Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 82 posts.

Games & Graphics
34

Procedural City Generation

Since seeing the city generation from the shelved Introversion Software game “Subversion” in action , I’ve wanted to to try writing a basic procedural city generator myself. The developers followed a method described in Parish and Müller’s paper: Procedural Modelling of Cities (2001) . The paper is well-written and…

36

NES Graphics – Part 3

Part 1 and part 2 described CHR data, nametable based backgrounds, sprites, and scrolling. Combined, these cover nearly everything a basic NES cart can do without using additional hardware. To go any further will require a quick tangent to discuss, in detail, how rendering happens.

41

Reverse Engineering Wipeout

In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation. The brand new PlayStation produced 3D graphics previously unseen on living room TVs and WipEout exploited its capabilities like no other game at the time. It was one of the pioneering titles of the fifth generation…