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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.

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994

Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try

The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…

996

Fog Volumes arrive in Godot 4.0

On top of the existing fixed-function fog, Godot 4.0 introduces a new type of fog: Volumetric Fog. For the 4.0 release, we decided to take Volumetric Fog one step further with the addition of FogVolumes. These allow users to dynamically place fog and control complex fog effects with shaders.

997

A Programming War Between 545 Wizards

What happens when you challenge hundreds of elite programmers to put on their robes and wizard hats, enchant their minions to solve a constantly shifting multi-agent traveling salesman problem, use the loot to build mighty armies, and vie for eternal glory and tournament prizes? You get a lot of

998

What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?

Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first…

999

The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International. The International is an unbelievably huge…

1001

Hacking Flappy Bird with Machine Learning

This is a hack for the popular game, Flappy Bird. Although the game is no longer available on Google Play or the App Store, it did not stop folks from creating very good replicas for the web. People have also created some interesting variants of the game - Flappy Bird Typing Tutor and Flappy Math Saga.

1003

Raspberry Pi Zero Hidden in an Xbox Controller

I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁…

1006

Diablo

All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.

1007

The Polygons of Doom: PSX

It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…

1009

The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer

Multiplayer has been the single most requested feature for Teardown ever since before its initial release. Synchronizing physics over the network is already known to be hard, and on top of that we have a completely dynamic, destructible world with full modding support. For a long time, we considered the whole idea…

1011

The Secret Button

There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years.

1015

A treasury of Zork maps

Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...

1018

The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks

Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…