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How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
GTA Online. Infamous for its slow loading times. Having picked up the game again to finish some of the newer heists I was shocked (/s) to discover that it still loads just as slow as the day it was re
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 142 posts.
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Computer Graphics from Scratch
Behind the beautiful imagery of the latest animated movie and the realistic environments of popular videogames lie some mysterious algorithms. Computer Graphics from Scratch aims to demystify these algorithms and shows you that computer graphics can be surprisingly simple.
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Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
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Street Fighter II paper trails – allocating sprite space by hand
The late 90s saw the emergence of Capcom in the world of arcades. The Osaka based company seemed to produce one hit after another with Ghouls'n Ghosts in 1988, Final Fight in 1989 and Street Fighter II in 1991 among a myriad of other excellent games.
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Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++
POKEGB: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 62 lines of c++. source: https://t.co/AGt7RUTr9H pic.twitter.com/o0BUUmzNOt
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One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again
I became a big fan of Minecraft when I first started playing it in early-2011. I have stopped in recent years since I find it dangerously addictive, though I sometimes keep up with the new changes. Today I want to look back at a development mistake that was made in Beta 1.8, one that took a decade to recover from.
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Finishing my first game while working full-time
Lessons from finishing my first game, Pocket Pong AR
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Legalizing gay marriage in Crusader Kings III with Ghidra
Crusader Kings III is a pretty impressive game. It’s impressive not only for its official content, but also for its extensive modding…
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Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat
Linux in a Pixel Shader - A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade EGA/VGA Comparison
The original EGA art for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was done by Mike Ebert , Steve Purcell , and Martin Cameron . It was originally released in July 1989. The VGA version, first released on the japanese FM Towns computer in 1990, adds Jim McLeod and James Dollar to the credits.
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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz. One…
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Playstation 3 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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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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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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Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer
My exploration into making a 90s style fantasy console inspired by the PS1
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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
The home of Code & Visuals
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Chess.com vs. Lichess
A comprehensive comparison of the two most popular chess websites.
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The neural network of the Stockfish chess engine
Last time, we briefly mentioned the high-level differences between Stockfish and Leela Chess. To recap, Stockfish evaluates about 100 million positions per second using rudimentary heuristics, wher…
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Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer
In the Unity for Software Engineers (now updated and available as a book), series, I give an accelerated introduction to game development in Unity.
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Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months
I played chess briefly with my friends in high school, where I had a rating of around 1100 online. I gave up the game for about 10 years, then picked it back up again recently, in May. I’ve tried a ton of different approaches in the past 6 months, switching things up whenever I stopped seeing results. I’ve improved…
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Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the…
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Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7 (2016)
In the 1990s, games started to move from 2D to 3D and if an alien would have landed on earth back then, it surely would have thought that nobody needs these low-res polygon-models without any filtering. Then it would destroy the earth.
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Monkey Island PC-speaker music player
The Monkey Island (TM) PC-Speaker music player
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A Mind Is Born (2017)
Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017 , where it ended up on 1st place.
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Heroes of Might and Magic
The Heroes of Might and Magic series of fantasy strategy games was an anomaly during its period of peak popularity at the turn of the millennium: it remained defiantly turn-based in an industry that had gone almost entirely real-time, and it likewise continued to rely on lovingly hand-drawn pixel art in lieu of trendy…
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Using Ghidra to Reverse Engineer Super Monkey Ball for GameCube
In Part 1, we used Dolphin’s debugger to find the location of Player 1’s score in RAM . In this article, our goal is to hack the score calculation routine so that the bonus goals do not award so many points.
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How fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode (2019)
I would like to thank krazhier and Keits for taking hours out of their busy schedules to discuss technical aspects of netcode with me, and Sajam for taking time to answer interview questions and being supportive throughout the writing process. I would also like to especially thank MagicMoste for making all the…
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Ray Tracing in pure CMake
A simple ray tracer written in pure CMake