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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.

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217

Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

Boris Vallejo is an epic fantasy painter, who has had an immense influence on fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and even the demoscene. Throughout the decades, his works have often been replicated by pixel artists, leading to controversy. I rediscovered Vallejo's great work for myself, looked into the…

219

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium , was a CD-ROM drive . With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed…

225

SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)

SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity. Its only problem is that it doesn't run well on contemporary systems. Not to worry, here's a complete guide to a perfect game of SimCity 3000 on modern Windows:...

228

Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud

Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time. Never have I taken part in anything close to the…

232

New pathfinding algorithm

New pathfinding algorithm Oxyd Last week we mentioned the change to make biters not collide with each other, but that wasn’t the only biter-related update we released this past week. Somewhat coincidentally, this week’s updates have included something I’d been working on for a few weeks before – an upgrade to the…

234

Godot 4.0 Released

It's official. Today marks the beginning of a new era for Godot. After 3+ years of breaking and rebuilding from the ground up, we're thrilled to say: Welcome to the start of Godot 4!

236

Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software

Activision’s blind faith in the infallibility of their RICOCHET anti-cheat software , combined with a buggy and unstable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II release, has resulted in faulty, permanent, and unappealable player account bans that prevent users from starting even the single-player game. These bans leave…

237

How a 64k intro is made

The demoscene is about producing cool real time works (as in “runs on your computer”) called demos . Some demos are really small, say 64 kilobytes or less, and these are called intros . The name comes from “crack intros”. So an intro is just a demo that’s small.