Making Sandspiel | Hacker News Reader

Making Sandspiel

maxbittker.com

160 pointspanic9 comments

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This was worth my time:

https://sandspiel.club/#dac3ceca6a45502e8dc5

click play in the top right after it loads.

That's amazing. Nice work.

You can pretend you're a fireman and throw sand on it to make it stop before it destroys too much.

Too soon...

It's an oil-based fire, add some water to make the oil float to the top, then neutralize with a hint of acid.

Coming from the browser, a tool into which I have personally sunk many hundreds of hours learning APIs, edge cases, and performance characteristics, it was a big surprise to see how effective a minimal programming environment for building games could be. So much complexity that we put up with is due to legacy and sunk costs!

Having a background\career where I've never professionally developed software for the browser or using browser\web tools and frameworks but often interact with people that do ("sofware engineer" now is mostly people building web applications), I'm glad to see this acknowledged. The web is a great deployment platform, and browser focused tools are great for certain types of applications, but there are a lot of people that act like the browser (and by association, browser focused tools and languages) is the only way to write and deploy software. Often there are better tools available, especially if you're doing game like or simulation like software even if your main target is the browser. I've always felt most productive when building small things or prototypes in lightweight frameworks with a simple update\draw loop (Processing, Pico 8, Love 2D, C-Toy, etc.)

Here's a nice 3D VR implementation: https://store.steampowered.com/app/632040/VR_Sand/

This reminds me of the Clonk series [1], which both has destructable terrain and a fluid physics simulation (lava/oil/water/earth). There is also an open source remake available [2].

[1] http://www.clonk.de [2] http://www.openclonk.org

I'm stuck at 1 fps. just me?

My phone runs it at 15 fps.

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