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Depixelizing Pixel Art
Explore research at Microsoft, a site featuring the impact of research along with publications, products, downloads, and research careers.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.
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How DOOM fire was done
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
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If Looks Could Kill
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
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TensorKart: self-driving MarioKart with TensorFlow
Kevin Hughes' blog
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2D Vehicles
Explore my 1996 vehicle physics prototype, recreated for the web as Motion Lab.
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Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
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I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it
The personal website of Elias Daler about programming, technology and videogames
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Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? (2017)
For me, the most favorite type of a computer program is an emulator. Being able to run code from a completely different hardware architecture always seemed like a magic. The old computers are great on their own, so this kind of connection between historic machines and the modern computing environment feels almost like…
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How to learn chess as an adult (2021)
Becoming the worst best chess player in the world
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Another Update
Hi all - bet you are wondering what is going on at this point. The short answer is I did not know exactly how to proceed until now, finally having an idea of my employment situation. I have talked to...
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FizzleFade
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
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DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
DeepMind's scientific mission is to push the boundaries of AI by developing systems that can learn to solve complex problems. To do this, we design agents and test their ability in a wide range of environments from the purpose-built DeepMind Lab to established games, such as Atari and Go.
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OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor
OpenShot 4.0 adds professional color grading, screen and webcam recording, local object masks, 10 new effects, a cleaner native timeline, and faster creative workflows.
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The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …
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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing
How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets
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The Most Mario Colors
The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was…
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Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
Playing Witcher 3, a GPU-intensive game on a 2015 fanless Macbook
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Veo 2: Our video generation model
Our leading video generation model
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Help I accidentally a wigglegram
It is a kind of stereo image you make by looping frames together, like as a GIF.
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MAME is now Free and Open Source Software
After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!
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Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
I've been obsessed with procedural maps since I was a kid rolling dice on the random dungeon tables in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. There was something magical about it — you didn't design the dungeon, you discovered it, one room at a time, and the dice decided whether you got a treasure chamber or a dead end full…
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Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API
Apple’s WebKit team today proposed a new Community Group at the W3C to discuss the future of 3D graphics on the Web, and to develop a standard API that exposes modern GPU features including low-level graphics and general purpose computation.
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4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
So I have been working on Miegakure for a long time now, and I have created and accumulated many cool 4D things of all sorts. I think it’s about time that I share some of them, so…
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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
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We made an animated movie in 8kB
The Sheep and the Flower - a demoscene production and real-time animation that looks like a standard short animated movie, in just 8kB
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Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
Here is a link to full schematics. Thanks to whoever made this. I just found a few issues with it. The CLK input to the 7474 on page 2 should be HRESET, not CLK. Pin 5 of the 555's on pages 5 and 6 should be connected to the capacitor. Also some of the nodes are inconsistently labeled.