The Powder Toy | Hacker News Reader

The Powder Toy

powdertoy.co.uk

107 pointsseverine37 comments

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.

My friends and I did the exact same thing, for the exact same reason, but with Pocket Tanks.

https://classic.blitwise.com/ptanks.html

For my friends and I, it was Armegetron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armagetron_Advanced

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.

CS Portable! That was great!

I remember having a version in which buying one of the shotguns crashed the server.

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.

We had Halo CE on flash drives and on the school file server in the depths of the Robotics club shared drive. It was great until they found the file and made us delete it.

Back on a FIRST Robotics trip, we all had laptops with trackpads playing Halo CE in the car, with a LAN setup via power inverter. We successfully ran between 2 vehicles with a semi in the middle at one point with no noticeable lag!

> It was great until they found the file and made us delete it.

I got lucky with my school, the teachers/sysadmin were defacto okay with us storing a game on there, at least until enough other students found it and caused network problems.

> Back on a FIRST Robotics trip, we all had laptops with trackpads playing Halo CE in the car, with a LAN setup via power inverter. We successfully ran between 2 vehicles with a semi in the middle at one point with no noticeable lag!

That is amazing.

Ah Halo CE. It was on every PC at our school by the time I graduated... You just had to find where it was.

Exactly the same story here for me and everyone I went to school with, and I have absolutely no recollection of where it came from. Presumably the same package that contained instructions on how to draw the Cool S.

The go to LAN game when I went to uni was GTA I! I was taking a non tech course but I still remember vividly this was my first interaction with typing in an IP address. (you had to enter the IP address of the game host on the lan to connect to it)

Me & my buddies had bootable DOS floppy drives with Scorched Earth installed. It was funny to see the reactions of others when we were playing the game on a "broken" computer (damaged hard drive).

Ah I remember that game!

...and trying to make a clone in, I think, Q-Basic and not getting very far

We did the same but with CS 1.6 in incredibles 64 MB!

Another fun game in a similar vein: https://sandspiel.club/

Fun fact - sandspiel was written in Rust -> WASM

This is shockingly performant on an iPhone 11.

It's not surprising.

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-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.

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.

I get around 42 FPS on an old iPhone SE, still a great phone!

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!

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.

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. 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.

I remember playing and being amazed with both of the projects you linked when I was a teenager! Fascinating!

The R216 computer in powdertoy:

https://trigraph.net/powdertoy/R216/manual.md

A Forth for the R216 computer:

https://github.com/siraben/r216-forth

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

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

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

If curious see also

2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473

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

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.

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.

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

Ah, I forgot how fun this game can be.

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

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-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.

Powder game is the first I was aware to have a pressure system. There were of course falling sand games before that.

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