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The Door Problem (2014)
“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 160 posts.
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Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell)
On August 31, 1966, a 44-year-old electrical engineer named Ralph Baer had an epiphany whilst waiting for a colleague outside a New York City bus terminal. For reasons he would never be able to explain, his thoughts turned to the potential of an interactive version of television. The next day, he sat down in his…
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Introducing Qt 3D Studio
Explore the Qt Blog for the latest insights on e.g. Qt Creator, your go-to source for cross-platform development tips and updates.
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Dolphin Progress Report: December 2016
We have celebrated the 15th anniversary of the GameCube and the 10th anniversary of the Wii in the last few months. As the Wii's successor, and the brand lineage, has been discontinued in the run-up to the release of the Switch, it is a time for reflection. But, this doesn't mean an end for the GameCube and Wii; if…
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Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics (2005)
In this position, I know about a bunch of mines on all the remaining fronts, but I can't quite determine where they are. There are a few mines that might be in one of two positions (red or blue), a cluster of mines that might be in one of two arrangements (green), and a more complex situation in the top left which I…
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Exploring the mysteries of Go with AlphaGo and China’s top players
Just over a year ago, we saw a major milestone in the field of artificial intelligence: DeepMind’s AlphaGo took on and defeated one of the world’s top Go players, the legendary Lee Sedol. Even then, we had no idea how this moment would affect the 3,000 year old game of Go and the growing global community of devotees…
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Spaces: A New Way to Connect with Friends in VR
Introducing Facebook Spaces, a new VR app where you hang out with friends in a fun, interactive virtual environment as if you were in the same room.
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No Man’s Sky One Year Later
It’s been a year since I last played the captivating , frustrating , and ultimately disappointing No Man’s Sky. There have been some large updates since then, and so I thought now would be a good time to come back and see how the game has evolved. These columns are going to run through September, so you’re basically…
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“Holy Grail” Bugs in Emulation, Part 2
It’s been two months since first writing on Holy Grail bugs in emulation and while it did pique the interest of many emulator developers there has been little movement on solving the bugs. Lior did much more research on solving Pinball Fantasies and byuu dug up a forum post implying that there is in fact a three…
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Generating music with expressive timing and dynamics
We present Performance RNN, an LSTM-based recurrent neural network designed to model polyphonic music with expressive timing and dynamics. Here’s an example...
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Lightmap Compression in the Witness
In my initial implementation of our lightmapping technology I simply stored lightmap textures in RGBA16F format. This produced excellent results, but at a very high memory cost. I later switched to the R10G10B10A2 fixed point format to reduce the memory footprint of our lightmaps, but that introduce
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SketchRNN model released in Magenta
Sketch-RNN, a generative model for vector drawings, is now available in Magenta. For an overview of the model, see the Google Research blog fromApril 2017, ...
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Introducing HumbleNet: Cross-Platform Networking Library for the Browser
Announcing the release of HumbleNet, a project initiated at Humble Bundle in 2015 to port peer-to-peer multiplayer games, originally to asm.js and now to WebAssembly. The current open source version ...
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Recompiling the Lost Vikings
In my previous blog post I talked about reverse engineering the virtual machine used to implement objects in the Lost Vikings. The Lost Vikings was released in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse, now bett…
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High Performance Z80 Emulation
…wherein I talk about my latest Z80 emulation adventures.
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Oculus Medium Under the Hood: Developing the Move Tool
In our latest blog series we’re taking you behind the scenes of Medium to learn how we created the tools that make up this unique app!
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The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
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Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
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Dolphin Progress Report: January 2017
Sometimes, it's easy to forget how much work there is left to do on a refined emulator. While the rush of getting a new game to boot or discovering a crazy feature hidden within an obscure gem never gets old, those moments do tend to get further and further apart as accuracy increases. As if to defy fate itself…
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Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D
How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked…
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Magic Leap: When Reality Hits the Fan
Largely A Summary With Some New Information I have covered a lot of material and even then only glossed at the surface of what I have learned about Magic Leap (ML). By combining the information ava…
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I built something with A-Frame in two days
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to try out several WebVR experiences for the first time, and I was blown away by the possibilities. Using just a headset ...
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GPU Performance for Game Artists
Performance is everybody’s responsibility, no matter what your role. When it comes to the GPU, 3D programmers have a lot of control over performance; we can optimize shaders, trade image quality for performance, use smarter rendering techniques… we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves. But there’s one thing we don’t…