1381
Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 1: Serious Comedy
One American writer said to me, “Your books will never sell in America because you can’t hear the elves sing. Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing.”
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
1382
Full Throttle
The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.
1383
Building a Game with the Real Engine
Some people make games using the Unreal Engine. That’s nice, but I wanted something a little different. That’s why I’m using the Real Engine.
1384
SDL2 common mistakes and how to avoid them
SDL has grown on me over the past year. I didn’t understand its value until viewing it in the right lens: as a complete platform and runtime replacing the host’s runtime, possibly including libc. Ideally an SDL application links exclusively against SDL and otherwise not directly against host libraries, though in…
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So You Want to Be a Hero?
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
1387
Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…
1388
Smooth Voxel Terrain, Part 2 (2012)
Last time we formulated the problem of isosurface extraction and discussed some general approaches at a high level. Today, we’re going to get very specific and look at meshing in particular.…
1389
The simple geometry behind any road
How does the geometry of a road unfold?
1390
Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator (2018)
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
1391
AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating
For the past few years, cheats have evolved rapidly. First came memory reading aimbots, then colorbots, and now AI aim assist. Cheats have escaped the host PC. How does it affect the players and anti-cheats?
1392
Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game
To me, a classic JRPG is pure mechanism, a kind of puzzle. Was there some way of getting the fun out of building such a mechanism—of solving that puzzle—, wrapping it with the minimal amount of functionality, the simplest thing that could possibly pass as a video game?
1393
Differentiable Dithering
Problem Let's say we want to reduce the number of colors in an image. For example consider the picture of fruit below:
1394
Mario Paint Masterpiece
Mario Paint the 1992 masterpiece game, music-maker, and animation studio
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Generating MIDI Music with GPT-2
Generating Irish/folk/classical music in ABC format using GPT-2-117M, with good results.
1397
Inside Look at Valve's New Lighthouse Tracking System
While walking around the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, I stumbled across an amazing piece of technology: Valve's "Lighthouse" tracking system. Valve's demos were (supposedly) a major contributor to Oculus' fundraising efforts and ultimate sale to Facebook, and this device may have been a key piece of those demos…
1398
The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC
This article is part of a study about the ports of Another World. It is highly recommended to read Another World 101 before reading this.
1399
Age of Empires 2 Scenario Editor Is Turing Complete
A blog about computing and other fun.
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Helmdar: 3D Scanning Brooklyn on Rollerblades
One of my favorite joys is exploring a city late at night on rollerblades. I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for about 10 years now, first in Boston and then in NYC. Every time day turns to night and back again a city takes a breath. At night people flow out or huddle up in buildings, leaving the streets clear for…
1402
Dissecting the 128-byte raycaster
Lately a Reddit post caught my attention which is about a raycaster demo, animated, with mouse control and texture mapping, in only 128 byt...
1403
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…
1404
Victoria III – First Impressions
This week’s post is coming to you all a bit early, as the folks at Paradox Interactive were kind enough to send me a review code for Victoria III – Paradox Interactive’s long awai…
1405
Do you remember Ultima Online?
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago when... Not really; I wish I were there, but I joined as soon as I could.
1406
“No Man’s Sky” Displayed on the Amiga 1000
It should be evident to anyone viewing this website that I have a bit of a vintage computer obsession. And regular readers who’ve been paying attention over the past year and a half or so likely know that my other … Continue reading →
1407
Hong Kong Locations in Ghost in the Shell
When film director Mamoru Oshii was looking for a model of the city of the future for his seminal 1995 animated film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow), h…
1408
Homeworld 2 Backgrounds
This article moved to its own webspace! You can follow him by clicking this: simonschreibt.de/gat/homeworld-2-backgrounds
1409
Coding Tricks Used in the C64 Game Seawolves (2025)
An in-depth overview of some of the unusual and very advanced technical tricks used in the Commodore 64 game, Seawolves.
1410
Object-Oriented Entity-Component-System Design
About two months ago, I decided to start developing a fresh codebase for my voxel project – something that many indie developers are probably all-too familiar with, including myself. This time around, there were three major features that I wanted to implement: