
The Powder Toy - severine
https://powdertoy.co.uk/
======
bigyikes
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.

~~~
DavidPeiffer
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!

~~~
Shared404
> 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.

------
umvi
Another fun game in a similar vein:
[https://sandspiel.club/](https://sandspiel.club/)

Fun fact - sandspiel was written in Rust -> WASM

~~~
ttul
This is shockingly performant on an iPhone 11.

~~~
tydnbvbv
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
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.

------
wfme
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).

~~~
haspoken
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)

------
siraben
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)

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jamespullar
Noita is a rather interesting game that has some similarities:
[https://noitagame.com/](https://noitagame.com/)

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JohnTHaller
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)

------
verroq
Is this a clone of the classic: [https://dan-
ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/](https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/)

~~~
zamadatix
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...](https://external-
preview.redd.it/KbiveNFl8yr3yJ0znWqoZM-7sIa8DIiUSum9HbpHAGM.gif?format=mp4&s=501e066c5bfefcb2a1cfab1cce74bf85ba2c96ea))
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
Powder game is the first I was aware to have a pressure system. There were of
course falling sand games before that.

------
dang
If curious see also

2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052473)

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

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dwrodri
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.

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krrishd
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.

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aabbcc1241
This game is addictive, I often player that for a half day when I was in year
1

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masterofhouses
Ah, I forgot how fun this game can be.

