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Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 254 posts.
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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.
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Optimizing our way through Metroid
How should a fuzzer balance exploration and minimization? Samus has the answer.
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15 Years of Shader Minification
How do demosceners create complex computer animations in just a few kilobytes? One of our secret weapons is Shader Minifier, a tool that minifies GLSL code. Over the years, it has evolved to pack more data into tiny executables, pushing the boundaries of what's possible. In this blog post, we'll go through its…
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Revisiting the algorithm that changed horse race betting (2023)
Explore Bill Benter’s iconic horse betting strategy, enhanced with modern code and contrasted against three decades of evolving data.
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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.
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I don’t need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining …
189
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?
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Bilinear interpolation on a quadrilateral using Barycentric coordinates
A new algebraic method for hardware-accelerated bilinear interpolation on convex quadrilaterals is presented, using the Barycentric coordinate feature of modern GPUs.
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Helmdar: 3D Scanning Brooklyn on Rollerblades
One of my favorite joys is exploring a city late at night on rollerblades. I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for about 10 years now, first in Boston and then in NYC. Every time day turns to night and back again a city takes a breath. At night people flow out or huddle up in buildings, leaving the streets clear for…
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Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations
Article explaining simulation algorithms that produce complex organic behaviours, starting with the classic physarum algorithm from Jeff Jones.
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Dolphin Progress Report: Release 2512
With the holiday season reaching its apex, we have a few surprises for those of you that have been patiently waiting. The latest release of Dolphin is stuffed with treats. Our first present is presentation - frame presentation, that is. Two new options have arrived and will help users both…
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Implementing a Game Boy emulator in Ruby
Introduction I created a Game Boy emulator in Ruby and released it as a gem called rubyboy! (I’d be happy if you could give it a star!) And now it runs in the browser using WebAssembly! Try the demo in your browser! Screenshots Rubyでゲームボーイのエミュレータを作りました！ カラー対応やWasmでブラウザ対応もやっていきたい💪 GitHub: https://t.co/hFwmZD6FNp…
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Sharing everything I could understand about gradient noise
You've most likely heard about gradient noise through the name Perlin noise , which refers to one particular implementation with various CPU optimizations. Because it's an incredible tool for creative work, it's used virtually everywhere: visual effects, video games, procedural mathematical art, etc. While getting it…
198
The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
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Bilinear down/upsampling, aligning pixel grids, and that infamous GPU half pixel (2021)
See this ugly pixel shift when upsampling a downsampled image? My post describes where it can come from and how to avoid those! It’s been more than two decades of me using bilinear texture filterin…
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The Sega Master System
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
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Luck Be a Landlord Might Be Banned from Google Play
Happy New Year everyone! Just three hours into 2025, I received an email from Google Play Support with the following subject line: Action Required: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies (Luck be a Landlord) Nothing has changed with Luck be a Landlord in the past few months,
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LookingGlass: Generative Anamorphoses via Laplacian Pyramid Warping
Anamorphosis refers to a category of images that are intentionally distorted, making them unrecognizable when viewed directly. Their true form only reveals itself when seen from a specific viewpoint, which can be through some catadioptric device like a mirror or a lens. While the construction of these mathematical…
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Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 (2022)
A year-long journey through polygon meshes, cubemaps, and smoothed-particle hydrodynamics in pursuit of a modern SimEarth
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Synthesizing Music from JSON
tl;dr: pl_synth is a tiny music synthesizer for C & JS and an editor (“tracker”) to create instruments and arrangements.
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The year of peak might and magic
Some passions are lifelong, but many others fade away over the course of a life, to be replaced by others. Not long after Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing, sold his company to 3DO , it started to become obvious to everyone who worked for him that the torch he carried for computer games no longer…
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Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction
As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming language -- a powerful and peculiar one.
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Rediscovering Quaternions
How do we represent a rotation in 3 dimensions? This is a surprisingly deep question, and one we can learn a lot from. Our goal will be to “rediscover” quaternions from first principles, building them up by exploring different representations and fixing the failures along the way.
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2D Signed Distance Functions
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.