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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
If you haven't heard the story about Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, and rounded corners, it's a fun read . A big takeaway is that rounded corners are everywhere . Let's take a look at procedurally generating a rounded box mesh.
I’m starting a contest for people that do cool things with a Kinect. See the details below. Before I joined Google, I was a grad student interested in topics like computer vision, motion self…
After he retired from making feature length films in 2013, legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki started work on a short film using CGI animation techniques, which
Adding multi-scale noise layers, mountain distance fields, and elevation blending to create detailed terrain from the paint map foundation.
Tangent space is often presented as a confusing block of shader math. This is a deep dive into what tangent vectors actually mean, how they emerge from UVs to bridge 2D and 3D space, and the geometry that makes normal mapping possible.
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
Written and copyrighted by Christian A. Schiller , World of M.U.L.E. curator, with contributions from Andrew Dieffenbach, M.U.L.E. Online developer. No reprint without permission. Happy to get feedback on this feature, either via the contact form or one of the following social media accounts: Facebook , Twitter or…
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it given that the…
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
Dithering is still a surprisingly applicable technique, not just for practical reasons (such as preparing a full-color image for output on a non-color printer), but for artistic reasons as well. Dithering also has applications in web design, where it is a useful technique for reducing images with high color counts to…
In my previous blog post I talked about reverse engineering the virtual machine used to implement objects in the Lost Vikings. The Lost Vikings was released in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse, now bett…
Screentendo is a desktop application that allows you to turn a selection of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros. I’ve never built a Cocoa app or used Sprite Kit before, so it was …
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
A moving train at night is an incredible place to hear stories. Like a campfire.
…wherein I talk about my latest Z80 emulation adventures.
Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…
ernesernesto dev blog
When you play Chess, there are on average something like 30 different moves you can make each turn. In other words, the branching factor is ...
Reconstructing films with artificial neural networks
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TLDR: Written version of the talk I gave at Develop Brighton 2026. Yes Godot can ship commercial VR, we paid roughly £80k in early adopter tax to do it. War stories from rebuilding Godot's core, the
A compilation of my Raymarching and Signed Distance Field learnings and work. In it, I teach you how to leverage those techniques along with lighting models, smoothmin, soft shadows, and some math to create beautiful 3D raymarched scenes ranging from abstract shapes to infinite realistic-looking landscapes.
