“Lightweight Software #Transactions for Games”, a #paper from 02009 about SpaceWars3D, where they tried to “realize the #performance potential of multiple cores” with #transactional-memory, only to be terribly disappointed. “[W]e depart from classic STM designs and propose a programming model that uses long-running, abort-free transactions that rely on user specifications to avoid or resolve conflicts.” #videogames
on 02026-09-18Concatenative language game jam. #videogames
on 02026-07-20#video about the “boss key” in old #videogames, comparing Commander Keen 4-5, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Bio Menace, Broderbund Star Wars, and Leisure Suit Larry, and the booby-trapped version in Space Quest III: (#retrocomputing or #history)
on 02026-05-15Hormuz-Strait-themed Minesweeper. #videogames
on 02026-04-05SDL port of the old IBM PC game Sopwith (2). #videogames
on 02026-04-04A Minesweeper version that can be hexagonal or triangular. #videogames
on 02026-04-03#video. He says he “evaluates the [#SDF] function once for all points on a [sparse] grid once, and then reuse those cached values when rendering” to get fast enough #performance for fully dynamic #videogames, using bilinear interpolation between the SDF at lattice points to approximate the SDF at intermediate positions. This produces the usual chamfered corner artifacts you see in SDF fonts, as he points out. He uses “brick maps” to reduce storage and, for #LoD, “geometry clipmaps” and the #Jolt-physics engine. However, it seems like he’s having trouble with objects “melting” onto his terrain. #toread #graphics #shaders
on 02026-01-1282-minute #SDF #video which I think ismostly about #sphere-tracing #graphics in #Unreal-Engine for #videogames. #toread
on 02026-01-12The "Black Triangle" story about getting a “hello world” working on the Playstation (development box) after a month of struggling at SingleTrac. #history #videogames
on 02025-12-14#video devlog by ThinMatrix #toread on #dual-grid #tilesets for #videogames
on 02025-12-08#video by Oskar Stalberg #toread on #dual-grid #tilesets for #videogames. For a triangle grid, you only need four little triangle “modules”! (If you can rotate them. He calls his tiles “modules” maybe because they have elevation.) For a square grid it’s 6. He demos a lot of stuff from his game "Townscaper", where the dual grid is entirely made of quads (somewhat skewed) but the primary grid (that the player interacts with) also has the occasional triangle, pentagon, or hexagon (corresponding to degree-3, degree-5, and degree-6 vertices in the primary grid). I wonder what other #tessellations might be interesting?
In another game, he’s doing a thing where he sort of goes back and forth between a triangular grid and a square grid, by cutting his square tiles into triangles in two different ways, and using #WaveFunctionCollapse with restarts to generate a terrain satisfying the implicit constraints of his modules. He’s generating islands from the edge with the constraint that each new module placed must be as high as or higher than the previously placed modules, thus avoiding the kinds of unrealistic local elevation minima that plague Minetest mapgen. This also helps to make the world navigable on foot.
He says he generates the Townscaper quad grid by subdividing a triangle grid, because you can subdivide a quad into four quads and you can subdivide a triangle into three quads, but then later he shows some stuff that sort of contradicts that, where before subdivision some of the triangles were joined up into quads.
Super interesting talk.
on 02025-12-08#video by #jess-hammer on #tilesets in #videogames, covering 15-piece tilesets, 16-piece tilesets, 47-piece tilesets, and a slightly different way to use 15-piece tilesets with a “#dual-grid system”. She shows how her MIT-licensed custom tilemap script implements the dual-grid thing.
on 02025-12-08#interview with Chris Sawyer about Roller Coaster Tycoon and #videogames #history
on 02025-12-03#video on non-photorealistic rendering shaders for #videogames, emulating Moebius’s crosshatched style #toread
on 02025-11-14#dithering transparency in Super Mario Odyssey #videogames avoids #graphics overdraw “by creating the illusion of transparency through stippling.” I guess you just run your shader program on the background pixels that peek through the dither mask.
on 02025-11-13#UX design principles of Nethack4 #videogames
on 02025-11-11Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup’s design philosophy. #UX #videogames
on 02025-11-11#retrocomputing #videogames Pango reconstructed assembly sources
on 02025-10-28#video on #videogames #floating-point bugs in timing #toread
on 02025-10-22#videogames streamer YourRageZ lent his “cameo” to #Sora-2 so his fans could make #humor videos about him, to which he reacts hilariously in this #video stream
on 02025-10-07#video #toread of Fractal Block World, a video game where you can shrink and grow. #videogames
on 02025-09-11entry point to James Hague’s “Purely Functional Retrogames” series about writing #videogames with #functional-programming (using Erlang syntax)
on 02025-09-06#video on video driver regression #testing in #videogames and #latency (“microstuttering” and “hitching”) on Linux. No, on Windows (10? 11?) due to mtkwecx, the MediaTek integrated Wi-Fi/Bluetooth hardware driver, which also causes replugging the keyboard and mouse to not work. Disabling the hardware in the BIOS solves the problem. So does downloading an updated driver from ASRock, but only for the keyboard/mouse problem.
