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the Nothing itself nothings
Personal blog · nothings.orgprogramminggames
the Nothing itself nothings is a personal blog at nothings.org about programming and games. Since 2008, 90 different Hacker News readers have linked it 107 times, most often “Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Linked for graphics and C programming posts: rasterisation, the Thief renderer, lexing, herringbone tiles and Judy array critiques.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-12-14
- 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-01-21
- How the stb_truetype Anti-Aliased Software Rasterizer v2 Works (2015)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-12
- /computer/judy/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-05-22
- A Performance Comparison of Judy to Hash Tables (2003)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-10
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-12-20
- L-Systems Considered Harmful (2009)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-12-11
- Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics (2005)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-08-22
- Why the Web Sucks (You Just Don't Know It)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-10
- Herringbone Tiles3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-07
What Hacker News says?
This sounded promising but then I saw a performance benchmark [1] that was done on a pentium(!) with a very suboptimal hash table design compared to [2] and [3]. The Judy site itself [4] is full of phrases like "may be out of date", when the entire site was last updated in 2004. If it was already out of date in 2004... It seems that Judy arrays are just kind of a forgotten datastructure, and it doesn't look promisin…
Comment linking /computer/judy/
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted Herringbone Wang Tiles as a story · 153 points
HN discussionVery interesting talk. My favorite takeaways: 1) The basic physics of sand, water and gases is quite simple. I was impressed by the fact, that he implemented most of it in Q-Basic way back. Thinking about this a bit more, Q-Basic looks like the perfect environment to play around with such pixel simulations, albeit a bit slow I guess. 2) The hard part is mixing rigidbody simulation and pixel simulation. Also updating…
Comment linking /gamedev/herringbone/herringbone_tiles.html
on “Noita – roguelite where every pixel is simulated”Submitted Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012) as a story · 134 points
HN discussionThe linked article[1] about stb_truetype seems to have polygons instead of fonts so it could be used for polygons or any vector. [1] http://nothings.org/gamedev/rasterize/
Comment linking /gamedev/rasterize/
on “Inside font-rs, a font renderer written in Rust”Submitted Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics (2005) as a story · 131 points
HN discussionI have not heard this 'criticism' ever before and it's absolutely ridiculous on so many levels to me as a person tangentially interested in gamedev, C, C++, runtimes, system programming, retro stuff, history of gaemdev, etc. 1. Why would a web dev suddenly decide to write in such a spartan way an algorithm heavy library in C or C++? This makes no sense except to somehow tie modern web dev failures like left pad with…
Comment linking /
on “Nuklear: A single-header ANSI C GUI library”Submitted 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011) as a story · 126 points
HN discussionPerhaps the musl author is referring to Sean Barrett's comments about strict aliasing on his web page: http://nothings.org/ Fun rant by the owner of the company Sean Barrett works for: http://web.archive.org/web/20160309163927/http://robertoconc... (and while we're on the subject, additional UB links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170585 ) As for how you navigate these files, you use a text editor that unde…
Comment linking /
on “Nuklear: A single-header ANSI C GUI library”Submitted Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012) as a story · 117 points
HN discussionWhile on the subject of graphics in games... Another pet peeve of mine: ambient occlusion (crude GI approximation) and especially SSAO (crude approximation of a crude approximation). Corners don’t look like that: http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/ (Ambient occlusion proper and in moderation I think looks fine, but most games really overdo it.)
Comment linking /gamedev/ssao/
on “Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping”Submitted The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project (2011) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionMaze generators are a lot of fun to play with, but don't always come up with the most compelling gameplay environments. One of the techniques I've heard works well is to step up the abstraction level one click, and create interesting environments and set pieces, then combine those to create a compelling environment for your players. One approach to do this uses herringbone Wang tiles to place various precreated envi…
Comment linking /gamedev/herringbone/
on “Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator”Submitted The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project as a story · 112 points
HN discussionYou're absolutely right about scanline rasterizers and GPUs, but scanline rasterization is very interesting historically. Most of the 1990s pre-GPU software renderers did scanline rasterization, for example Quake and Thief had a pure software renderer. Before GPUs, perspective correct texture mapping was the holy grail of 3d graphics because CPUs of the time were not fast enough to do all the divisions for each pixe…
Comment linking /gamedev/thief_rendering.html
on “The lost art of 3D rendering without shaders”Submitted The Compositing Tree (2014) as a story · 68 points
HN discussionSean Barrett, the author of stb_truetype.h, has an interesting article about how stb_truetype does its glyph rasterisation. https://nothings.org/gamedev/rasterize/
Comment linking /gamedev/rasterize/
on “Writing a TrueType font renderer”Submitted Micropayment Barriers (1998) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionI got this http://nothings.org/writing/websucks.html so fascinating in 2004 the web already suck
Comment linking /writing/websucks.html
on “Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)”Submitted Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThat's just some code that @ephtracy is using. "ephtracy/stb forked from nothings/stb" Sean T. Barrett is @nothings on twitter per the twitter link on https://nothings.org/
Comment linking /
on “MagicaVoxel: A free voxel art editor and path tracing renderer”Submitted Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion as a story · 43 points
HN discussionThe programmer is Sean T. Barrett: * https://github.com/ephtracy/stb * https://nothings.org/
Comment linking /
on “MagicaVoxel: A free voxel art editor and path tracing renderer”Submitted Some Strategies for Fast Lexical Analysis When Parsing Programming Languages as a story · 30 points
HN discussionOne needs to be careful when calculating exact probabilities. http://nothings.org/games/minesweeper/ previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13566730
Comment linking /games/minesweeper/
on “Pure Skill Minesweeper”Submitted Herringbone Wang Tiles (2011) as a story · 28 points
HN discussionYeah, Sean Barrett has a good writeup about them and optimizing them for branch-prediction, etc It's framed in the context of programming-language tokenization, but the principles are the same. https://nothings.org/computer/lexing.html
Comment linking /computer/lexing.html
on “Wc2: Investigates optimizing 'wc', the Unix word count program”Submitted I Found Myself in the Game Industry (2013) as a story · 25 points
HN discussionWork has been done applying the Boyer-Moore principle to regex scanning. * https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-6423(03)00013-3 (PDF is freely available) * https://nothings.org/computer/source/sgrep.html
Comment linking /computer/source/sgrep.html
on “The Boyer-Moore Fast String Searching Algorithm”Submitted How the Stb_truetype Anti-Aliased Software Rasterizer v2 Works (2015) as a story · 16 points
HN discussion
