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The Ruin of War
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021122 points31 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second part of a three part series (I) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II. Last week, we lo…
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Procedurally generating a rounded box mesh
If you haven't heard the story about Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, and rounded corners, it's a fun read . A big takeaway is that rounded corners are everywhere . Let's take a look at procedurally generating a rounded box mesh.
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An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching
An introduction to raymarching in C++ with diffuse Phong shading and ASCII-terminal output.
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The Dig
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
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8 Bits of history: My first game is still available on the internet
Smackeyackys excellent adventure I was somewhere around eight or nine when the 8 bit era of personal computers started getting into action....
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Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
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1980: MUD
The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.
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Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century
Implementing an 8080 emulator in a microservice architecture on top of kubernetes
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Eyeway's Retina-Tracking Foveated Display
Introduction This article is part 3 on EyeWay Vision’s (EyeWay) foveated laser scanning display and follows up on Part 1 that discussed the technology, and Part 2 that showed through-the-opti…
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From NAND to Raytracer: Raytracing on the Hack Computer
I recently spent some time going through the amazing nand2tetris course, and assignment #9 is to implement something with the Jack programming language that runs on the Hack computer. My friend encouraged me to try writing a raytracer, which is an algorithm that generates physically realistic images by simulating…
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Instanced Line Rendering Using WebGL
Native line rendering in WebGL leaves a lot to be desired. There's inconsistency in the implementation, so you can't trust that the line width you want will be available to you, for example. It's also missing some pretty important features, like line joins and caps. For these reasons, quite a bit of work has been done…
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A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
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Raiders of the Lost Ark as a Black-and-White Silent Film (2014)
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In mo
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Automatic Video Editing
Amongst the many consequences of COVID-19 has been the suspension of in-person talks: suddenly, people like me have had to think about how to produce prerecorded videos. In this article I’m going to explain what I’ve come to understand about video recording and the “automatic video editing” technique I’ve used for…
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Engineering a Chess Match
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…
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Fantasy Cartography: Just Add Something Blotchy
It's been a while since I've done a graphicky post, so here's a new one for the chilly weather. Over on the doomed platform of magnificen...
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