Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 105 posts.

Games & Graphics
36

Ken's Academy Award: Noise and Turbulence

In 1997 I received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for work I had done on procedural texture. For example, the NYU Torch on the right is made entirely from procedural textures (except for the text along the bottom). The flame, background, and metal and marble handle…

40

Writing for Half-Life

(File dated November 9, 1998) PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake […]

44

HTML Kong

There are two things I’ve always wanted to try in HTML : generating a photorealistic image using CSS , and creating an interactive game without the need for JavaScript. HTML Kong is the end result of those two ambitions – a reproduction of the Game & Watch video game, Donkey Kong , using just HTML and CSS .

52

Generation Nintendo

In the final months of World War II, when the United States was trying to burn out the will of a starving Japan via the most sustained campaign of aerial incendiary bombardment in history, a handful of obvious targets remained strangely untouched. Among those targets was Kyoto: population 1 million plus, founded in…

57

Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM

It's that time of year again, where we say Happy Birthday to one of my most favorite games, DOOM! Every year I try to reveal something about the game's development that hasn't been documented to death. Believe me, DOOM has been documented more than most games. But never fear, I have so much stuff th

58

Lessons from Doom (2010)

A high-minded goal like “expand the boundaries of the medium” doesn’t always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary lines in game design – picking up ideas that were abandoned long ago and seeing if there’s any new life in them. The game I keep coming back to…