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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.
Hello! This is part one of a short series of posts on writing a simple raytracer in Rust. I’ve never written one of these before, so it should be a learning experience all around. So what is a raytracer anyway? The short version is it’s a computer program that traces the paths of simulated rays of light through a…
This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial, and you would like to learn some more by studying other people's source…
I love the rendering style of Townscaper by Oskar Stålberg. Since Townscaper can export your town as a .obj (including three “magic” textures), I thought it would be a nice project to reverse-engineer this style. Last weekend, I finally had
The dawn of incremental games: how some of the most virally addictive games of the 2010s were nothing but text and numbers going up.
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
It’s been about 6 months since I watched Catherine West’s excellent Using Rust for Game Development sent me down the Entity-Component-System (ECS) rabbit hole, and I thought I’d share some of my findings. I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a while now but it took a while to put my thoughts into a cohesive…
Well, somebody had to find it.
What is the most beautiful piece of code you have ever seen? Not only it is subjective, "beauty" is also a word that can mean a lot of things. If we were to be discussing of raw speed, I would bring up the Fast Inverse Square Root [1] . If we were to judge by aesthetic, my answer would be Andrew Kensler's, 1337 bytes…
Thanks to 159 contributors, 430 pull requests, community reviewers, and our generous sponsors, I'm happy to announce the Bevy 0.9 release on crates.io…
A deep dive into investigating and reducing the flutter distortion on the soundtrack of Steamboat Willie (1928).
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many…
A friend cleaned up and gave me a copy of a game I've not heard about before: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions , a motorbike racing game for PC, released 1998 by Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Midas Interactive Entertainment.
Minecraft generates unique worlds with Perlin noise. Covers the algorithm, octaves, and Fractal Brownian Motion - with a terrain implementation walkthrough.
I've written this post with a specific target audience in mind, namely those who have a good grounding in existing APIs (e.g. D3D11 and GL) and understand the concepts of multithreading, staging resources, synchronisation and so on but want to know specifically how they are implemented in Vulkan. So we end up with a…
Take a look at this: This is a triangulation of a set of random points, such that all the points are connected to one another, all of the faces are triangles, and the edges include the convex hull of the points. I would like to claim that this is not a very “good” triangulation. This algorithm tends to produce lots of…
I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!) I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code. Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very basic games. I wrote a simple Shoot
A monoculture is usually better in the short term. It’s a better allocation of resources (everyone working on the same thing!) If you want to write a rich web app that works today (ie, on the browsers of today), it’s much better.
Shadertoy is a wonderful tool which lets users create and share a type of program called a fragment shader online. The true magic of shadertoy is its community of very talented graphics programmers who build incredible works of art despite having access to only a sliver of the traditional graphics pipeline.
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
Today’s release of Firefox includes various features for developers and users that enable a richer and safer experience on the web. WebGL 2 enables a new
An analysis using Process Monitor and WinDbg, dealing with JavaScript, WASM, and Windows shellcode.
Another year, another showreel. As every year, the amount of quality games being created by Godot has increased significantly (as did the amount of submissions).
My name is Andrei Cebotar. I’m 37, I live in Moldova, and I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy.
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released,
OpenTTD has been available on the Steam Store for the past five years. During that time, we’ve built up an incredible player base, attracting lots of new players to the game. Starting today however, OpenTTD will no longer be directly available as a standalone game on Steam. It can instead be obtained as part of a…
