Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 99 posts.

Games & Graphics
33

Simulation Islands

Island management is a fundamental low level feature of physics engines and can have a big impact on solver design and performance. This was one of the first problems I decided to work on for Box2D version 3 (v3). Since I began working on v3 I’ve been comparing several algorithms for island management. My goal has…

40

The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International. The International is an unbelievably huge…

46

CS:GO: From Zero to 0-Day

We identified three independent remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in the popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game. Each vulnerability can be triggered when the game client connects to our malicious python CS:GO server. This post details our journey through the CS:GO binary and conducts a technical deep…

52

Dungeon KeeperFX 1.0

All original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game. Ownership of the original game is still and will always be required for copyright reasons. When installing KeeperFX 1.0, perform a fresh installation without overwriting any previous versions. Saved games…

53

Trains on another level

Hello! The code refactor of rails presented last week is great, but the motivation for such a task wasn't quite just some shape changes for rails. As explained last week, we can now define any kind of rail shape, and we had some very specific shapes in mind all along...

58

NetHack 3.6.7

This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4, 3.6.5, and 3.6.6. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security . You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.7 as soon as possible.