1981
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Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.
1982
1983
The Secret Feature of EM-DOSBOX on Internet Archive
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
1984
Bastard Tetris
“For people who enjoy swearing at their computer, Bastet (short for Bastard Tetris) is an attractive alternative to Microsoft Word.” (From http://hublog.hubmed.org)
1985
Computer-generated dream world: Virtual reality for a 286 processor
Virtual reality for a 286 processor
1986
Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
Rune Skovbo Johansen has a really sweet Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique, where the dither dots “stick” to 3D surfaces, yet the dot density adapts to the view distance and zoom level.
1987
Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
1988
Designing and building an FPGA sprite-based graphics accelerator (2014)
A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…
1989
A Profanity-Laced Video Game Password That Breaks Everything
Most of these passwords were gibberish that required a pen-and-paper to write down and remember. One password, however, is more memorable, and much more sinister.
1990
I don’t need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining …
1991
Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 1: Serious Comedy
One American writer said to me, “Your books will never sell in America because you can’t hear the elves sing. Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing.”
1992
1993
Full Throttle
The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.
1994
Building a Game with the Real Engine
Some people make games using the Unreal Engine. That’s nice, but I wanted something a little different. That’s why I’m using the Real Engine.
1995
SDL2 common mistakes and how to avoid them
SDL has grown on me over the past year. I didn’t understand its value until viewing it in the right lens: as a complete platform and runtime replacing the host’s runtime, possibly including libc. Ideally an SDL application links exclusively against SDL and otherwise not directly against host libraries, though in…
1996
1997
So You Want to Be a Hero?
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
1998
Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…
1999
Smooth Voxel Terrain, Part 2 (2012)
Last time we formulated the problem of isosurface extraction and discussed some general approaches at a high level. Today, we’re going to get very specific and look at meshing in particular.…
2000
The simple geometry behind any road
How does the geometry of a road unfold?
2001
Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator (2018)
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
2002
AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating
For the past few years, cheats have evolved rapidly. First came memory reading aimbots, then colorbots, and now AI aim assist. Cheats have escaped the host PC. How does it affect the players and anti-cheats?
2003
Korg makes music with Raspberry Pi
Think of synth music, racks of keyboards, or massive DJ rigs, and Korg comes to mind. Raspberry Pi is at the heart of some of its new synthesizers.
2004
Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game
To me, a classic JRPG is pure mechanism, a kind of puzzle. Was there some way of getting the fun out of building such a mechanism—of solving that puzzle—, wrapping it with the minimal amount of functionality, the simplest thing that could possibly pass as a video game?
2005
Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system
Visit the post for more.
2006
Differentiable Dithering
Problem Let's say we want to reduce the number of colors in an image. For example consider the picture of fruit below:
2007
GameBox is a programmable, turn-based, WebAssembly game platform
Let's make some games
2008
2009
Bringing Vulkan everywhere
gfx-rs is a project bringing efficient cross-platform graphics to rust. This blog supposedly hosts the major milestones, concepts, and recaps of the project.
2010
Mario Paint Masterpiece
Mario Paint the 1992 masterpiece game, music-maker, and animation studio