Topics /

Games & Graphics

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

Any year
1352

AR with SceneKit and Metal

Recently I found myself needing to process and visualize both point clouds and meshes in an iOS application utilizing ARKit, with the point cloud being gathered using the 2020 iPad “LiDAR” sensor. To enable maximum performance and content creation convenience I thought it would be nice to have both custom shaders and…

1353

VR robots are building railways in Japan

Could VR-powered humanoid robots be the future of heavy construction? Over the years we’ve seen a number of major corporations try their hands at marrying VR technology and robotics, from VR convenience store employees and a remote-controlled bomb squad bot to a rather unsettling headset that uses a robotic arm to…

1357

Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata

Last time we looked at generating random dungeons for video games using the Drunkard’s Walk algorithm. The Drunkard’s Walk is fun to play with, and often generates cool levels, but it’s also pretty unreliable. That’s not good enough for my purposes: I want to reliably generate big, open, cave-like maps, with lots of…

1364

An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering

A little while ago I was doing some research into the state-of-the-art for approximating subsurface scattering effects in real-time (mainly for skin rendering), and I had taken a bunch of loose notes to help me keep all of the details straight. I thought it might be useful to turn those notes into a full blog post, in…

1374

Bastard Tetris

“For people who enjoy swearing at their computer, Bastet (short for Bastard Tetris) is an attractive alternative to Microsoft Word.” (From http://hublog.hubmed.org)