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1982: The Hobbit
Veronika Megler just wanted a part-time job while she finished her college degree. She didn't realize it would end with her writing one of the first computer game blockbusters.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 142 posts.
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Why I’ll never create modules for VCV Rack anymore–and what I’ll make instead
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
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Factorio's Belt Bug
Factorio is a factory-building game involving lots (and I mean, LOTS) of conveyor belts. The code that implements these belts is marvel of optimization, but unfortunately they can't handle every construct.
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System Shock
We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…
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Fitting Cubic Bézier Curves
Blog of Raph Levien.
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Townscaper’s Rendering Style in WebGL
I love the rendering style of Townscaper by Oskar Stålberg. Since Townscaper can export your town as a .obj (including three “magic” textures), I thought it would be a nice project to reverse-engineer this style. Last weekend, I finally had
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Universal Paperclips
The dawn of incremental games: how some of the most virally addictive games of the 2010s were nothing but text and numbers going up.
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Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
Well, somebody had to find it.
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The Roblox Microverse
Roblox is something new and interesting that abstracts away the platforms underneath it.
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Simulating CRT Monitors with FFmpeg (Pt. 1: Color CRTs)
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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Street Fighter II, Spin when you can't
This article is part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
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DoS attacks against my online game
DDraceNetwork is an open source online game I’ve been running since 2013 with a community of volunteers. The game is available for free, I’m hosting servers for it in many countries around the world so that we have trusted official ranks . The servers are paid for by donations , which I stop collecting once the cost…
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Analogue Pocket Hate Story
Back in late 2019, the FPGA -based hardware emulation company Analogue , known for their near-flawless clones of various retro video game consoles announced an exciting new product. This time around, instead of plugging into your TV and playing the games of one system (per device), the product called the Analogue…
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Castlevania III Password Algorithm
An explanation of the Castlevania III password algorithm, including name hashes, payload encoding, decoding, special names, and all valid passwords.
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How does a game engine work? an overview (2016)
Want to develop your own game engine? Here is a nice overview of what you need to implement in order to develop a game engine.
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Why can’t you design noise in frequency space?
The python code that goes along with this blog post can be found at To evaluate the quality of a blue noise texture, you can analyze it in frequency space by taking a discrete Fourier transform. Wh…
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Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
Recently, Juliana has gotten into Stardew Valley. Hard. Since I’m a huge fan myself, I'm doing a Game Design Perspective on the game to celebrate. I'll be looking at the game mechanics and how the interlocking layers make the game tick. In Stardew Valley, you play as a disillusioned city slicker wh
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Rendering Moana with Swift
Moana (2048×858 pixels, 64 spp) rendered with Gonzales on a Google Cloud Instance with 8 vCPUs and 64GB of memory in roughly 26 hours. Memory usage is about 60GB. (Denoised with OpenImageDenoi…
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Complex game worlds, simple text interfaces (2015)
UPDATE July 2021: 6 years later, there’s a game and also an updated explainer video .
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Collision Detection Is Hard: The Story of Alf
Today we’re talking about ALF. It’s a surprising move for Nicole Express; we do not condone cat-eating. But neither did Alf, eventually. In any case, we’re n...
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Frickin' shaders with frickin' laser beams
Solve all your shader problems with this one weird trick.
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In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
This article is supported by my Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider contributing. I feel like hard counters get a bad rap in RTS games. There are a lot of arguments out there both fo…
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Anime Video Encoding Guide for X265 (HEVC) & AAC/Opus (2019)
External Links Yuki Subs Guides has a master list of guides of all you need to know about anime encoding. Also, go visit my MPC-HC + MadVR, mpv, and SVP 4 setup guide! Table of Contents x265 Settin…
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Path Tracing Quake in Blender
This week twenty-five years ago, Quake broke new ground in game engine realism. It was one of the first commercial games to have fully texture mapped 3D scenes rendered in real-time, with pre-computed lightmaps adding an extra layer of atmosphere.
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Sunset Geometry (2016)
Robert Vanderbei has written a beautiful series of articles and talks about a method for finding the radius of the earth based on a single photograph of a sunset over a large, calm lake.