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Sphere Rendering: Flat Planets
I'm a Technical Artist with over a decade of professional experience in both AAA and independent projects.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 265 posts.
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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
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Crafting Painterly Shaders
A detailed essay on my research and process of building a shader to mimic paint, watercolor, and aquarelle by exploring various implementations of the Kuwahara image smoothing filter.
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WebGPU is now available on Android
Support WebGPU on Android, use of DXC for shader compilation, timestamp queries in compute and render passes, default entry points to shader modules, support display-p3 as GPUExternalTexture color space, memory heaps info, and more.
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The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise
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3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo
Novel view reconstructions for (right) our method and (left) conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting with random initializations. Our method, even with random initialization, faithfully reconstructs the scene (e.g.. buildings at the back and the ground texture) providing much higher quality renderings.
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Pushing the frontiers of audio generation
Our pioneering speech generation technologies are helping people around the world interact with more natural, conversational and intuitive digital assistants and AI tools.
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Let's talk about animation quality
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
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Atari's Mike Jang
Some sad news to report on the blog this week. I got word that long-time Industrial Designer at Atari coin-operated division, Mike Jang, has passed away. I’ve known Mike since 2016, and whils…
100
Real-time audio programming 101: time waits for nothing (2011)
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
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Atkinson Dithering (2021)
When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…
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Studios: Please don't spoil the movie we are seated to see
I tweeted this incredibly non-controversial take and it got a huge reaction, so I thought I'd recycle the content for a blog post. Enjoy. We...
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A most profound video game: a good cognitive aid for research
Baba Is You is a philosophical video game that facilitates the kind of thinking needed for frontier topics in the sciences of life and mind.
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Collision Detection (2015)
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
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ZX Spectrum Raytracer
I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum , the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the…
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DOS game “F-15 Strike Eagle II” reverse engineering/reconstruction war stories
Misadventures in 16bit reverse engineering, programming WTFs and general rants about the IT industry.
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Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
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Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting
Over the past few weeks, I've been experimenting with painting in watercolours using my AxiDraw plotter. Watercolour is a medium I enjoy painting in (by hand) as a personal hobby, kind of separate from my public art making, so it’s been interesting to combine it with code. I’ve thought about trying
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The Curse of Monkey Island
Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island . No puzzle spoilers, however…
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Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers
One of my favorite game jams is the legendary Js13kGames competition, where participants have one month to make a web browser game that fits in a 13 kilobyte zip file. To put that into perspective,…
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The Bevy Foundation
It is with excitement that I unveil to the world ... The Bevy Foundation is the next step in our journey to build a world class free and open source …
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My favorite tools and techniques for procedural gamedev
An overview of some of my favorite shaders, algorithms, and techniques I use to aid my work in procedural gamedev and 3D scenes. It focuses particularly on things that can be added or mixed in to enhance non-procedural scenes.
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The Later Years of Douglas Adams
If God exists, he must have a sense of humor, for why else would he have strewn so many practical jokes around his creation? Among them is the uncanny phenomenon of the talented writer who absolutely hates to write.
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Ace of Aces: Why you should do maths as a game designer
Every now and again you come across something that stretches your brain in a new direction. Last week I stumbled on a magic trick of a Choose Your Own Adventure: Al Leonardi’s Ace of Aces, a paper …
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Playstation 2 GS emulation – the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation
As you may, or may not know, I wrote paraLLEl-RDP back in 2020. It aimed at implementing the N64 RDP in Vulkan compute. Lightning fast, and extremely accurate, plus the added support of up-scaling on top. I’m quite happy how it turned out. Of course, the extreme accuracy was due to Angrylion being used as reference…
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Texture-Less Text Rendering
How to draw text to a Vulkan renderpass without binding a single texture
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The best darn grid shader yet (2023)
For as long as I’ve been writing shaders, there’s been one specific shader I’ve always tried to write…
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BreakTime: Running Breakout inside Google Calendar
A version of brickbreaker inside google calendar - your meetings are bricks, and the game declines them when you smash them!
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Introducing Our New Name
After more than a year of public and internal discussions, we're ready to announce our new name!