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I built a low-latency AI companion that plays Skyrim with me
How Varkos was built: a low-latency AI companion that plays Skyrim with you, follows complex instructions and evolves through shared experiences.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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“Burning Ship” fractal
The images described here are generated by analysing the following series for each point (c x ,c y ) on the plane.
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Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch
RAWRLAB Games, as an official middleware Nintendo developer, provides an unofficial Godot port for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 development at no cost to approved Nintendo developers that qualify as "Godot Ecosystem Contributors" according to the terms mentioned in this announcement . This port is intended…
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Secret colours of the Commodore 64
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
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A minimal raytracer
How my quest to make a business card sized raytracer got a little out of hand.
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How Distortion Works in Music
Ben’s software blog. Mostly Scala, with a few other things.
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Game Loop
If there is one pattern this book couldn’t live without, this is it. Game loops are the quintessential example of a “game programming pattern”. Almost every game has one, no two are exactly alike, and relatively few programs outside of games use them.
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Remastering Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with Machine Learning
The site for the Remako Mod, a Final Fantasy VII mod that uses AI to improve the graphics of this classic JRPG.
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Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years
Today, Downpour comes out! In case you don't know, Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years. I started it after I left Niantic in October 2022, and I have been working on it ever since then (with breaks for illness
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DrawAFish.com Postmortem
A blameful postmortem of how my viral HackerNews project got compromised by legacy passwords, missing auth, and the perils of vibe coding.
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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
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Deus Ex
A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all…
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Simulating water over terrain
If you don't want a long an boring introduction, skip directly to the virtual pipes method description . I will get a little bit sad if you do this, though x)
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I love software rendering
Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage. Why I still prefer the software renderer, and why it needs a fast PC.
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Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
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Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
This entry focuses on Wube Software's long-running Factorio Friday Facts; a seven-year labor of love documenting the creation of the titular video game.
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I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral
Hacker Experience is an online hacking simulation game. Read more about it here.
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Simulating worlds on the GPU: Four billion years in four minutes
This post delves into the implementation of my procedural earth simulation, written entirely in GLSL fragment shaders. It simulates the complete history of an earth-like planet in a few minutes, with the simulation updating at 60 frames per second.
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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
Learn how IdentityLogger used fingerprinting to combat ban evasion, protecting our CSGO community from relentless cheaters.
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Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
Wherein we figure out how to land on the stupid aircraft carrier in Top Gun
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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
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David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
An ode to a small work of programming genius.
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The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
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Railroad Tycoon
It says much about Sid Meier, a born game designer if ever there was one, that he tended to get some of his best work done when he was allegedly on vacation. A few years after his significant other had lost all track of him on what she thought was a romantic getaway to the Caribbean but he came to see as the ideal…