on 02025-09-03#handcam #video of FreeFire #videogames on an iPhone, from the channel ESPORT HAND CAM, using the #3fingerclaw technique
on 02025-08-29"nethack-el" is an #Emacs user interface #UX for #Nethack #videogames
on 02025-08-27#Valve says they’ve shut down money laundering on Counter Strike: Global Offensive. “Valve said it had updated the game so keys could no longer be traded online ... Following the latest update to the game, keys will be bound to a player’s account so they cannot be transferred.” #videogames #news #politics #news
on 02025-08-21#videogames money laundering, specifically skin trading and skin betting in Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Seems like mostly AI slop filler. #politics
on 02025-08-21#video on “isometric” #videogames. The author apparently doesn’t know the difference between the isometric projection and other axonometric projections, so the video is actually about axonometric projections. Lots and lots of video game footage. He also mistakenly describes the Amiga as a 16-bit machine.
on 02025-08-21#video of Jon #Blow’s presentation at Reboot Develop in 02017 about designing #Jai for #videogames. Photoshop takes 7 seconds to start up to display you an image, during which time it’s displaying you a high-resolution image on its splash screen that isn’t the one you wanted to see, and “now” in 02017 opening the File→New menu window takes an entire second. (Indeed, in this 30fps video, it takes 30 frames to finish drawing the menu.) On his i7-7700HQ. He says single-core performance had improved 24× since 02000 based on SPECfp, but it’s also quad-core. Demo of his in-progress Sokoban game, started a year earlier at the same time as Jai, starts at 16'36". Roughly 100kloc per second unoptimized compilation speed on the i7-7700HQ. A thing I hadn’t realized before is that his compile-time execution represents a repudiation of the idea of simple DSLs like the shell, which is consistent with his dislike of things like Lua. The video is unfortunately very hard to read his screen from. This is one of the videos where he says that the syntax is temporary. His reflection system is useful for not just compile-time computation but also run-time debug messages and experimental interfaces. He never mentions the name of the language, so maybe he hadn’t settled on “Jai” yet, but the compiler is already called “jai.exe” and the filenames end in “.jai”. Also he already had the #LLVM backend, which he described as the “short-term plan” for optimization. #compilers
on 02025-08-03#video #interview with Jon Blow for three hours about mindfulness meditation, VR, the nature of the universe, whether free will exists, Braid, The Witness, the nature of art, what art is worth making, Stephen Wolfram, AI voice acting in games, Unreal Nanite, John Carmack in the history of 3D #videogames. Henri-Louis Bergson, contact improv, the nature of the videogame medium, etc. He says games are worse at storytelling than the traditional storytelling media. Also, “Thinking is not what makes you conscious. Thinking is what you’re conscious of.” He also mentions that he has aphantasia, or almost. He agrees “with Peter Thiel about the general state of things”, but thinks he’s “a little too charitable” because he doesn’t realize software stopped advancing in 01990. September 28, 02021, they were still working 100% remote because of covid.
on 02025-07-14John #Carmack on a style of programming where you inline all your code and do not use any subroutines. “As an additional confirmation of the point of the article, a couple years later when I was working on the Doom 3 BFG edition release, the exactly predicted off-by-one-frame-of-latency input sampling happened, and very nearly shipped. That was a cold-sweat moment for me: after all of my harping about latency and responsiveness, I almost shipped a title with a completely unnecessary frame of latency.” #latency #real-time #responsivity #games #video-games #software-design
on 02024-09-03#Minetest mod where you can cut a pizza in the world, with example Lua. #OldCoder on #Mastodon. #video-games
on 02024-08-27#video #toread on programming #video-games with your own engine
on 02024-08-27#video about 10 “waifu” #videogames from Steam. Hentai Sheriff, Anime World War 2 (an FPS), Anime Redemption (a third-person shooter where your character is an anime woman wearing a bikini), etc. Pretty horrific.
on 02024-05-21#video on why #Samyam doesn’t like writing #videogames in #Godot
on 02024-05-12#6502 #asm #source-code for Prince of Persia, one of the all-time great #video-games, one of the first to feature rotoscoped motion, and Linus Torvalds’s favorite game around the time he wrote Linux. This is the original Apple II version, rather than the better known IBM PC version, published by its author Jordan Mechner in 2012 after being recovered by Jason Scott and Tony Diaz. “As the author and copyright holder of this source code, I personally have no problem with anyone studying it, modifying it, attempting to run it, etc. Please understand that this does NOT constitute a grant of rights of any kind in Prince of Persia...”
