6 ms·

The Powder Toy

107 points by severine 6y ago

dang 6y ago
If curious see also 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473
umvi 6y ago
Another fun game in a similar vein: https://sandspiel.club/ https://sandspiel.club/ Fun fact - sandspiel was written in Rust -> WASM
- ttul 6y ago
  This is shockingly performant on an iPhone 11.
  - tydnbvbv 6y ago
    It's not surprising. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks Iphone is as fast as top desktop CPUs. It has 200% performance of my desktop pc (where it runs fast). What is surprising is that it's very slow on Snapdragon 730 phone.
    - agloeregrets 6y ago
      Might be half CPU there but also half that the JS Engine on Android is much slower than iOS’s. In all JS benchmarks the iPhone outclasses the Android devices by amounts greater than the CPU advantage.
  - bschwindHN 6y ago
    I get around 42 FPS on an old iPhone SE, still a great phone!
    - agloeregrets 6y ago
      Seeing how much progress has happened since then, it’s all really impressive! The current iPhone 11 Pro seems to be locked at exactly 60 FPS and you can’t get it to drop. Geekbench scores for your iPhone rage near 540 single core and 986 multi core. The current iPhone is 1330 and 3434 respectively. I would guesstimate that unlimited, FPS would be somewhere near 120 for the current iPhone. The app is very fast! I bet it could run on an Apple Watch!
- willis936 6y ago
  This is great, thanks. I started off as feeling very destructive, but I found the tools to let things grow, then things became overgrown, and I became destructive again. It was fun to have a piece of wood with plants on it on fire. I tried to put out the fire with water, but the water would cause the plants to grow, which would make the fire grow.
bigyikes 6y ago
When I was younger, my friends & I would carry this game around on our pocket USB drives so that we could quickly launch it up on our school's computers any chance we got. Good times. It's a surprisingly intricate game, but I mostly just like to blow stuff up.
- degenerate 6y ago
  My friends and I did the exact same thing, for the exact same reason, but with Pocket Tanks. https://classic.blitwise.com/ptanks.html https://classic.blitwise.com/ptanks.html
  - anamexis 6y ago
    For my friends and I, it was Armegetron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armagetron_Advanced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armagetron_Advanced
    - Shared404 6y ago
      My group had a cracked version of one of the CS games, don't know whether it was CS or CS Source though. It only had de_dust2, but we played so many hours on that game.
      - smcleod 6y ago
        CS Portable! That was great!
        skocznymroczny 6y ago
        I remember having a version in which buying one of the shotguns crashed the server.
      - skocznymroczny 6y ago
        Whenever I am at lan parties my buddies want to play CS 1.6 and I don't understand the appeal. They only play de_dust2 too. I find it so boring. Everyone buys exactly the same weapons (m4a1 for antiterrorists, ak47 for terrorists). Everyone runs pretty much to the same spot, there's an exchange of blows, one team wins. Repeat. They don't even try any other maps or other weapons or anything.
masterofhouses 6y ago
Ah, I forgot how fun this game can be.
wfme 6y ago
I remember playing with this game back in high school. Was my first practical introduction to logical operators and binary. Ended up spending so much time trying to build some basic electronics once I found out how to build logic gates. No idea if these still work, but kinda cool looking back on them, ten years later. Here's a fairly simple 4 bit adder with display and memory https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=12853 https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=12853. Powder toy was never complete without some kind of explosive, so here's a grenade that proved quite popular https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=6390 https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=6390.
- janjanson 6y ago
  I remember playing and being amazed with both of the projects you linked when I was a teenager! Fascinating!
- haspoken 6y ago
  The R216 computer in powdertoy: https://trigraph.net/powdertoy/R216/manual.md https://trigraph.net/powdertoy/R216/manual.md A Forth for the R216 computer: https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth
verroq 6y ago
Is this a clone of the classic: https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/ https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
- zamadatix 6y ago
  The Powder Toy came out about 3 years after The Powder Game and there was "The Falling Sand Game" considered to have kicked off the genre to popularity (video: https://external-preview.redd.it/KbiveNFl8yr3yJ0znWqoZM-7sIa8DIiUSum9HbpHAGM.gif?format=mp4&s=501e066c5bfefcb2a1cfab1cce74bf85ba2c96ea https://external-preview.redd.it/KbiveNFl8yr3yJ0znWqoZM-7sIa...) which came out about 2 years prior to either (~2005). Of course nothing is ever fully original and you can continue to trace back to an older "classic" if you like.
  - verroq 6y ago
    Powder game is the first I was aware to have a pressure system. There were of course falling sand games before that.
krrishd 6y ago
Damn, I used to spend hours and hours as a kid on the dan-ball.jp version of this, what a throwback. Absolutely loved going through the gallery and seeing all the super elaborate stuff people built too.
jamespullar 6y ago
Noita is a rather interesting game that has some similarities: https://noitagame.com/ https://noitagame.com/
dwrodri 6y ago
Hadn't thought of this game in a long time, and didn't know it was open source! Props to the team for their continuous updates over the years, looks like there's a lot of new stuff since I last played this.
plutonorm 6y ago
Be nice to hook this up with an OpenAI gym container and let a real time agent loose on it.
siraben 6y ago
There's a Powder Toy subcommunity which focuses on building computers in-game. The state-of-the-art (subframe) involves exploiting particle evaluation order to create CPUs that can run at 1 instruction per frame. I even wrote a Forth implementation for such a 16-bit 8K RAM computer. Good times. [0] https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth
JohnTHaller 6y ago
The Powder Toy is solid fun. We've been portablizing it at PortableApps.com since 2012: https://portableapps.com/apps/games/powder-toy-portable https://portableapps.com/apps/games/powder-toy-portable
aabbcc1241 6y ago
This game is addictive, I often player that for a half day when I was in year 1

