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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 142 posts.

2021
127

The Dig

As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…

131

1980: MUD

The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.

134

From NAND to Raytracer: Raytracing on the Hack Computer

I recently spent some time going through the amazing nand2tetris course, and assignment #9 is to implement something with the Jack programming language that runs on the Hack computer. My friend encouraged me to try writing a raytracer, which is an algorithm that generates physically realistic images by simulating…

136

Instanced Line Rendering Using WebGL

Native line rendering in WebGL leaves a lot to be desired. There's inconsistency in the implementation, so you can't trust that the line width you want will be available to you, for example. It's also missing some pretty important features, like line joins and caps. For these reasons, quite a bit of work has been done…

137

A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1

The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…

139

Automatic Video Editing

Amongst the many consequences of COVID-19 has been the suspension of in-person talks: suddenly, people like me have had to think about how to produce prerecorded videos. In this article I’m going to explain what I’ve come to understand about video recording and the “automatic video editing” technique I’ve used for…

140

Engineering a Chess Match

This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…