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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,924 posts.
Create a Game Character with HTML5 and JavaScript
William Malone: Part 1 in a journey in developing a game character.
Emacs Lisp Animations
Emacs , a programmer's text editor with roots in the 1970s, is a great tool for animation. In Fall, 2010 I taught a digital art class at NYU's interdisciplinary Steinhardt art school. Clearly, the thing to do was to teach how to make animations in Emacs by programming it in Lisp.
GPU Performance for Game Artists
Performance is everybody’s responsibility, no matter what your role. When it comes to the GPU, 3D programmers have a lot of control over performance; we can optimize shaders, trade image quality for performance, use smarter rendering techniques… we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves. But there’s one thing we don’t…
Making of “Introduction to A*”
(Warning: these notes are rough – the main page is here and these are some notes I wrote for a few colleagues and then I kept adding to it until it became a longer page)
Chess Game Using Racket’s Pasteboard
The Racket GUI library provides an "editor toolkit" which can be used to implement programs that use an interactive graphical canvas where objects can be moved around with the mouse. This toolkit has good reference documentation, however this documentatio...
NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
Response to 'Reasons why Lisp games suffer'
I haven’t been on r/lisp for a week or so due to being rather low on free time as we try and get an alpha of our game out of the door. When I did pop back I saw ‘5 Reasons why Lisp Games Suffer and proposed solution’ which I thought would be interesting, but what I found was bizarre and misinforming.
Why Can a Machine Beat Mario but Not Pokemon?
Why Can a Machine Beat Mario but not Pokemon? By now, you’ve probably heard of bots playing video games at superhuman levels. These bots can be programmed explicitly, reacting to set inputs with …
What I Learned Failing to Finish a Game in 2024
Here’s a breakdown of my year in game dev, the challenges I faced, and the key takeaways that’ll shape my 2025 projects.
A new AI game: Give me ideas for crimes to do
Less than a week ago OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, and it kicked off what feels like a seismic shift in many people’s understand of the capabilities of large …
Rebooting a 15 year-old game written in D – Part 1 Compiling
While exploring D recently, I remembered a game I played while at university 15 years ago. For a long time, I couldn’t remember the name at all, only that it was from a Japanese developer. After some search wrangling, I finally managed to find the name of the game: Torus Trooper!
Browser Games Aren't an Easy Target
If you're about my age and had a similarly dull upbringing, you probably also have memories of playing video games behind a teacher's back whenever class involved going to some sort of "computer lab." Flash games were the thing when I was in elementary school, and when I was in middle school, I'd bring Quake with me…
Calculating the Distance Between Points in Wrap Around (Toroidal) Space
Let’s say you are trying to find the distance between two points in 2D, but that these points are in a universe that “wraps around” like old video games – leaving the screen…
1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)
While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and l…
The International 2018: Results
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
Cheap Beer and the Psychology of PlayStation Now Pricing
Sony just launched its PlayStation Now service that lets you rent access to streaming games. The pricing seems a bit odd to some, but it actually uses some well established psychological tricks to …
Writing a second video game for the Micro:bit in Rust
I recently published a story about bitflyer, a simple game for the BBC micro:bit.
Gaussian Splats part 3: There's always a bigger scene
Continuing our Gaussian splatting development series, Director of Technology Sam Birley breaks down how we bypassed GPU Scene instance caps, implemented PlayCanvas Streamed SOG LODs, and managed GPU memory budgets for production-ready photogrammetry… bringing us to a point where the renderer has fin
Running BBS Door Games on Windows 10 with GameSrv and DOSBox
I continue to enjoy seeing what can be done with WSL (Windows Subsystem for ...
OpenTTD 13.4 Released
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a .4 release, but quite a few people have reported a crash when a news item appears while a drop-down menu is open.
Dolphin – The Rise of HLE Audio
Like any artistic medium, games are emotional experiences filled with joy, sadness, frustration, and more. Special moments can bring tears, cause shouting, or even screams. But imagine during one of those emotional highs if the audio simply died, and the game continued onward in a deafening silence before eventually…
How I made a game played in Notepad
Play games made by Sheepolution
Speeding up the Super Game Boy
The Super Game Boy allows you to play Game Boy games on your Super Nintendo. This is an impressive feat, when you consider that the two consoles share basica...