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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.

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1263

Ideas for Game Clones to Code (2012)

So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you've read the free book, "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" , a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at every chance) but you want to get better at coding. You can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your…

1273

Why WinQuake exists and how it works

When I took a look at the history of Quake binaries, they all made sense to me. quake.exe was the original release, able to run on DOS and Windows 95. Then came vquake.exe to support the hardware accelerated chip Vérité 1000. Later, glquake.exe generalized hardware acceleration to any vendor providing OpenGL drivers…

1274

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.

1275

The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…

1276

Making Games in Lisp with Hypergiant and Chicken Scheme

Hypergiant is a library for CHICKEN Scheme that tries to make it easy to make efficient games. 1 The idea behind it is the belief that games should start with a prototype that should take minimal effort, but these should be extensible to be whatever you want the final product to be. So Hypergiant attempts to find the…

1281

Chess engines do weird stuff

Since AlphaZero, lc0-style chess engines have been trained with RL. Specifically, you have the engine (search + model) play itself a bunch of times, and train the model to predict the outcome of the game.

1285

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…

1287

Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

While playing Anno 1800 , I noticed something which I’ve never noticed before in any other game (but to be fair, I don’t play too many city builders): The sun keeps a position relative to the camera and thus the shadows alway s fall from left to right: