Top all-time · #6438
Pekka Väänänen
Personal blog · 30fps.netprogrammingmath
Pekka Väänänen's personal blog at 30fps.net covers programming and math. Since 2023, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Portals and Quake”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for technical posts on classic game engine internals, such as Quake's portal and potentially visible set (PVS) rendering, often alongside other graphics history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Portals and Quake3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-10
- Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-25
- Full Screen Triangle Optimization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-07
- A simple way to scale pixel art games2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-28
- Mapping to the PICO-8 palette, perceptually2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-07
- More Accurate Doom Colormap2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-30
- HyAB k-means for color quantization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-09
- How Westwood VQA Works2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-15
- Annoying details of a Z-buffer rasterizer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-04
- Approximate First Principal Component2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-17
What Hacker News says?
Please read https://twobithistory.org/2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html and https://30fps.net/pages/pvs-portals-and-quake/ Also, I think most of the x86 magic was done by Abrash.
Comment linking /pages/pvs-portals-and-quake/
on “John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025”Submitted Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques as a story · 348 points
HN discussionSubmitted Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64 as a story · 225 points
HN discussionSubmitted Portals and Quake as a story · 189 points
HN discussionSubmitted A simple way to scale pixel art games as a story · 156 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mapping to the PICO-8 palette, perceptually as a story · 64 points
HN discussionSubmitted HyAB k-means for color quantization as a story · 47 points
HN discussionSubmitted Better SRGB to Greyscale Conversion as a story · 27 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to present MS-DOS screenshots as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Should you normalize RGB values by 255 or 256? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Approximate First Principal Component as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted More Accurate Doom Colormap as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Portals and Quake as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why CIELAB doesn't improve median cut as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mapping to the PICO-8 palette, perceptually as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Portal flow brings it all together as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A simple way to scale pixel art games as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Annoying details of a Z-buffer rasterizer as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Revisiting Yliluoma's ordered dither algorithm as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted HyAB k-means for color quantization as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Full Screen Triangle Optimization as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Single-pass palette refinement and ordered dithering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted More Accurate Doom Colormap as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Approximate First Principal Component as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Westwood VQA Works as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Westwood VQA Works as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Efficiently split a NumPy array into tiles as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Annoying details of a Z-buffer rasterizer as a story · 1 points
HN discussion