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Games & Graphics

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

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1414

Lemmings 2: The Tribes

When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…

1415

The Road to Ultima V

It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…

1417

Lindenmayer Systems

Originally developed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968, an L-System is a formalism to generate self-similar structures. Although, L-Systems are capable of generating famous fractals like the Sierpinski Triangle (Axiom: FXF--FF--FF, F → FF , X → --FXF++FXF++FXF-- , angle = 60 ) or the Gosper Curve (Axiom: FX, X →…

1422

Differential Heuristics

In 2005 Google showed off Google Maps, which lets you drag the map around instead of reloading the page like MapQuest and others used. That’s the feature that got everyone’s attention. But what got my attention was a feature they added in 2007 where you could drag the start/end points on a route [1] , and it would…

1424

Amiga Screens: A Primer

One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…

1425

Five Years of Being a Full-Time Indie Game Developer

Wow, it’s been a while. Figured passing another milestone is worth at least some sort of update. Looking back at my 1 year milestone has been amusing. My initial thought was that almost all the points brought up 4 years ago would no longer apply. A lot of the insights back then are strangely still quite applicable. So…

1432

Super Mario Derivations

One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.

1435

Sierra Gets Creative

Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…

1436

Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…