know exactly how to proceed until now, finally having an idea of my employment situation. I have talked to...
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FizzleFade
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
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The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …
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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing
How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets
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The Most Mario Colors
The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was…
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Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
Playing Witcher 3, a GPU-intensive game on a 2015 fanless Macbook
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Help I accidentally a wigglegram
It is a kind of stereo image you make by looping frames together, like as a GIF.
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Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
I've been obsessed with procedural maps since I was a kid rolling dice on the random dungeon tables in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. There was something magical about it — you didn't design the dungeon, you discovered it, one room at a time, and the dice decided whether you got a treasure chamber or a dead end full…