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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 193 posts.
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…
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.
Experiments in cognitive architecture.
Notes about creative coding on the Web.
Ok, this one is really best explained with a visualiser:
A streamable 4D gaussian splat format with tunable error bounds. 16–58× smaller than raw; streams and seeks over plain HTTP Range requests.
On your computer graphics journey, you will eventually run into some paper or code mentioning spherical harmonic functions. They are indeed a very useful tool: with just a few coefficients, they allow us to approximate a given function defined on a sphere. This can be very useful for modeling complex lighting.
An autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen about being a youngster making games and posting them online!
Virtual reality for a 286 processor
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
How does the geometry of a road unfold?
An in-depth overview of some of the unusual and very advanced technical tricks used in the Commodore 64 game, Seawolves.
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…
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…
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.
In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.
Do you notice a difference? The image on the right appears “yellower” than the image on the left, which looks more goldenrod by comparison.
Some observations from my War of the Lancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaroftheLance%28videogame%29 1989 Code Harness assisted modernisation WIP I gave Qwen-3....
I have a solid workflow for making my game with AI. However, every iteration, I have to go through extensive manual play-testing to verify functionality…
A from-scratch JEPA world model trained on Super Mario Bros. to study action-conditioned prediction and reward-free planning.
This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.
Introduction 3D Gaussian splatting is a technique that answers this question: given a dataset of pictures of a scene, how can I reconstruct it in 3D? This is achieved using a machine learning algorithm that, for many different camera angles, does the following: render the scene, compare it to the picture taken at the…
A few days ago, The new York Times (owner of Wordle) announced that from 2 February it would start reusing some words from previous years. Their announcem...
I get kidnapped by the MIG while adding DDR3 to our CPU
Endbot is a complete audio-visual demo that fits in exactly 256 bytes . It runs under DOS (via DosBox-X) and renders in real-time: a robot sprite with progressive bullet damage, a growing explosion, a scrolling checkerboard landscape, and a MIDI soundtrack - all from a single tiny .com file.
An interactive deep dive into building halftone shaders in GLSL, covering everything from classic dot patterns and CMYK color separation to Moiré interference, gooey effects, and animated displacement.
TL;DR: Don’t base your FPS calculations on a specific number of frames. Instead, maintain a rolling window of frames that happened during the last second. Use precise timers. Read on for more details.
Over the last few weeks, I created a computer game set in the Arctic. Or maybe I’ve been working on it since 1981. It all depends on how you count.
