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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
Hello! This is part one of a short series of posts on writing a simple raytracer in Rust. I’ve never written one of these before, so it should be a learning experience all around. So what is a raytracer anyway? The short version is it’s a computer program that traces the paths of simulated rays of light through a…
This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial, and you would like to learn some more by studying other people's source…
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
The dawn of incremental games: how some of the most virally addictive games of the 2010s were nothing but text and numbers going up.
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
It’s been about 6 months since I watched Catherine West’s excellent Using Rust for Game Development sent me down the Entity-Component-System (ECS) rabbit hole, and I thought I’d share some of my findings. I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a while now but it took a while to put my thoughts into a cohesive…
Well, somebody had to find it.
What is the most beautiful piece of code you have ever seen? Not only it is subjective, "beauty" is also a word that can mean a lot of things. If we were to be discussing of raw speed, I would bring up the Fast Inverse Square Root [1] . If we were to judge by aesthetic, my answer would be Andrew Kensler's, 1337 bytes…
A deep dive into investigating and reducing the flutter distortion on the soundtrack of Steamboat Willie (1928).
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many…
A friend cleaned up and gave me a copy of a game I've not heard about before: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions , a motorbike racing game for PC, released 1998 by Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Midas Interactive Entertainment.
Minecraft generates unique worlds with Perlin noise. Covers the algorithm, octaves, and Fractal Brownian Motion - with a terrain implementation walkthrough.
Take a look at this: This is a triangulation of a set of random points, such that all the points are connected to one another, all of the faces are triangles, and the edges include the convex hull of the points. I would like to claim that this is not a very “good” triangulation. This algorithm tends to produce lots of…
I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!) I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code. Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very basic games. I wrote a simple Shoot
Shadertoy is a wonderful tool which lets users create and share a type of program called a fragment shader online. The true magic of shadertoy is its community of very talented graphics programmers who build incredible works of art despite having access to only a sliver of the traditional graphics pipeline.
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
An analysis using Process Monitor and WinDbg, dealing with JavaScript, WASM, and Windows shellcode.
At Recode’s Code Media conference on Feb. 13, 2018 (a few hours ago as I write this), they live streamed an interview with Ronny Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap and NBA commissioner Adam Silver. The int…
Discovering Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data
Blending the real and digital worlds, once more.
Roblox is something new and interesting that abstracts away the platforms underneath it.
Despite my disappointment with Cities: Skylines 2, I keep coming back to the game from time to time. I can't even control it. It's like a deep inner need....
The homepage of Lux: professional artist, game developer, educator, and pixel provocateur.
I am still puzzling through the right way to think about some ideas in compression, so let’s take a break from that and talk about generally cleaning up the ...
