Top all-time · #1074
Ryan Gordon
Personal blog · icculus.orggamesprogrammingsystems
Ryan Gordon's personal blog at icculus.org covers games, programming and systems. Since 2008, 66 different Hacker News readers have linked it 70 times, most often “FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-01-15
- /physfs/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-28
- Unreal Tournament 99 running on WASM (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-28
- LordHavoc's DarkPlaces Quake Modification3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-06-23
- Fat ELF binaries for multiple architectures on Linux (and possibly others)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-10-19
- Unreal Engine 1 to Emscripten2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-09
- /1pass/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-28
- /gtkradiant/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-13
- Flibitijibibo (Linux/Mac games porter) on dropping Mac support for new games2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-02
- Docker - A KDE System Tray2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-13
What Hacker News says?
Maybe I've just been out of the scene too long, but can't let mention of Linux gaming luminaries go without Ryan C. Gordon of Loki Games/icculus.org. For many years, if there was a big project coming to Linux, Ryan Gordon was likely to be the wizard behind it. His homepage: http://icculus.org/ Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/icculus
Comment linking /
on “VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now”Submitted Unreal Tournament 99 running on WASM (2017) as a story · 212 points
HN discussionShipping binaries on Linux is nearly impossible on a long term support basis. FatELF would of addressed at least some of these problems, but was largely rejected by the larger community of people not shipping proprietary products on Linux: https://icculus.org/fatelf/
Comment linking /fatelf/
on “Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential”Submitted FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015) as a story · 110 points
HN discussionCheck Quaddicted[1] for some singleplayer maps. The most common engine by far is Quakespasm[2] which keeps the original style but fixes bugs, reintroduces some features from the software renderer that were lost in the original OpenGL version (fullbrights, lightmaps that go above 100%, non-power-of-two textures, etc) and removes and raises some hardcoded limits. You probably also want QuakeInjector[3], which is a "qu…
Comment linking /gtkradiant/
on “Id Software”Submitted FatELF is no more. Linux developer community owned Ryan Gordon. as a story · 59 points
HN discussionDarkplaces engine[1] had introduced lots of features including photon mapping back in 2011, but it was slow as I remember. Photon mapping is kind of a predecessor of path tracing[2]. [1] https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/download.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_mapping
Comment linking /twilight/darkplaces/download.html
on “Q2VKPT: Fully path traced Quake 2”Submitted Fat ELF binaries for multiple architectures on Linux (and possibly others) as a story · 29 points
HN discussionTwo or more computers in a network become and behave as a single PC, so if you buy any client-server software you are literally stealing programs for yourself. Because all programs are the same to a PC. AKA all programs executables can be divided into two or more exe's and run over a network it's called the client-server or mainframe dumb client model of computing and you don't want that because that's the end of th…
Comment linking /gtkradiant/
on “America produces enough oil to meet its needs, so why do we import crude?”Submitted Unreal Tournament 99 intro flyby in web browser as a story · 20 points
HN discussionNot a game, but hosting. here i got ports/patches for open core/open source games, especially for Loki games like 1.5 decades ago: http://icculus.org/ Amongst them one my favorites: Alien vs. Predator (Sierra Game Studio). Proprietary game content though, unsure about the code licence. Edit: typos fixed
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favourite open source game?”Submitted It's Friday - go play "The tombs of Asciiroth" as a story · 20 points
HN discussionHow so? I thought they are the same, at least almost . Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) had GUIDs from qkeys. https://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2006-April/000951.html You can see how qkeys are generated, and essentially a GUID is: Cvar_Get("cl_guid", Com_MD5File(QKEY_FILE, 0), CVAR_USERINFO | CVAR_ROM); So, in this case, GUID is the MD5 hash of the generated qkey file. See "CL_GenerateQKey" for details. > On startup, th…
Comment linking /pipermail/quake3/2006-April/000951.html
on “20 years of Git”Submitted Linux Gamers' FAQ as a story · 6 points
HN discussionMore context here: https://icculus.org/finger/flibitijibibo?date=2024-06-15&tim...
Comment linking /finger/flibitijibibo?date=2024-06-15&time=13-14-16
on “SDL3 new GPU API merged”Submitted Docker - A KDE System Tray as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou don't get the end game was to client-server the big budget games which has happened. AKA diablo 1 + 2 we owned the game outright, not so with diablo 3 and overwatch. Steam was forced into half-life/cs in 2004, no one wanted it and steam is malware. That is why we lost dedicated servers and level editors in the AAA gaming space. GTK Radiant - level editor quake engine games http://icculus.org/gtkradiant/ Doom vs…
Comment linking /gtkradiant/
on “Linus Torvalds has switched to AMD”Submitted Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor more inspiration I'd check out the Quake engine source. It's quite the masterpiece. There's also been some modernization over the years by LordHavoc of the DarkPlaces engine https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ - I'm constantly impressed how well the HD remaster on DarkPlaces looks on modern 4k hardware.
Comment linking /twilight/darkplaces/
on “Writing a game engine in pure C: The Graphic Initialization”Submitted The Icculus Microgrant 2020 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHave you seen https://icculus.org/physfs/ ? You could put everything inside a zip and that's it.
Comment linking /physfs/
on “35% Faster Than The Filesystem (2017)”Submitted Flibitijibibo (Linux/Mac games porter) on dropping Mac support for new games as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAs sibling comments stated it's common in games. A well known open source VFS library is PhysicsFS¹, previously it was called PhysFS AFAIR. ¹ https://icculus.org/physfs/
Comment linking /physfs/
on “35% Faster Than The Filesystem (2017)”Submitted Flibit's Official Catalina Plan as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux port using their weird "game inside a shell script" approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than just using wine/proton on the Windows build. [0] apparently using this https://icculus.org/mojosetup/
Comment linking /mojosetup/
on “GOG has had to hire private investigators to track down IP rights holders”Submitted LordHavoc's DarkPlaces Quake Modification as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSuperTux also uses a filesystem abstraction library: https://icculus.org/physfs/ Fortunately it doesn't need to do networking, threading, or IPC; those are definitely a pain. Boost provides an abstraction layer, but it's a big dependency.
Comment linking /physfs/
on “SuperTux v0.4.0 – first stable release since 2005”Submitted Steam Dev Days - Getting Started with Linux Game Development as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have seen quite a few code bases, where the original author who didn't want to continue the project, just released the source code somewhere (as zlib, public domain, GPL or what ever) but nothing more. If there was interest by some other developers, there was always some new open source project/community building itself up around the released code. And if not immediately, maybe a few years later. E.g., some exampl…
Comment linking /projects/
on “Shutting down a product? Open source it.”Submitted Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
