Games
Recursive shadowcasting computed field of view in 4.5 µs at radius 16 on a 256x256 map with 10% walls, about 3x faster than a Bresenham line to every cell, and missed 0 of 6,759 visible cells where the lines missed 959. The version most people copy has a bug that shows 7x more cells through solid wa
Games
Across 1,000 seeded 200x120 maps, cellular automata caves came out fully connected 0.5% of the time. BSP, random room placement and drunkard's walk were connected every time. But the caves' stray pockets held about 1% of the floor and took 16 carved cells to fix, while discarding and retrying failed
Games
A 128x128 chunk of 4-octave noise took 0.30 ms to 1.92 ms in Node on an Apple M3, depending on the noise. Simplex never beat branch-free Perlin, a switch statement made 8 octaves 4.7x slower, and calling one chunk loop with two noise functions made it 3x slower.
Games
Yes. Over 10,000,000 rolls Math.random hit a 1% drop 0.9998% of the time, as close as crypto.getRandomValues. The streaks players call broken are the maths of independent rolls — 13.5% of 100,000 simulated players got nothing in 200 kills at 1%, matching the 13.40% formula. A pity timer fixes that;
Games
About 97% of it. One second of a 30-bone walk cycle at 60 fps is 72,005 bytes of raw float32 and 2,229 bytes after constant-channel removal, cubic keyframe reduction and quantisation — 32x, with 7.2 mm of worst-case joint error on a 1.8 m character. Measured on a walk cycle, a snappy jump and a jitt
Games
A failed A* search on a 256x256 grid expands 52,286 nodes — 99.7% of every walkable cell on the map — against 10,920 when a path exists. It costs 7.57 ms instead of 1.66 ms. The heuristic that makes A* fast contributes nothing when the goal is unreachable, because there is no goal to be guided towar
Games
At 100,000 sprites, sorting a shuffled list costs 27.0 ms per frame — 162% of a 60fps budget, before you draw anything. Sorting the same list when it is already in order costs 1.35 ms, and 3.36 ms when 1% of sprites have moved. The sort is not the problem. Rebuilding the list every frame is.
Games
Not below about 2,000 spawned objects per frame, and the free-list pool everyone writes made the median frame 2.5x slower at 3,000 spawns and 4.8x slower at 10,000. Allocating a bullet costs 3.55 ns more than reusing one; the pool's own push and pop cost 7.86 ns. What pooling can buy is the tail — b
Games
The naive version — full state as JSON, every tick — costs 1,101,710 bytes per second per client at 128 entities and 60 Hz, and 141 Mbit/s of server upload for 16 players. Binary packing, 16-bit quantisation, delta encoding and interest management together brought that to 70 payload bytes per tick,
Games
There is no crossover. A struct-of-arrays layout beat an array of plain objects at every entity count measured, including 1,000 — but at 1,000 it saved 0.005 ms per frame. The saving first reaches a whole millisecond at 184,000 entities. And the cache-locality argument everyone repeats reverses on i
Games
Because `position += velocity * deltaTime` is not frame-rate independent. The same falling body ended 0.477 m apart at 60 fps versus 144 fps after 10 seconds, and 1.43 m apart at 30 versus 240. A fixed-timestep accumulator closed the gap to zero — and then failed in three ways nobody measures.
Games
Serialising a 50,000-entity save with JSON.stringify took 16.5 ms — one whole 60 fps frame. But the frame is the cheap problem. When v2 of the game loaded v1 saves, JSON was silently wrong on two of three schema changes and the packed binary was silently wrong on the fourth. Measured across JSON, gz