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This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes
Last week I linked to this video by Skill Up , which talks about how the concept of loot boxes developed inside of EA and how we got to where we are today. This time let’s talk about it in detail.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 96 posts.
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CHIP-8 in Common Lisp
In the previous post we looked at how to emulate a CHIP-8 CPU with Common Lisp. But a CPU alone isn't much fun to play, so in this post we'll add a screen to the emulator with Qt .
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Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts
Vintage computers and retro gaming
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Zi2zi: Master Chinese Calligraphy with Conditional Adversarial Networks
zi2zi is the follow-up work for my last project , once again tackling the same problem of style transfer between Chinese fonts.
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Indie games don't make money
At the time of writing, a quick check of stats on steamspy for player unknown:battlegrounds reveals this chart:
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Photo-realistic lip-sync from text
We present ObamaNet , the first architecture that generates both audio and synchronized photo-realistic lip-sync videos from any new text. Contrary to other published lip-sync approaches, ours is only composed of fully trainable neural modules and does not rely on any traditional computer graphics methods. More…
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The Old-School Fire Effect and Bare-Metal Programming
Many years ago, sometime in the nineties, my family was having dinner at the neighbours', and their son showed me some cool DOS programs on the computer. One of the programs was a demo that drew animated flames on the screen. I was amazed! Asking what language it was written in, I was told it was Pascal.
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Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch – C64 Demo Effect (2016)
This article describes the inner workings of Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch ( MISC ), a new C64 demo effect introduced in my demo Lunatico .
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Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation
Omnispeak is an open-source reimplementation of Commander Keen episodes 4, 5, and 6. It aims to be a pixel-perfect, bug-for-bug clone of the original games, and is compatible with savegames from the DOS version.
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The Mathematics of 2048: Counting States by Exhaustive Enumeration
How many board configurations are there in the game of 2048? Let's try to enumerate them.
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How to draw oscilloscope lines with WebGL
When I saw oscilloscope music demos, they amazed and inspired me. Observing a clever use of interaction between sound and an electron beam is a unique experience. Some awesome oscilloscope music videos: Youscope, Oscillofun and Khrậng. However, I could not find any beautiful oscilloscope emulators. Lines produced by…
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The Door Problem (2014)
“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”
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Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell)
On August 31, 1966, a 44-year-old electrical engineer named Ralph Baer had an epiphany whilst waiting for a colleague outside a New York City bus terminal. For reasons he would never be able to explain, his thoughts turned to the potential of an interactive version of television. The next day, he sat down in his…
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Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics (2005)
In this position, I know about a bunch of mines on all the remaining fronts, but I can't quite determine where they are. There are a few mines that might be in one of two positions (red or blue), a cluster of mines that might be in one of two arrangements (green), and a more complex situation in the top left which I…
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No Man’s Sky One Year Later
It’s been a year since I last played the captivating , frustrating , and ultimately disappointing No Man’s Sky. There have been some large updates since then, and so I thought now would be a good time to come back and see how the game has evolved. These columns are going to run through September, so you’re basically…
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Lightmap Compression in the Witness
In my initial implementation of our lightmapping technology I simply stored lightmap textures in RGBA16F format. This produced excellent results, but at a very high memory cost. I later switched to the R10G10B10A2 fixed point format to reduce the memory footprint of our lightmaps, but that introduce
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Recompiling the Lost Vikings
In my previous blog post I talked about reverse engineering the virtual machine used to implement objects in the Lost Vikings. The Lost Vikings was released in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse, now bett…
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High Performance Z80 Emulation
…wherein I talk about my latest Z80 emulation adventures.
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The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
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Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
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Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D
How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked…
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Magic Leap: When Reality Hits the Fan
Largely A Summary With Some New Information I have covered a lot of material and even then only glossed at the surface of what I have learned about Magic Leap (ML). By combining the information ava…
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GPU Performance for Game Artists
Performance is everybody’s responsibility, no matter what your role. When it comes to the GPU, 3D programmers have a lot of control over performance; we can optimize shaders, trade image quality for performance, use smarter rendering techniques… we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves. But there’s one thing we don’t…