Hacker News: vancroft

New comment by vancroft in "Ultima Underworld Remake Released"

vancroft — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:39:20 +0000

I've been hoping for a remaster of this to be released for a long time, watching https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldGodot for progress. Then suddenly I saw this! Looks like a fully functional remake of UU in Unity. I'll admit, I don't love the art style of the 3D models compared to the original sprites, but I can live with that if it makes the game easier/more modern to play.

Ultima Underworld Remake Released

vancroft — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:35:12 +0000

Article URL: https://kweepa.itch.io/unity-underground

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217141

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by vancroft in "They’re vibe-coding spam now"

vancroft — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:48:15 +0000

Email clients should just strip out hyperlinks. You link in the email? Write it directly, then people can copy/paste it. It wouldn't stop all phishing, but it would be a start to increase people's awareness of shady links.

New comment by vancroft in "Setting up a new PC used to be fun, now it is ad-ridden nightmare"

vancroft — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:31:16 +0000

Setting up my PC with PopOS recently has been really fun. Everything is snappy and fast, and no bloatware crap.

New comment by vancroft in "Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document"

vancroft — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 07:16:39 +0000

Sounds like the old saying about the advertising industry: "I know half of my spending on advertising is wasted - I just don't know which half."

New comment by vancroft in "Ultima VII Revisited"

vancroft — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:21:40 +0000

So funny to see this here, I was just looking into Ultima remakes last night, and saw this one among others. Looks really awesome. I never played any of the Ultima games back in the day, and have bounced off them when trying in later years. This should make Ultima VII a lot more accessible and playable.

There's also a remake of Ultima Underworld being made in Godot: https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldGodot

Hoping for these projects to succeed, both U7 and UU sound like incredible games that deserve to be accessible to modern gamers.

New comment by vancroft in "GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search"

vancroft — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 05:31:51 +0000

> I always ask ChatGPT do directly cite and evaluate sources. And try to get it in the mindset of comparing and contrasting arguments for and against. And I find I must argue against its points to see how it reacts.

Same here. But it often produces broken or bogus links.

New comment by vancroft in "US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years"

vancroft — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:23:19 +0000

Al Jazeera reports around 750 US military bases, across the world but concentrated in Europe, Japan and South Korea, and the Middle East. Not quite bordering China. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

New comment by vancroft in "Obsidian Bases"

vancroft — Thu, 22 May 2025 07:38:31 +0000

This looks really cool! I'm curious to try it out and see how the .base files look like

To Conquer the Primary Energy Consumption Layer of Our Entire Civilization

vancroft — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 05:42:09 +0000

Article URL: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2025/04/03/to-conquer-the-primary-energy-consumption-layer-of-our-entire-civilization/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43629216

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by vancroft in "DeepSeek gives Europe's tech firms a chance to catch up"

vancroft — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:41:38 +0000

Wow, why is the title tag of the page apparently a Windows file path?

New comment by vancroft in "Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers"

vancroft — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 07:06:52 +0000

I'm not a subscriber so I can't read it, which startup are they referring to in the headline?

New comment by vancroft in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

vancroft — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 07:08:32 +0000

You've got the wrong link I think, that's showing data from 2020 to 2024.

New comment by vancroft in "Firefox update added more sponsored content on new-tab page"

vancroft — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 05:33:15 +0000

Nope, blank page here too. Or, it's actually going to the Firefox Home screen, I just turned off all the content in Settings > Home. I'm on 130, still a blank home screen.

New comment by vancroft in "Writing a book in the age of open source"

vancroft — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 06:21:52 +0000

This was such a great pitch for the book, I went ahead and ordered it!

With fantasy settings in particular it's crucial to keep the setting consistent, since the book is the only "source of truth" on the matter. This sounds like the way to go. Excited to check it out.

New comment by vancroft in ""My Bike Is Everything to Me""

vancroft — Thu, 30 May 2024 07:45:52 +0000

Side note, never heard of the band mentioned in the article but it sounds interesting:

Bicycle is "a band that rolls across the country on bicycles and rocks in towns and cities along the way. ... 'Heavy metal folk rap' is how the New York Times coined the band's sound."

Unfortunately the link to the band's page appears to be gone, and there's nothing on google about them. Rare to find something these days that has almost 0 web presence!

New comment by vancroft in "Show HN: ECSS – Simple rules for efficient CSS"

vancroft — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 07:28:07 +0000

This is a very interesting approach, and the rules and principles are very sensible. It's nice to see something that tries to really use the platform and emphasize semantic HTML.

Of course, as with any convention-based, getting everyone to follow the rules might be difficult, although the stylelint-config helps.

It would be helpful to see an example of the ruleset applied to a large-ish solution. There are a lot of rules, so it's kind of hard to imagine what it would look actually look like in the css.

Could you elaborate a little on what you mean by “just-in-time” rulesets and how rule 22 ("Component styling should only be served with live components.") works in practice? Are you referring to web components?

New comment by vancroft in "Ask HN: Recommendation for Intermediate CSS Course?"

vancroft — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 13:55:59 +0000

I haven't personally done this course yet, but it looks very promising if you're looking for something that just tackles plain HTML and CSS, without any frameworks: https://www.spicyweb.dev/css-nouveau/1-vanilla-has-never-tas...

New comment by vancroft in "Hawaiian Airlines Debuts Free Inflight Wi-Fi from SpaceX's Starlink"

vancroft — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:06:08 +0000

Yeah, the potential for enshittification is massive. I can imagine they'll offer the Wi-Fi for free at first, use that as a reason to take out screens, and then start charging for the Wi-Fi as an "extra service" (in the way that everything is charged for these days, including basics like booking seats together if you're booking for two or more people).

New comment by vancroft in "Hawaiian Airlines Debuts Free Inflight Wi-Fi from SpaceX's Starlink"

vancroft — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 08:45:40 +0000

I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of in-flight entertainment. Once the Wi-Fi gets reliable enough, people will probably just start using their own devices and streaming services. Which of course becomes a great cost-cutting opportunity for airlines as they could potentially ditch their own systems. I have no idea what % of costs the in-flight system represents, but if the margins are as thin as people say I'm sure they'll jump at the opportunity.