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How video games inspire great UX (2019)
This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 241 posts.
182
3D Gaussian Splatting in a Weekend
Introduction 3D Gaussian splatting is a technique that answers this question: given a dataset of pictures of a scene, how can I reconstruct it in 3D? This is achieved using a machine learning algorithm that, for many different camera angles, does the following: render the scene, compare it to the picture taken at the…
183
A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words
A few days ago, The new York Times (owner of Wordle) announced that from 2 February it would start reusing some words from previous years. Their announcem...
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Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral
I get kidnapped by the MIG while adding DDR3 to our CPU
186
A whole boss fight in 256 bytes
Endbot is a complete audio-visual demo that fits in exactly 256 bytes . It runs under DOS (via DosBox-X) and renders in real-time: a robot sprite with progressive bullet damage, a growing explosion, a scrolling checkerboard landscape, and a MIDI soundtrack - all from a single tiny .com file.
187
Shades of Halftone
An interactive deep dive into building halftone shaders in GLSL, covering everything from classic dot patterns and CMYK color separation to Moiré interference, gooey effects, and animated displacement.
188
How to Implement an FPS Counter
TL;DR: Don’t base your FPS calculations on a specific number of frames. Instead, maintain a rolling window of frames that happened during the last second. Use precise timers. Read on for more details.
189
My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza
Over the last few weeks, I created a computer game set in the Arctic. Or maybe I’ve been working on it since 1981. It all depends on how you count.
190
A Perceptron in Age of Empires II
An operational NAND gate in Age of Empires II , built with the game's scenario editor. This one can also be built within the game in a two-player setup but it's a lot easier (so to speak) to just script it.
191
A physics engine with incremental rollback for multiplayer games
We want Easel to be powerful enough to make the kinds of games you would play for hours.
192
The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything
I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.
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Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)
At long last, Relic Entertainment has announced that Age of Empires 4 is coming. Strategy gamers rejoice! I am excited – I played the first one back in ’98 (I may be dating myself here)…
194
The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game
Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.
195
Three hundred synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app
MIDI Guide, the open, "comprehensive" MIDI CC & NRPN dataset, has far outgrown its original purpose.
196
Ray tracing massive amounts of animated geometry using tetrahedral cages
Animate compact tetrahedral cages and reuse static mini-BLASes to ray-trace hundreds of millions of triangles in real time, dramatically cutting per-frame update and memory costs for dense foliage, grass, and crowds.
197
Writing a Guide to SDF Fonts
(TL;DR: this is a blog post about the process of writing my guide to SDF fonts .)
198
Building Principia for Windows XP
Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it given that the…
199
Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer (2024)
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
200
Ported my C game to WASM, here's every bug that I hit
ernesernesto dev blog
201
Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2: A Partial Post Mortem
TLDR: Written version of the talk I gave at Develop Brighton 2026. Yes Godot can ship commercial VR, we paid roughly £80k in early adopter tax to do it. War stories from rebuilding Godot's core, the
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Orbs
Everything has changed for us with orbs. How do I make you believe me?
203
The case for MUDs in modern times (2018)
In the age of smart devices and instant entertainment, can a medium as old as MUDs survive? Driven entirely by text, these Multi-User Dimensions ― or Dungeons,
204
Painting with Gaussians
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
205
ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine
My complete guide for setting up the ASRock BC-250. You can’t beat its price for performance, and it’s perfect for those who love tinkering with projects.
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VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
208
Playing Atari ST Music on the Amiga with Zero CPU
How to emulate an Atari YM2149 audio chip on Amiga at litteraly 0 CPU cost, by Arnaud Carré
209
Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine
Join me as I update a project through 10 years of Unity editors. Along the way I will talk about my process, Unity tips and tricks, and the tech changes of Unity Engine - several of which I observed firsthand while working at Unity.
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Anatomy of a Texture
A step-by-step guide to modern texture memory layout