Posts in Noah Hellman's blog
Splitting Surfaces for Perspective Drawing December 1, 2024 Let’s say that we are hand-drawing a shape with a rectangular surface, e.g. a rectangular cuboid such as this one: And we may wish to add, say, a door somewhere on the right-facing wall. We decide that in our scene, this door is at a certain ratio R $R$ of the distance L $L$ from the near edge to the far edge. But to what ratio r $r$ does…
The Web Without JavaScript April 24, 2024 Today is 04-24. Because this sort of resembles the 424 Failed Dependency HTTP response status code, it has been proposed to call this the JS Naked Day in order to promote the “Rule of Least Power” as described by the W3C in 2006. JavaScript is very powerful and is essential for some types of websites to even function. However, it also has a tendency to be…
Exploring The Halo 1 System Link Protocol September 18, 2023 One of my all-time favorite games is Halo: Combat Evolved that launched together with the original Xbox in 2001. One major part of the game was multiplayer, up to 16 people at a LAN party could play together by connecting four Xbox consoles over Ethernet , referred to as System Link . Out of pure curiosity, we will try to look at how the…
Revisiting The Fast Inverse Square Root - Is It Still Useful? April 20, 2023 In 2005, id Software released the source code for their 1999 game Quake III Arena under the GPL-2 license. In the file code/game/q_math.c , there is a function for calculating the reciprocal square root of a number which at first glance seems to use a very peculiar algorithm: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float…
Piping in AWK December 10, 2022 AWK is often used as part of a pipeline of shell commands. However, have you ever opened a pipe from within AWK? A few weeks ago I was trying to do some quick alignment of attributes in XML files. For example, turning < SomeTag a = "aa" b = "bbbbbb" c = "cccccc" > < SomeTag a = "aaaaa" b = "bbbbbbbbbbbbbb" c = "cc" > < SomeTag a = "a" b = "b" c = "c" > <…