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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.
In this position, I know about a bunch of mines on all the remaining fronts, but I can't quite determine where they are. There are a few mines that might be in one of two positions (red or blue), a cluster of mines that might be in one of two arrangements (green), and a more complex situation in the top left which I…
If we’ve done our jobs right, Wind-up Knight is a fairly simple game. There are only four inputs, and only two are ever needed simultaneously. Sir Sprint, our heroic spring-loaded knight, runs forward automatically, removing the need for a classic directional pad or analog stick. The challenge is derived from careful…
Once upon a time, there were many music composition software packages, mostly written in Common LISP. To name a few I know, Common Music, Symbolic Composer (not related to the Symbolics Lisp Machine). Common Music is still available in source code but I doubt if anyone is still able to setup that. Symbolic Composer…
From reconfiguring the system to reconfiguring the user.
This comes from a question posed to me and others in 2019 by Stefan Langerman, a computational geometer who also happens to be a diamond dealer. The classic ...
This is an example of an image vectorization algorithm. It shows the bilinear interpolation, polynomial approximation, differential analysis, and iterative algorithms working together to solve a practical problem
Suppose we want to draw a batch of images, where each image is made up of randomly positioned and colored triangles, that are blending. It will look like this:
Explore all of Unity's products and services to find the right set of tools for you. Get more information about our plans and pricing.
Just over a year ago, we saw a major milestone in the field of artificial intelligence: DeepMind’s AlphaGo took on and defeated one of the world’s top Go players, the legendary Lee Sedol. Even then, we had no idea how this moment would affect the 3,000 year old game of Go and the growing global community of devotees…
Some friends of mine play the board game Settlers Of Catan . In this game, each player rolls two ordinary dice on their turn, and the number which comes up determines what resources people get for the turn. When a seven is rolled, something special happens: no resources are generated, and instead a robber moves on the…
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.
A post about lockstep, rollback, and what it takes to prepare your game for future netcode integration. Continue reading →
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…
Facial hair is a largely overlooked topic in facial performance capture. Most production pipelines in the entertainment industry do not have a way to automatically capture facial hair or track the skin underneath it. Thus, actors are asked to shave clean before face capture, which is very often undesirable. In this…
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2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. Writing it was possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.
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.
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,
Introducing Facebook Spaces, a new VR app where you hang out with friends in a fun, interactive virtual environment as if you were in the same room.
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products…
The capabilities of game-playing AIs have grown rapidly over the last few years. This trend has culminated in the defeat of top human players in the complex real-time strategy (RTS) games of DoTA 2…
Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors...
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…
After a long wait, the Progress Report is back! This time it wasn't so much from a lack of content, but from a lack of content creators. The past three months had illnesses hit one of our writers and the other had a very challenging move. Even with these major hurdles jumped, we're not even close to 100% yet. It's…
