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Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: squidgetx on February 10, 2011, 07:34:59 pm

Title: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: squidgetx on February 10, 2011, 07:34:59 pm
Builderboy's amazing physics lessons (http://ourl.ca/4279/169816) on cellular automata, along with the power of Axe have inspired some of the first powdertoy projects for the z80 line of calculators. Featuring realistic flowing of particles, these programs are fairly sophisticated, and. better yet, fun to play with! :D
Shmibs has recently released his dust toy (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/435/43533.html) featuring solids, water, dust, fire, and ? particles. The program even features grayscale on 15mhz models. :o
(http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/ss/816/81610.gif)

Meanwhile, Qwerty.55, who actually started his powder game before Builderboy's tutorial, is hard at work (;))on his powder game (http://ourl.ca/8142). His features greyscale as well (not shown in the screenshot) and a very nice cursor routine. He is hard at work on implementing some of the more advanced physics and eventually plans to have particles interact with each other (explosions? :D).
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/1-Powder.gif)
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: AngelFish on February 10, 2011, 07:38:21 pm
Define "Hard at work"  :P

Thanks though.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Ashbad on February 10, 2011, 07:38:51 pm
sounds awesome, great news article :)
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Darl181 on February 10, 2011, 07:45:14 pm
Wow, can't wait to see how advanced this gets ;D
w00t powdertoy
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Eeems on February 10, 2011, 08:51:47 pm
Wow! that's amazing!
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: ztrumpet on February 10, 2011, 08:53:09 pm
Where is shimbs?  I must tell him that that is amazing!  It looks great. :D

Qwerty's is going to be so cool when it's done.  Features FTW! ;D
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: AngelFish on February 10, 2011, 09:21:55 pm
Oh yeah, I probably forgot to mention this: Powder will be getting a Prizm port eventually. Full color and everything.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Darl181 on February 10, 2011, 09:43:04 pm
@qwerty: awesome :D

I was wondering, with shmibs' thing, is there a way to clear the screen?  Or do you have to quit?
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Xeda112358 on February 10, 2011, 09:48:33 pm
Ooh, I love Powder Toy... I need to check out the calc versions!
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: willrandship on February 11, 2011, 12:29:24 am
Speaking of ports, I bet it would be awesome on the nspire too.

Even the 84+ versions are amazing!
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: shmibs on February 11, 2011, 01:24:21 am
Darl, there isn't an included way to clear the screen, as this was sort of just a demo, but it would be easy enough to add one to the included source if you want it

just stick in a
:Rect(0,,79,63)r
:RectI(0,,79,63)r
somewhere
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Darl181 on February 11, 2011, 11:03:45 am
Ok, thanks
So, there isn't real data it's stored in, just whether it's on the screen or not?  Efficient...
It's all in the back-buffer then?
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Builderboy on February 11, 2011, 12:23:53 pm
I love storing data in the buffer ^^ By the time you have displayed things onto the scree, you don't even need a second step to write into the data buffer because you already have! :D

I can't believe my physics lessons spawned these excellent games! (well one of them :P) But its looking really amazing!  I don't even think I have ever seen this type of thing done for the calculator at all ever!  Worthy of a feature when released methinks :]
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Munchor on February 11, 2011, 12:29:40 pm
Both games look awesome, Builderboy really spreaded the physics fanaticism around here :P
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Builderboy on February 11, 2011, 01:38:17 pm
Physics is what I do  8)
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Michael_Lee on February 11, 2011, 03:03:08 pm
Powder games are absolute win.

I liked the news article title, btw.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Ranman on February 11, 2011, 11:40:55 pm
:crazy: :crazy: :crazy:

That is outstanding!

 8)
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: Hot_Dog on February 12, 2011, 03:46:02 am
This stuff is absolutely amazing
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 17, 2011, 11:46:21 pm
These look really nice guys. Nice job so far!
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: z80man on February 18, 2011, 12:59:25 am
@shmibs did you ever consider changing the ? substance to oil. I tried patching the program, but got an undefined symbol error. It could just be that my version of axe is outdated. Anyways I set oil to have the same properties as water, except that if there is fire underneath it, the oil converts to fire. I can show you the source for that section later once I test it.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 18, 2011, 04:05:53 am
I wonder... could the explosion effect from Leafiness's Graviter game be implemented in one of these two games? That would really rule, although I bet it would be a bit slow with other type of particles around.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: z80man on February 18, 2011, 04:19:19 am
I wonder... could the explosion effect from Leafiness's Graviter game be implemented in one of these two games? That would really rule, although I bet it would be a bit slow with other type of particles around.
I don't know about Powder Game, but it looks like Dust Toy might be able to handle velocity. Every particle has 1 byte in L1, but only uses 3 bits I believe. The rest of the bits could be used for direction and velocity. Also I think the method Dust Toy uses to render particles could be optimized. Currently it seems to render every particle, every frame which causes slowdowns with large numbers of particles even when they are not moving. If a particle was rendered every time a pixel next to it was changed, then a speed increase might be possible.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: AngelFish on February 18, 2011, 04:24:50 am
I wonder... could the explosion effect from Leafiness's Graviter game be implemented in one of these two games? That would really rule, although I bet it would be a bit slow with other type of particles around.

Not for Powder on the TI-84+ SE's. The processor simply can't handle anything else. Believe me, I've tried to get it working. The Prizm, however, is likely to be a different story.
Title: Re: Powder/Dust Games Trickling In
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 18, 2011, 04:27:02 am
Ah ok, thanks for the info. :D