Hacker News: massifist

New comment by massifist in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

massifist — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:39:34 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "Video Game Websites in the early 00s"

massifist — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:20:55 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "How a devboard works (and how to make your own)"

massifist — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 11:32:09 +0000

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

New comment by massifist in "Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT"

massifist — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 11:02:10 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "FLTK 1.4 Released"

massifist — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:58:20 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "Comparison of configuration file languages (2016)"

massifist — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 10:03:59 +0000

Also, allowing unquoted names.

New comment by massifist in "A History of C Compilers – Part 1: Performance, Portability and Freedom"

massifist — Sun, 05 May 2024 19:04:05 +0000

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).

New comment by massifist in "Descent 3 Source Code"

massifist — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 08:33:36 +0000

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!

New comment by massifist in "MIT researchers demonstrate rapid liquid metal 3D printing technique"

massifist — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 15:31:26 +0000

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

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

New comment by massifist in "The Pleasure of Pattern"

massifist — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 12:30:39 +0000

"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).

New comment by massifist in "Progman: X11 WM modeled after Program Manager from the Windows 3 era"

massifist — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 10:20:33 +0000

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...

New comment by massifist in "Why George Washington's Statue in London Doesn't Touch British Soil"

massifist — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 07:51:36 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "Ask HN: How many of you are consciously downsizing your devices/going retro?"

massifist — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 05:38:14 +0000

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. ;-)

New comment by massifist in "Odin Programming Language"

massifist — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 02:52:36 +0000

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

New comment by massifist in "Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)"

massifist — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 01:08:26 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "Unix as IDE (2012)"

massifist — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 09:16:51 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "Reindeer sleep and eat simultaneously"

massifist — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 02:29:33 +0000

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).

New comment by massifist in "Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI"

massifist — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:42:15 +0000

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.

New comment by massifist in "The falling nutritional value of crops"

massifist — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 21:08:04 +0000

Four apples a day keeps the doctor away.

New comment by massifist in "Rising costs mean food companies are making snacks, sodas taste worse"

massifist — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 20:52:53 +0000

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.