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Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
We spent years working on this game. We're betting our family's future on it. So. Why does it look so bad? We've been writing indie game...
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 101 posts.
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How to Start Learning Computer Graphics Programming
Ever since I opened up my Direct Messages and invited everyone to ask me computer graphics related questions on Twitter , I am very often asked the question "How can I get started with graphics programming?". Since I am getting tired of answering this same question over and over again, I will in this post compile a…
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1060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud captured by amateur astronomers
This extraordinary view of the LMC might be the world's longest exposure image in amateur astronomy. 1060 hours were needed to capture this highly-resolved image (204 Megapixels) of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
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Why I Write Games in C (yes, C)
I am an unusual beast. All my solo project games I've been making recently have been written in 'vanilla' C. Nobody does this. So I think it might be interesting to explain why I do.
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A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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Game Engine Black Books Update
I have kept myself busy with the Game Engine Black Books and I have plenty of news. Most importantly, they have been revised. The DOOM book is now in version 1.1 while the WOLF3D book is entering v2.1. And there is more.
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Cities: Skylines Is Turing Complete
(Non-clickbait title: building a 4-bit adder in Cities:Skylines.)
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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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Zelda Screen Transitions Are Undefined Behaviour
The vertical scrolling effect in the original “The Legend of Zelda” relies on manipulating the NES graphics hardware in a manner that was likely unintended by its designers.
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Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?
There’s a lot of fantastic research into 2D graphics rendering these days. Petr Kobalicek and Fabian Yzerman have been working on Blend2D , one of the fastest and most accurate CPU rasterizers on the market, with a novel JIT approach. Patrick Walton of Mozilla has explored not just one, but three separate approaches…
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Day of the Tentacle
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
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Nigerian Teens Are Making Sci-Fi Shorts with Slick Visual Effects
For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube channel. Using a smartphone wi
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Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp
What Remains is a narrative adventure game for the 8-bit NES video game console, and was released in March 2019 as a free ROM, playable in emulator. It was created by a small team, Iodine Dynamics, over the course of two years of on and off development. It’s currently in the hardware phase as a limited batch of…
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Show HN: 2D Graphics on Modern GPU
Is the traditional 2D imaging model nearing the end of its usefulness, or does it have a shiny future in the “modern graphics” world? I spent a week on a research retreat in a cottage in the woods to answer this question, as it shapes the future of UI toolkits. Performant UI must use GPU effectively, and it’s…
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I Am the Cheapest Bastard in Indie Games
A Queen's Wish screenshot. Note that I use game art that I like to look at. This is necessary because I'll be staring at it for years, and...
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Fun with Snapchat's Gender Swapping Filter
Snapchat's new gender-bending filter is a source of endless fun and laughs at parties. The results are very pleasing to look at. As someone ...
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Gamedev Tutorial: Trigonometry Basics – Sine and Cosine
[latexpage] 本文之中文翻譯在此 Overview Trigonometry is a very essential building block to a huge portion of game math. That's why I've chosen this topic for the first tutorial of my new Gamedev Tutorials series. Having a solid understanding of basic of trigonometry can go a long way for game development. It is used…
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Writing a game engine in pure C: The Graphic Initialization
If you haven’t read the other posts, go now: Part 1: the state manager Part 2: the graphic initialization Part 3: the engine entity We have a state manager now but a game without graphic re…
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L-systems
Jordan Santell, focusing on open web engineering, immersive web, WebXR, WebGL, JavaScript, open source, open standards, and all things weird web.
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The Art of PNG Glitch (2015)
A documentation for all about glitching PNG.
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We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
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I’m only making business card sized games now
Over the years I’ve worked on many games, some big, some small. I’ve found that the smaller the game, the more fun I seem to have making it. So I set out to make the smallest game I pos…
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Pathfinding for Tower Defense
In a Tower Defense game, there are many enemies that are all headed to the same place. In many Tower Defense games, there is a predetermined path, or a small number of paths. In some, such as the classic Desktop Tower Defense [1] , you can place towers anywhere, and they act as obstacles that affect the paths taken by…
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Writing a small ray tracer in Rust and Zig
This is where I write about the stuff that I've been working on.