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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 48 posts.
A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers: supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Slides showing how the rule…
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
The road to StarCraft was a brutal sequence of bad breaks, hard pivots, and near-disasters. This is the part most people never heard.
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life: The life simulator used is Golly which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel: The metacell uses a period 184 tractor beam, which…
Disclaimer: this page only dispays 30,000 particles. You can check the 80,000 version here .
I’m a programmer and author interested in how intelligence, perception and learning work—and in building things that explore those questions directly.
UPDATE: Please read this later entry for update on this documentary. I’m putting this here to get some attention. There’s a documentary in production, or which was in prod…
On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and released the source code of their previous engine. This time is was the turn of idTech4 which powered Prey, Quake 4 and of course Doom 3. Within hours the GitHub repository was forked more than 400 times and people started to look at the game internal…
Board and Initial Setup You'll notice that the "squares" on the board are not really square— they range from more or less square ...
Before Warcraft became a legend, it was a risky DOS-era experiment. This is how it actually began.
Analysis of the classic "dropping two eggs from a building" interview question
Learn the optimal strategy for playing Hangman.
Warcraft almost didn't become Warcraft. Part 2 gets into the hard calls, surprises, and turning points that shaped the hit.
When doing the new website for the Sublime Text 2.0 launch, instead of just screenshots, I wanted to have animations to demonstrate some of its features. One of the criteria was that the animations should work everywhere, from IE6 to an iPad. This ruled out two common video options, Flash and the <video> element…
Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint , Heat Signature , and Tactical Breach Wizards . Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
GoldenEye 64 had a special place in my heart when I was growing up. It was the first game my parents wouldn’t let me buy due to violent content. I saved up allowances and dug up couch treasures for months to taste the forbidden fruit. The effort turned into one of the pillars of my childhood experiences. I still…
The following is a "photographic" gallery of fractal patterns found while exploring the planet with Google Earth. Each is provided with a KMZ file so the reader can explore the region for themselves. Readers are encouraged to submit their own discoveries for inclusion, credits will be included. Besides being examples…
