Hacker News: ggambetta

New comment by ggambetta in "Soccer Arcade Games Through the Years"

ggambetta — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 13:09:47 +0000

No Striker? [0] Zero realism but incredibly fun to play. IIRC it had a two-player mode (sharing the keyboard) that was super fun.

[0] https://www.mobygames.com/game/12380/striker/

New comment by ggambetta in "How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown"

ggambetta — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:21:21 +0000

I was thinking exactly the same thing, this is CSP/SR. One of my favorite topics! https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture....

New comment by ggambetta in "Delacroix's Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople Restored"

ggambetta — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:57:42 +0000

I've read that. I'm not part of the conservator community, I just really enjoy the videos.

New comment by ggambetta in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

ggambetta — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:45:20 +0000

I fully agree with you. However, when non-LatAm people talk about "socialism", they probably think of European-style socialism, which is awesome. LatAm socialism is a lot more extreme, and closer to full-on communism - my country still has people stuck in the 60s cold war era mentality and fully supporting the ideals of of the Soviet Union, still praising Cuba and Venezuela, reality notwithstanding.

European-style socialism would be better. Full 60s socialism would be significantly worse. It's quite likely that people ITT are using "socialism" to refer to either, and we're all talking past each other.

New comment by ggambetta in "Delacroix's Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople Restored"

ggambetta — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:26:12 +0000

They should just trap Julian Baumgartner inside for a month, with nothing but water, food, and conservation-grade varnish and reversible pigments, and the whole place would look like new!

New comment by ggambetta in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

ggambetta — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:09:58 +0000

It seems you're not from LatAm.

New comment by ggambetta in "Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)"

ggambetta — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:09:47 +0000

That's a great idea! Just haven't gotten that far yet (that article is pre-LLM, and I'm very early in a new AI-driven reconstruction). But yeah, taking the original extracted sprites and having Nano Banana upscale or redraw them is a great idea.

New comment by ggambetta in "Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)"

ggambetta — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:01:26 +0000

I'm very happy to see this! Not so much because of TDIII (which I played, although not nearly as much as Stunts), but because there seems to be some momentum building around recreating old games using AI agents, and I love that! I had explored some related ideas [0] but throwing Claude at the problem seems super promising. The recent Crimsonland thing [1] was great!

[0] https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html

[1] https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/

New comment by ggambetta in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

ggambetta — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:51:07 +0000

Fair, I wouldn't have been able to write Bresenham back then (or now, off the top of my head). I'd have written a simple trig-based one. Maybe I'd have failed the interview :D

New comment by ggambetta in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

ggambetta — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:49:19 +0000

So at the end of each run increment the relevant pointer by (pitch - w) not pitch which I'm sure it's one of the bugs they saw all the time in this interview :)

New comment by ggambetta in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

ggambetta — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:45:26 +0000

Thought the same. Reckless today, literally standard back then.

New comment by ggambetta in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

ggambetta — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:29:19 +0000

This brings back memories! I could easily pass this interview today, because I used to write code like this all the time 25 years ago doing gamedev (and so did everyone else to some extent). But the really interesting thing is that I just realized I haven't written code like this in a long, long time.

Programming has changed over time, but the change has been so gradual I hadn't even realized this until this article. These days I'm pondering how the profession has changed in the last 2 years due to AI. Feels a lot more like a step change. And yet I'm having more fun than I've had in a long time, both at work and at home, throwing Claude at problems. I still don't fully understand why.

New comment by ggambetta in "Voxel Space (2017)"

ggambetta — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:49:54 +0000

What I'm hearing is that the smoke in smoke tests comes from the oil tanks!

New comment by ggambetta in "The dead economy theory"

ggambetta — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:22:33 +0000

> And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture,

Errr pretty sure that was Google?

New comment by ggambetta in "Let's compile Quake like it's 1997"

ggambetta — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:38:46 +0000

The whole thing compiles with 2 warnings. Incredible codebase. John Carmack definitely was/is on a different level.

Back when I was making videogames I followed a similar philosophy. No warnings (but in an orders-of-magnitude smaller and less complex codebase). Crash on failed asserts, used liberally, in debug builds. Not sure why but it seems that gamedev doesn't do this kind of rigorous engineering in general (or at least it didn't back then -- and admittedly I never worked in a big studio).

New comment by ggambetta in "Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)"

ggambetta — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:26:32 +0000

Thanks for the detailed explanation, I had no idea about any of this.

New comment by ggambetta in "Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)"

ggambetta — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:04:06 +0000

I'd have guessed multiply-by-0 and multiply-by-1 can be special-cased to run much faster and simpler code paths, like you'd do when writing MUL for a processor that doesn't have it (I <3 z80)

New comment by ggambetta in "All the bugs they found"

ggambetta — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:54:28 +0000

Not gonna fix 'em!

New comment by ggambetta in "Porting my 3D points renderer on a ZX Spectrum 48K"

ggambetta — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:08:40 +0000

I love this! Happy to see I'm not the only crazy out there trying to port modern renderers to the Spectrum :D I've been meaning to experiment with assembly, but haven't gotten to that yet. This has some good ideas I'd love to play with.

New comment by ggambetta in "A physics engine with incremental rollback for multiplayer games"

ggambetta — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:23:33 +0000

No need to resend inputs with seq IDs <= the last one acknowledged by the server, right? 1-2 seconds sounds like overkill. Unless the server updates themselves are lower than 0.5-1 Hz, but what kind of game is that? A very sparse world where chances of misprediction are very low?