massifist

If there's enough room, you could add special palette indexes that stay constant or diminish more slowly with distance. To give a glow effect for lights, torches, etc. I always appreciated this effect in Quake.

EDIT: Oh nevermind. I guess brightmaps are more flexible.

I have fond memories of Planet Quake and also Blues News (for the latest scoop). I remember it spawned a whole bunch of other planet sites. I think some of them became part of GameSpy (or its parent company). I probably moved on by then.

I found this article very informative. Thanks for writing it.

I like the idea but you could take it a step further and have just a core virtual machine that you could attach virtual (input/output) devices to. So then the canvas and audio would just be virtual devices that met some specification. Or say for example, you just want to listen to an audio playlist, you could attach an audio device, a keyboard and a terminal device (for feedback). A canvas device wouldn't necessarily be required (if there was no use for one). And it would be up to the user to attach the devices required by an application, or at least the user would have direct control.

TLDR: QEMU but much simpler and only WASM need be supported.

I thought I remember reading that there is some relation (or inspiration) from an older X11 toolkit called xforms. Which might also be of interest to someone.

I've been redoing some old projects in FTLK recently so this sparked my interest. And I just like delving into the history of things.

Also, allowing unquoted names.

I remember sometime back in the 90's buying a used copy of Visual C++ 5.0 from some dude at the mall. It felt kinda shady, like a drug deal was going down, but I turned out well and I scored a legit(?) copy for much cheaper than market value. I was very excited when I got it home, and it kept me busy for a long while. There's a lot of good documentation (and source code) on those CD's and it taught me a lot, (pretty much) coming from Quake C.

I think at some point I also started using DJGPP, which pushed me toward GCC (and Linux).

I thought I had gotten this (Descent 3) for free with a graphics card I purchased, but Freespace was what I was thinking of, though it might have been Freespace 2.

The graphics card was the Diamond Viper V770, if I recall correctly. Good times!

Here's an older HN link from an MIT article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156463

"What is the evolutionary advantage of being able to match abstract patterns?"

This reminds me of something I read about the mind preferring patterns because patterns require less (mental) effort (to perform tasks).

I has always assumed Program Manager's window decorations were inspired by Motif but apparently it was the other way around, regarding Presentation Manager; Program Manager's ancestor.

"Motif was directly inspired by the look and feel of the Presentation Manager interface"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_Manager#Presentat...

I just started reading a book called Almost A Miracle, about the War of Independence. It's really good, I haven't been able to put it down.

I'm perfectly fine with a 20+ year old Dell computer. It suits (most of) my needs, unless I need to build or compile even a medium sized project, then it's torturous.

Admittedly, some websites are simply too slow but I don't often visit those, and it's probably one of the reasons I prefer sites like HN.

Though, I can't honestly claim to be (intentionally) downsizing or "going retro". Maybe I've just become something retro. ;-)

There's also Hare [https://harelang.org] which I see mentioned on (rare) occasion. I think it uses a different backend than LLVM.

While I do appreciate historical accuracy, I find this news very disconcerting!

And here I was hoarding all this salt, hoping for our return to the salt standard. :-(

Well ya can't win em all! And at least I'm not on a low sodium diet.

Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

While looking at the old Unix Archives, it's easy to get the impression that Unix really is the ultimate development environment, by and for programmers. At least at it's inception, before it started seeing more general use.

It's just like Blade Runner, where there's thousand ads everywhere, all trying to compete for the consumers attention. Now all we need is holographic ads that project from the screen and dance around on your keyboard (while your trying to type).

You might want to check out FluidSynth if you don't mind a command line application. I don't think it has a graphical interface but it can run in the background, so you might be able to use it with other applications which do.

Four apples a day keeps the doctor away.

I've sworn for years that Hostess changed the Twinkie ingredients but no one seems to believe me. They tell me that my tastes have probably changed.

This is good to know.

I usually stir the fresh grinds with a metal fork which seems help remove static charge.

It seems like the static problem gets worse with darker roasts (in my experience).

Yes, that's what I wanted to do, change the CSS values (based on ids, I guess).

I'm pretty sure I've heard of D3, I'll have to check it out. Thanks.

I just switched over to SVGs from bitmap images. I was using PNG images for different icons which worked fine until I had to upscale to higher resolutions. The SVGs work great and are probably smaller too (depending on the complexity).

I want to render them to a canvas with different (dynamic) color configurations and I'm exploring different ways to do this.

I have an older (cheapo) UPS that I just replaced the battery on, which is probably over 15 years old now. It was much easier than I thought.

Coincidentally, right after I replaced the battery and left it to charge overnight, it saved my workstation from a power outage [events which aren't too common in my location] the very next day. It was quite satisfying to be able to save my work and shut down properly.

The old battery had stopped working long before replacement. So I guess the UPS was no better than a surge protector at that point.

This brings back some fond memories. I still have a copy of the book "Tips and Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus", though it's not in very decent condition. It has this ray traced image on the front cover (with a crazy monster) that is very characteristic of the early 90s. Though, I could never help but notice what appeared to be an error on the staircase banister where it looked like the normals were facing the wrong way. So it looked hollow. Or maybe the (object's) matrix was wrong. Anyway. The book really had me hyped up to create some virtual worlds. Like DOOM.

I learned a lot from the book but some of the topics where a little too advanced for me at the time, as I was still learning C and grappling with x86 assembly language.

However, I rediscovered the book several years ago and implemented something similar to the ray caster (which had really impressed me at the time) in DOSBox. I tried to optimize the algorithm and add a few enhancements. It was lots of fun! A genuine (early 90s) retro experience! I think I even had to fire up Turbo Debugger to solve a few problems.

Is there a reason why they don't suggest the possibility that this was a mammal scavenging the carcass of a dinosaur?

And would this be a surprise, other than providing an interesting specimen?

Awesome!! Slackware is still my favorite Linux distro. I like to think of it as Linux From Scratch for the lazy.

Good call. Thanks.

This must have been a blast BITD! I can only imagine.

I wonder if it was easy to cheat since all the network traffic seems to have been (at least potentially) visible to all peers, if I understand correctly. Maybe it spawned the first instance of cheat bots too.

I don't know, something tells me a (actual) operating system will still be required (at some level).

Though, they might eat the desktop environment or UIs (in general).