Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 160 posts.

Games & Graphics
1

VR

About a month and a half ago I tried the new Oculus and was completely blown away. Even though there were clear rough points – expensive computer, not wireless, limited apps – I was amazed. The next morning I had two thoughts: 1. Because VR games are so physical, gaming will no longer be perceived as an unhealthy…

9

FizzleFade

I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…

15

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.

23

Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code

Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…

25

Racing for Realism

At Pixar, pushing the limits of rendering is always a race towards realism, but never at the expense of style. Learn how the talented artists, programmers, and scientists at Pixar are pushing the limits of computer graphics to tell the best possible story.

28

Railroad Tycoon

It says much about Sid Meier, a born game designer if ever there was one, that he tended to get some of his best work done when he was allegedly on vacation. A few years after his significant other had lost all track of him on what she thought was a romantic getaway to the Caribbean but he came to see as the ideal…