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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 213 posts.

2020
182

Myst: the Drawbacks to Success

Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…

187

Reverberations: An 8-bit approach to J.S. Bach

The toccata is perhaps the most well-known work in the entire organ repertoire. Like many toccatas, it is probably a transcribed improvisation. It has been postulated that this was a test tune that Bach would play when trying out new organs. That would explain its crude character and the various hops between heavy…

191

Oldschool Gaming on FreeBSD

When was the last time you played a computer game? I really like one of Benjamin Franklin quotes – “We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.&#822…

192

Real-Time Ray-Tracing in WebGPU

Intro By the end of 2018, NVIDIA released the new GPU series Turing, best known for its ability of accelerated ray tracing. Ray tracing is the process of simulating light paths from reality. In reality, billions of rays get shot around you and at some point, hit your eyes. Up...

194

The Making of Stunt Island

It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…

201

Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer

In 2018, I wrote an article “Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer” for GPU Zen 2 book, which was published in 2019. In this article I tried to aggregate as much information about Vulkan performance as I could - instead of trying to focus on one particular aspect or application, this is trying to cover a wide range of…

202

Emacs Lisp Animations

Emacs , a programmer's text editor with roots in the 1970s, is a great tool for animation. In Fall, 2010 I taught a digital art class at NYU's interdisciplinary Steinhardt art school. Clearly, the thing to do was to teach how to make animations in Emacs by programming it in Lisp.

204

Browser Games Aren't an Easy Target

If you're about my age and had a similarly dull upbringing, you probably also have memories of playing video games behind a teacher's back whenever class involved going to some sort of "computer lab." Flash games were the thing when I was in elementary school, and when I was in middle school, I'd bring Quake with me…