Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 213 posts.

Games & Graphics
156

AR with SceneKit and Metal

Recently I found myself needing to process and visualize both point clouds and meshes in an iOS application utilizing ARKit, with the point cloud being gathered using the 2020 iPad “LiDAR” sensor. To enable maximum performance and content creation convenience I thought it would be nice to have both custom shaders and…

162

Lemmings 2: The Tribes

When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…

171

Master of Magic

Steve Barcia started thinking about his second grand-strategy game well before he had finished creating his first one. While he was waiting for his latest iteration of Master of Orion to compile each day in the cramped Austin, Texas, offices of his company SimTex, he sketched in the mental details of a follow-up that…

174

Fix Your Timestep

Introduction Hi, I’m Glenn Fiedler and welcome to Game Physics. In the previous article we discussed how to integrate the equations of motion using a numerical integrator. Integration sounds complicated, but it’s just a way to advance the your physics simulation forward by some small amount of time called “delta time”…