What’s the difference between a technique and a hack?
While answering a question on the Creators Club forums , I found myself thinking about the difference between general purpose rendering techniques, which tend to be flexible, reusable, and widely understood, versus game specific hacks, which rely on creativity and lateral thinking to achieve their desired result, often by efficiently taking advantage of some other work the game was already doing. The world is full of knowledge about general purpose rendering techniques. These are presented at conferences , written about in books , and described on blogs and forums .


