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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 254 posts.

2025
121

Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds

Just kidding. Of course, I have something to say about this. In the company, we look at the art of Homeworld from time to time and bow to the creators of this masterpiece. Once, we talked about how great the background look and how interesting this sketched style is. There is something…some details seem…special to us:

128

Omnimax

In a previous life, I worked for a location-based entertainment company, part of a huge team of people developing a location for Las Vegas, Nevada. It was COVID, a rough time for location-based anything, and things were delayed more than usual. Coworkers paid a lot of attention to another upcoming Las Vegas…

136

Portals and Quake

Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.

145

How Copyover MUD Servers Worked

When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“ Multi-User Dungeons ” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet ). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows…

149

Stop Killing Games

tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition. A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected. Luckily, I have enough reach I was…

150

Spline Distance Fields

Earlier this year I decided to put my main project Tangerine on hold indefinitely and began prototyping a new renderer in an unfamiliar language using a totally new graphics API with the goal of overcoming all of Tangerine's technical shortcomings. The new renderer is an eccentric CPU ray tracer called Star Machine…