on 02017-03-30The Gameduino is a video card shield (“hat”?) for your #Arduino (or anything else via SPI!), providing sprites, tiles, scrolling, collision detection, VGA output, and a 64-voice synthesizer, using an embedded #J1, for US$39. Open-source #hardware. #video-games
on 02017-03-22#emulation of the PDP-1 running Spacewar, the first of all computerized #video-games, from 1962
on 02017-03-22#Entity-systems in #video-games programming: “the future of MMOG development”. Also called “entity-component systems”.
on 02017-03-11QWOP, sometimes known as the hardest of all #video-games. Originally Flash, now DHTML
on 02017-03-07Magnavox got #patents on TV-display #video-games due to Ralph Baer’s kinda crappy Odyssey, and they (then their new owners Philips) started suing game makers in 1974; this was how the end of the legendary #interactive-fiction company Infocom came, because Activision had acquired them and were heavily bled by a Baer lawsuit. #history #toread
on 02017-01-10Doom Roguelike got a trademark-infringement takedown from Zenimax. #video-games
on 02016-12-07procedural dungeon generation for #video-games using outer-totalistic #cellular-automata, which is a fairly naïve approach but does work. It uses #KLIPSE for #explorable-explanations.
on 02016-11-23What would a #video-games construction kit need to replace ZZT and MegaZeux? #UX #CP4E
on 02016-10-11#garbage-collection in #video-games
on 02016-10-10Godot is a 2D/3D open-source #video-games engine from #Argentina company Okam Studio; five OSes plus HTML5, built-in IDE for its homespun scripting language
on 02016-08-12#screencasting #video of writing a version of Pong in #JS with <canvas> in 5’30" #video-games
The #history of Spacewar, Steve “Slug” Russell’s 1961 game, arguably the first of all #video-games
on 02016-07-25You can do a lot of simple interaction stuff purely in #HTML and #CSS now, plus the occasional <label> and <input> to maintain UI state, without using JS. Like, to the point of playable #video-games.
#Wouter’s Lobster programming language, a scripting language for writing #video-games in, features Python-like indentation syntax, Ruby-like blocks as a replacement for all control structures, type inference, multimethods, reference counting, a built-in OpenGL interface, and GLSL shaders. Originally it was dynamically typed, but now (as of September 2015) it has full type erasure.
on 02016-05-15An interview #video with Richard Bartle, part of the materials recorded for Jason Scott’s documentary GET LAMP about #interactive-fiction #video-games, talking about the history of #MUD software, which was multiuser interactive fiction.
on 02016-04-29The #Interactive-Fiction Database has 443 #video-games in Spanish, apparently none of which are playable in Parchment.
on 02016-04-27Gostak, the #interactive-fiction story (of #video-games) where all the words are made up, in the Parchment DHTML #Z-machine engine.
on 02016-04-27The prototyping language for 2D sprite #video-games called VGDL is explained in this chapter of the #ebook “Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games”. 2013, cc-by.
on 02016-04-26Not only is there an argument that #video-games are essential for #AI, but also a prototyping language for 2D sprite games called VGDL, kind of like ZZT in a way.
on 02016-04-26multiview stereo reconstruction of #3D models from 8-bit #video-games sprites using “space carving” or maybe “voxel coloring”.
on 02015-11-19a formally proven #Tetris #video-games #software written in #Ada SPARK, ported to the #Pebble #smartwatch.
on 02015-11-11Martin Benitez from #Maciel. Mostly #video-games #video stuff.
on 02015-10-30on unspoken dress codes and #sexism in #video-games: “I was once told by a seasoned industry professional that they were reluctant to let myself and a female colleague stream video together as they didn’t want to look like they were “selling sex”.”
on 02015-08-23Rain World: a 2012 2D platformer indie #video-games prototype with a slugcat protagonist, procedurally generated animations, and filtered collages for level backgrounds. Includes some tips on #A* #search #algorithms in tricky situations.
on 02015-08-15difficulties with #OO in e.g. #C++ when programming #video-games for the #PlayStation 3 in 2009. Unfortunately these are slides. Basically the author’s claim is that C++ encourages memory layouts that have terrible #performance on modern hardware. Very concrete, with lots of C++ #examples and PowerPC #asm disassembled from them of 3-D programming and diagrams of #cache line evictions and whatnot. Basically his recommended cure is to use #parallel-arrays for most things and “flat” contiguous level-order tree linearizations for tree data.
on 02015-08-13This #tutorial #introduction to A* #pathfinding #search for #video-games programming, by @redblobgames, has interactive demonstrations! I don’t remember those from before! The #UX somewhat lacks affordances to indicate that the things in the illustrations are draggable, so the text has to tell you, but in many other ways, these are among the best #visualization of #algorithms I’ve ever seen.
on 02015-08-13“Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers”. Lots of #video-games design examples.
on 02015-08-10