Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

sandspiel.club

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 193 posts

Re: Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

#91

Post by preommr »

Ezku wrote: post #79

Love the performance, no trouble with 60fps. The swirly wind, fire, and smoke effects are beautiful! It’s also the only part here with which I would not know how to get started building, could anyone share their thoughts on the implementation?

I was interested in this too so I took a dive in.

The smoke effects are based on another project about Fluid simulation https://github.com/PavelDoGreat/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation

It also has a working demo with controls (it's collapsed by default I think, and kind of hard to see if you're not looking for it in the upper right hand corner). It's pretty astonishing how beautiful it is.

As far as I can tell, the filters and the code isn't too complicated. I am just wondering how they got those values to begin with because that's where the real magic is. There are some references there as well. One of them links to a gpu gems page that I am pretty sure I've seen before that looks really similar to this. So it's really just incremental improvements from previous works. But this version looks a lot more polished.

Re: Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

#92

Post by btschaegg »

This very strongly reminds me of a game called "Hydroxis" (or at least I think so) for the Amiga. You started with water pooling in some cavity in an otherwise static level and had to move it to a target location by means of enabling and disabling some blocking segments in the level. That was fun!

I had remembered that one a decade or so ago and it turned out to be the single hardest thing I tried to find for my WinUAE collection :-(

Re: Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

#93

Post by HoppyHaus »

lfam wrote: post #87
ullarah wrote: post #33

This is great, I love falling sand games. The only downfall is that the Pythagorean Cup didn't work? https://i.imgur.com/ejqBwR4.png https://sandspiel.club/#cCZB5Un0exri2UajMjcu

Are there any falling sand games where it does work?

The Powder Toy with water equalization

Re: Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

#94

Post by justwalt »

tokyodude wrote: post #84
zzleeper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another data point: on Windows I get 60 fps on both Chrome and FF

That would arguably mean your machine is fast enough to get 60fps since the browser basically throttles to 60. So a slower machine would show the difference but an even faster machine would still show 60

In my experience, FF performance is much better in Windows than in Mac or Linux, unfortunately.

Re: Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

#95

Post by fenomas »

hyperpallium wrote: post #78
fenomas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not unfortunate at all; arguing definitions is rarely useful or interesting, and "game" has dozens of worthy contenders that disagree with GP and with the article you read. E g.: Sid Meier's famous definition: "a series of interesting decisions". (But what would he know?)

Says "arguing definitions is rarely useful"; argues a definition usefully. :-) FWIW I asked the question because I'm designing a simulation "game" without explicit win-conditions, but I'm concerned it won't be very engaging without them. e.g. Minecraft added monsters (to survive the night), and the enderverse.

Don't get me wrong, the question of whether this or that game is better with or without win conditions is perfectly interesting. It's just the raw "is it a game or not?" that's not useful. It's like asking whether comic books are books - the answer is "yes under some definitions, no under others", simple as that.

For the case of your game[0] specifically, one option is to expose game stats that the player can form their own challenges around. E.g. if the game UI shows how many times you've jumped, that implicitly lets the player form "do X without jumping more than Y times" sorts of challenges, etc. Or the more formal way to do it is like e.g. Minecraft achievements - there's no "win condition" for putting a saddle on a pig or whatever, but the mere fact that there's a piece of UI tracking whether you've done it or not, creates a challenge by itself.

[0] yeah I said it! ;)

Re: Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL

#97

Post by seventhtiger »

danbolt wrote: post #31
dleslie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SimCity

Games like SimCity, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft are good examples where the experience of "playing" isn't necessarily about translating the game from an "initial" state to "end" or "win" one. I think the parent comment makes a good point that if you do define games as the mentioned, this and a few other things certainly doesn't necessarily fit with the definition. Still, games are often a fill-in word for many int…

If Animal Crossing and The Sims are games, then so is a doll house or a bit of play dough.

I subscribe to Chris Crawford's definition. Games are competitions between multiple players and they must be able to interfere with each other. A painting, a toy, a puzzle, a race, are all not games. The difference between taking a stroll while carrying a ball and playing a game is keeping score.

The most controversial result of that is that God of War and Dark Souls are actually puzzles, and not games, and although it's unintuitive upon reflection it rings true to me.

Post reply on HN