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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 241 posts.
Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated (which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose). I just wanted to …
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
In the last post, I got the game’s clouds to look passable. But after looking at it during playtesting, I still wasn’t satisfied with the way the overall picture of how sea, sky and clouds came together. With some small tweaks, things started to look a lot better.
Improving on a timeless recipe
McZee meets a penguin!
In 1998 Looking Glass Studios released the stealth game Thief: The Dark Project . This was just as 3D hardware acceleration was taking off, so due to the development cycle it didn't use hardware acceleration; it was a purely software-rendered game.
For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…
Since AlphaZero, lc0-style chess engines have been trained with RL. Specifically, you have the engine (search + model) play itself a bunch of times, and train the model to predict the outcome of the game.
Experiments in cognitive architecture.
Notes about creative coding on the Web.
Ok, this one is really best explained with a visualiser:
A streamable 4D gaussian splat format with tunable error bounds. 16–58× smaller than raw; streams and seeks over plain HTTP Range requests.
On your computer graphics journey, you will eventually run into some paper or code mentioning spherical harmonic functions. They are indeed a very useful tool: with just a few coefficients, they allow us to approximate a given function defined on a sphere. This can be very useful for modeling complex lighting.
An autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen about being a youngster making games and posting them online!
Virtual reality for a 286 processor
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
How does the geometry of a road unfold?
We've stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here's everything we learned—and how we beat them.
A short story about debugging and how sometimes what's true is false. Starring everyone's favourite uncle, Undefined Behaviour.
An in-depth overview of some of the unusual and very advanced technical tricks used in the Commodore 64 game, Seawolves.
In 2005 Google showed off Google Maps, which lets you drag the map around instead of reloading the page like MapQuest and others used. That’s the feature that got everyone’s attention. But what got my attention was a feature they added in 2007 where you could drag the start/end points on a route [1] , and it would…
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.
Do you notice a difference? The image on the right appears “yellower” than the image on the left, which looks more goldenrod by comparison.
Some observations from my War of the Lancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaroftheLance%28videogame%29 1989 Code Harness assisted modernisation WIP I gave Qwen-3....
I have a solid workflow for making my game with AI. However, every iteration, I have to go through extensive manual play-testing to verify functionality…
A from-scratch JEPA world model trained on Super Mario Bros. to study action-conditioned prediction and reward-free planning.
