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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 265 posts.

2024
36

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…

39

“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…

41

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…

52

WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

In recent years we have had an ongoing effort to improve graphics performance of the WebKit GTK and WPE ports. As a result of this we shipped features like threaded rendering, the DMA-BUF renderer, or proper vertical retrace synchronization (VSync). While these improvements have helped keep WebKit competitive, and…

53

Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques

Towards the end of Wim Wenders’s excellent Perfect Days , the protagonist Hirayama is drinking beer under a bridge after he has seen a Businessman courting his crush. Suddenly the Businessman joins him under the bridge. As it turns out, things aren’t actually that simple but the point is their conversation takes them…

56

Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)

The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…

57

I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig

The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…