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The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases
I love peeking behind the scenes. I like knowing how things were made. I think most people do really, it's something built-in to humans.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 82 posts.
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The Pannini Projection – perspective images with very wide fields of view
Pannini: A New Projection for Rendering Wide Angle Perspective Images Thomas K. Sharpless, Bruno Postle and Daniel M. German; International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics, London, June 2010.
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Make a Doom level, part 1: the basics
I love Doom. Or, well, I love Doom 2, which is the game we actually had when I was nostalgia years old. I love the aesthetic — pixely in a 3D(ish) environment, and consistent in a way that meshes together really well. The classic levels are abstract (occasionally too abstract), but still detailed enough to feel like…
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Time travel in Braid
I bought Braid on the promise of lavish visuals and neat puzzles with temporal mechanics, and on this basis I was rewarded. I found some frustration with the controls, which I eventually traced to dodgy keyboard drivers - the game wouldn't register the up or down arrows while I ...
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Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (v5)
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
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Turn any part of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros
Screentendo is a desktop application that allows you to turn a selection of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros. I’ve never built a Cocoa app or used Sprite Kit before, so it was …
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Make a Doom level, part 2: design
I assume you’ve read the introduction, which tells you the basics of putting a world together. This post is more narrative than mechanical; it’s a tour of my thought process as I try to turn my previous map into something a little more fun to play. I still touch on new editing things I do, but honestly, you already…
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The MS-DOS Showcase
2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you clic…
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NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
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The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
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Graphics Analysis of an NES Game's Select Menu
In Star Versus’s two player mode, the first thing players see is a menu to select their ships, handicaps, and arenas. Although straight forward in concept, this menu actually maxes out the NES’s graphics in multiple ways. Specifically, it uses each available palette, requires all 64 sprites, and places 8 sprites onto…
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8088 MPH: The final version
Although we were very happy with the win at Revision, we were not entirely happy with 8088 MPH as a whole. Because of the time pressure, there were some things we could not finish as well as we wan…