107 points by severine 6y ago

dang 6y ago

If curious see also 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473

umvi 6y ago

Another fun game in a similar vein: https://sandspiel.club/ https://sandspiel.club/ Fun fact - sandspiel was written in Rust -> WASM

ttul 6y ago
This is shockingly performant on an iPhone 11.
- tydnbvbv 6y ago
  It's not surprising. https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks Iphone is as fast as top desktop CPUs. It has 200% performance of my desktop pc (where it runs fast). What is surprising is that it's very slow on Snapdragon 730 phone.
  - agloeregrets 6y ago
    Might be half CPU there but also half that the JS Engine on Android is much slower than iOS’s. In all JS benchmarks the iPhone outclasses the Android devices by amounts greater than the CPU advantage.
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  I get around 42 FPS on an old iPhone SE, still a great phone!
  - agloeregrets 6y ago
    Seeing how much progress has happened since then, it’s all really impressive! The current iPhone 11 Pro seems to be locked at exactly 60 FPS and you can’t get it to drop. Geekbench scores for your iPhone rage near 540 single core and 986 multi core. The current iPhone is 1330 and 3434 respectively. I would guesstimate that unlimited, FPS would be somewhere near 120 for the current iPhone. The app is very fast! I bet it could run on an Apple Watch!
willis936 6y ago
This is great, thanks. I started off as feeling very destructive, but I found the tools to let things grow, then things became overgrown, and I became destructive again. It was fun to have a piece of wood with plants on it on fire. I tried to put out the fire with water, but the water would cause the plants to grow, which would make the fire grow.

bigyikes 6y ago

When I was younger, my friends & I would carry this game around on our pocket USB drives so that we could quickly launch it up on our school's computers any chance we got. Good times. It's a surprisingly intricate game, but I mostly just like to blow stuff up.

degenerate 6y ago
My friends and I did the exact same thing, for the exact same reason, but with Pocket Tanks. https://classic.blitwise.com/ptanks.html https://classic.blitwise.com/ptanks.html
- anamexis 6y ago
  For my friends and I, it was Armegetron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armagetron_Advanced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armagetron_Advanced
  - Shared404 6y ago
    My group had a cracked version of one of the CS games, don't know whether it was CS or CS Source though. It only had de_dust2, but we played so many hours on that game.
    - smcleod 6y ago
      CS Portable! That was great!
      - skocznymroczny 6y ago
        I remember having a version in which buying one of the shotguns crashed the server.
    - skocznymroczny 6y ago
      Whenever I am at lan parties my buddies want to play CS 1.6 and I don't understand the appeal. They only play de_dust2 too. I find it so boring. Everyone buys exactly the same weapons (m4a1 for antiterrorists, ak47 for terrorists). Everyone runs pretty much to the same spot, there's an exchange of blows, one team wins. Repeat. They don't even try any other maps or other weapons or anything.

masterofhouses 6y ago

Ah, I forgot how fun this game can be.

wfme 6y ago

I remember playing with this game back in high school. Was my first practical introduction to logical operators and binary. Ended up spending so much time trying to build some basic electronics once I found out how to build logic gates. No idea if these still work, but kinda cool looking back on them, ten years later. Here's a fairly simple 4 bit adder with display and memory https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=12853 https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=12853. Powder toy was never complete without some kind of explosive, so here's a grenade that proved quite popular https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=6390 https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=6390.

janjanson 6y ago
I remember playing and being amazed with both of the projects you linked when I was a teenager! Fascinating!
haspoken 6y ago
The R216 computer in powdertoy: https://trigraph.net/powdertoy/R216/manual.md https://trigraph.net/powdertoy/R216/manual.md A Forth for the R216 computer: https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth

verroq 6y ago

Is this a clone of the classic: https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/ https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/

zamadatix 6y ago
The Powder Toy came out about 3 years after The Powder Game and there was "The Falling Sand Game" considered to have kicked off the genre to popularity (video: https://external-preview.redd.it/KbiveNFl8yr3yJ0znWqoZM-7sIa8DIiUSum9HbpHAGM.gif?format=mp4&s=501e066c5bfefcb2a1cfab1cce74bf85ba2c96ea https://external-preview.redd.it/KbiveNFl8yr3yJ0znWqoZM-7sIa...) which came out about 2 years prior to either (~2005). Of course nothing is ever fully original and you can continue to trace back to an older "classic" if you like.
- verroq 6y ago
  Powder game is the first I was aware to have a pressure system. There were of course falling sand games before that.

krrishd 6y ago

Damn, I used to spend hours and hours as a kid on the dan-ball.jp version of this, what a throwback. Absolutely loved going through the gallery and seeing all the super elaborate stuff people built too.

jamespullar 6y ago

Noita is a rather interesting game that has some similarities: https://noitagame.com/ https://noitagame.com/

dwrodri 6y ago

Hadn't thought of this game in a long time, and didn't know it was open source! Props to the team for their continuous updates over the years, looks like there's a lot of new stuff since I last played this.

plutonorm 6y ago

Be nice to hook this up with an OpenAI gym container and let a real time agent loose on it.

siraben 6y ago

There's a Powder Toy subcommunity which focuses on building computers in-game. The state-of-the-art (subframe) involves exploiting particle evaluation order to create CPUs that can run at 1 instruction per frame. I even wrote a Forth implementation for such a 16-bit 8K RAM computer. Good times. [0] https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth

JohnTHaller 6y ago

The Powder Toy is solid fun. We've been portablizing it at PortableApps.com since 2012: https://portableapps.com/apps/games/powder-toy-portable https://portableapps.com/apps/games/powder-toy-portable

aabbcc1241 6y ago

This game is addictive, I often player that for a half day when I was in year 1