Hacker News: phqb

New comment by phqb in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

phqb — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:33:05 +0000

I'm prototyping a wood-working simulator game in my free time for a year now, here is its latest short https://phqb.github.io/woodsim-short-15-07-2026.html.

My goal is to capture the satisfying feeling of sawing & chiselling wood and hammering its parts (jointing) into an usable object.

Now sawing mechanic is done, chiseling shouldn't be a problem. Jointing will be hard.

The techs: Rust, raylib, JoltPhysics. I don't use engines to avoid answering "how to do X in Y" questions while I even don't know how to do X yet. But now I'm considering migrating to bevy to not have to implement (good) shadow, lighting, ... from scratch.

Btw I use no AI except for brainstorming and well-defined & isolated functions. I want to control all my codes instead of begging the LLM model.

New comment by phqb in "The King in Yellow"

phqb — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:19:32 +0000

I also knew this book from Signalis which is now one of my favorite. I even made a copy of this book[0] based on the in-game one.

[0]: https://x.com/phqb1/status/1840023494060585237

New comment by phqb in "Show HN: I made a WebGL-based app that traces images using circles"

phqb — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:26:28 +0000

I added JSON import & export. Btw you can get a sharable link. But the details of the drawing will reduce because of URL length limitation.

New comment by phqb in "Show HN: I made a WebGL-based app that traces images using circles"

phqb — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:23:20 +0000

I added number of circles sliders.

Show HN: I made a WebGL-based app that traces images using circles

phqb — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 17:56:08 +0000

I was fascinated by this [0] and this video [1]. After many struggles, I finally built this app that traces images using circles similar to what these videos had shown.

The most challenging part (to me) is to find a way to convert images to vector lines. I had tried Potrace, but its output is not suitable for my use case: too many small elements share the same border. Potrace's goal is to represent the original image faithfully using vector lines. But I want to trace the image edges.

After searching and trying some Potrace alternatives in vain, I finally found my keyword. Surprisingly (to me), it lies at the end of the wiki page of the very topic [2]. Then I found a paper [3] that has nice pseudocode and a C implementation. I rewrote the pseudocode in Rust because I wanted to experiment with rustwasm. Honestly, I didn't care much about the math behind it.

From then, I could continue to finish the app and show it to the world.

This app is also my chance to learn about rustwasm and WebGL.

FYI: this app is offline-only; your images never leave your browser

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgreAUpPwM

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_detection#Subpixel

[3] https://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2017/216/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30530376

Points: 93

# Comments: 24