Sand World
A downloadable game for Windows
Welcome to Sand World this is a Falling Sand or Noita Like game prototype with an almost infinite world and tons of interactions.
Controls are really simple: Generally you use mouse and keyboard.
On the top right you find brushes in the following order or press the hotkeys.
Also you will find all elements there.
Brushes
[C] Circle
[R] Rectangular
[H] Heat
[C] Cold
[E] Entity
[P] Player
[T] Texture
Brush controls
Some controls are brush specific.
[Scroll Wheel] to set brush size or select an entity
[Hold Shift] to apply the brush in a line
[Hold Alt] to apply original image colors
General
[TAB] To toggle the UI. Useful for screenshots!
[WASD] To move the camera
[Hold Shift] To move faster
The former four brushes are self explanatory. Try them.
Entity Brush
Lets you spawn an entity. You can use the scroll wheel to choose between the entities.
Player Brush
Lets you control the player.
Use [Mouse] to aim and [WASD] and [Space] to control the player.
[Left click] to shoot
[Right click] to spray water
Texture Brush
Lets you draw an image loaded from your PC. Use low resolutions and PNG only.
Images are loaded from %localappdata%\Zicore\Sand World\Images\
[Middle Mouse] Loads 1.png
[F] Loads 2.png
[Hold Alt] To apply original image colors! The element rules still apply.
There are a ton of elements and interactions alrady. Start experimenting!
Lava!
Options
On the left hand side are some useful options for debugging and testing.
FPS Lock (60): Lets you lock the FPS to 60. (Otherwise the target FPS will be 144)
Pause: Pauses the simulation
Async: Determines whethere the simulation is run asynchronus or on one thread.
Show Chunks: Shows the dirty rects of the chunks.
Show Air Temp: Currently not implemented, this needs a shader rework. When its done also shows the temperature of Air pixels when the heatmap is enabled.
Simulate Air: Updates air tiles with heat and simulates it as a gas kind of. This is very performance hungry. Since bascially all tiles need to be updated.
Also this currently tries to create chunks until the creation bounds are hit. Again very perfomance hungry. You can see this when you activate Shows Chunks!
Simulate Heat: Simulates heat transfer, requires more performance
Generate Collider: Enables collider generation, off means better performance but falling through the floor.
Generate World: Enables automatic biomes based world generation. Please note that this is very experimantal and not finished in any way. It should just give you an idea.
Show Heatmap: This sets the slider to 1.0, essentially setting the blend value of the heatmap to the max. You can use the slider to seamlessly blend between the main color and the heat value.
Show debug info: Shows more information in the info box on the left. Especially how the performance is for certain steps.
Chunk size: Determines the dimensions of each chunk. I recommend 32x32 or 16x16 pixels. You can try other chunk sizes and tell me if you have better performance.
Simulate Step: Simulates excatly one step. Useful in pause mode!
Reload Elements: Reloads all elements from %localappdata%/Zicore/Sand World/Elements. Use this to test your elements after modifying them. More about that in the modding document.
Clear: Completely reloads the world, entities and everything. Useful for when things get messy.
General Options
Press Escape to show the options for resoultion and window mode, I hope it works for you since I can only test on my machine right now.
Disclaimer
This is currently a preview build to potentially gather some feedback.
There are still a few bugs and other issues I know of that need to get fixed when the priority fits.
Known issues
- World generation performance: The world generation needs optimization.
- Lack of gameplay: This is a preview build mostly containing the simulation. There is no actual gameloop yet. Treat it as a sandbox.
- Chunks away from the cameras view are removed.
- Broken chunks: Sometimes the chunk loading fails and the chunk is empty and can't be interacted with or collider is stuck.
- Objects that are burning falling through the terrain.
- Objects rendering with holes.
- Some element interactions might be broken.
Discord and Youtube
https://discord.gg/RkDWeQMFPb
https://www.youtube.com/c/Zicore47
Download
Development log
- Minor bugfix releaseOct 11, 2023
Comments
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this is awesome
Really excited to see where this goes
YO, I love falling sand and your project, bringing the heart of this type of sandbox simulation back into the limelight. I have some feedback on your overall project from my early days in the falling sand community I think you should look into if it interests you. This was a long time ago, so I don't know if the downloads are still available but there was a program called Burning Sand. It was popular, and a second version came out called Burning Sand 2. A Lot of mods came out for it, amazing mods that added new materials and complexities to the game. One of the best experiences I have ever had was playing a mod in the Burning Sand engine where you create a universe, with planets and stars. You take a brush size and paint in a planet, and you watch the ocean develop land, then cities and eventually from those cities space ships. You create a sun, and it was amazing to watch this ball of fire and its pixels move around like the actual plasma of the sun, and the rays come off it. I have never experienced something like that since. Looking around, I think the mod is called Omni 2. Maybe you can find a copy of burning sand 2 and some mods to look at it and help to inspire your direction with this project. Whatever you do, I wish you luck. Here is a video of Omni in action btw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTbfx4jfP5c&ab_channel=Liberator551