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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.
Sometimes, the complexity and overhead of a third-party physics library, such as Box2D, is overkill for your JavaScript game. In this article, walk through an implementation of a straightforward 2D physics engine. Learn to create a simple physics world with gravity and collision detection between game objects. This…
This is the second part of a three part series (I) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II. Last week, we lo…
(TL;DR: this is a blog post about the process of writing my guide to SDF fonts .)
There is an amazing shadertoy called “Tiny Clouds” by stubbe (twitter: @Stubbesaurus) which flies you through nearly photorealistic clouds in only 10 lines of code / 280 characters (2 o…
So, when I read that Assassin's Creed 2 for the PC would fight piracy by requiring a live internet connection all the time when you were pla...
If you haven't heard the story about Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, and rounded corners, it's a fun read . A big takeaway is that rounded corners are everywhere . Let's take a look at procedurally generating a rounded box mesh.
I’m starting a contest for people that do cool things with a Kinect. See the details below. Before I joined Google, I was a grad student interested in topics like computer vision, motion self…
Salva de la Puente describes the sharedspace component he's built, which brings the power of WebRTC to A-Frame users. The component provides a collaboration model where participants can join or ...
After he retired from making feature length films in 2013, legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki started work on a short film using CGI animation techniques, which
Adding multi-scale noise layers, mountain distance fields, and elevation blending to create detailed terrain from the paint map foundation.
Tangent space is often presented as a confusing block of shader math. This is a deep dive into what tangent vectors actually mean, how they emerge from UVs to bridge 2D and 3D space, and the geometry that makes normal mapping possible.
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
Written and copyrighted by Christian A. Schiller , World of M.U.L.E. curator, with contributions from Andrew Dieffenbach, M.U.L.E. Online developer. No reprint without permission. Happy to get feedback on this feature, either via the contact form or one of the following social media accounts: Facebook , Twitter or…
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
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…
Recently, we have been working on getting a large JavaScript game to run on game consoles. To make that happen, we made use of ChowJS, our ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler and runtime which can target game consoles.
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
Dithering is still a surprisingly applicable technique, not just for practical reasons (such as preparing a full-color image for output on a non-color printer), but for artistic reasons as well. Dithering also has applications in web design, where it is a useful technique for reducing images with high color counts to…
In my previous blog post I talked about reverse engineering the virtual machine used to implement objects in the Lost Vikings. The Lost Vikings was released in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse, now bett…
