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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.

Any year
168

Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more thrilled. Duh.

170

Interactive intro to shaders

Demystify shaders with this beginner-friendly guide. Explore fragment shaders, signed distance functions, and metaballs through interactive code examples. Learn how to create beautiful blob animations and effects using just a few lines of code.

171

How to draw an outline in a video game

🖍️ Explaining multiple techniques for rendering outlines and highlights for real-time applications. This includes vertex object-space as well as screen-space methods. This can be used to render outlines in Unity or Unreal. Outlines can be used for gameplay reasons or aesthetics.

174

There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge

I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are…

178

Half-Life

Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…

179

Neural scene representation and rendering

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to how we understand a visual scene: our brains draw on prior knowledge to reason and to make inferences that go far beyond the patterns of light that hit our retinas. For example, when entering a room for the first time, you instantly recognise the items it contains and…

180

Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

Ok→Cancel versus Cancel→Ok (kovarex) A really strange debate started as a continuation of FFF-238. I insisted that the button order should obviously always be OK Cancel, as in any UI I see around. But little I knew, that this is actually specific to windows, and on Linux or macOS, the order is reversed: Eventually, we…