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Games & Graphics

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

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215

Carpentopod: A Walking Table Project

Back in 2008, I wrote some software for fun to generate various optimized walking mechanisms. And when I also picked up some electronics and wood working skills in more recent years, I was able to turn one of these mechanisms into an actual wireless walking wooden coffee table: the Carpentopod. This post briefly…

221

Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh

I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK)…

232

Winning at Candy Crush

I find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “ winning at Puzzle Adventures ”, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores with no effort.

235

“Bad Apple” in Minecraft

Demoscene is the art of pushing computers to perform tasks they weren’t designed to handle. One recurring theme in demoscene is the shadow-art animation “Bad Apple!!”. We’ve played it on the Commodore 64, Vectrex (a unique game console utilizing only vector graphics), Impulse Tracker, and even exploited Super Mario…

238

Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code

Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…

239

Unreal Rust

A few months ago I asked myself "What if I could write a game in Rust, but use Unreal as a renderer?". After a bit of thinking I came to the conclusion that exposing the Unreal renderer to Rust via C ffi was way more work than I was willing to do. But what if I could just build on top of Unreal instead? I could just…