Making the Powder Toy Better
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I have downloaded the Powder Toy over a year and some things seem to bother me a lot.
First of all, the non user-friendly interface. It's simple but that doesn't make it user friendly. I hate mistakenly going through the Powders, Explosives,etc. all the time in order to pick a material that I need. Making something more user-friendly will definetely increse downloaders, creativity and ease in hundreds of sectors.
Secondly, memory and memory allocation. Like the worst problem of all. Let's just say you created a masterpiece and you delete something by mistake. By pressing CTRL+Z it will undo the erase. Now if you mistakenly click again before rolling back the changes...BOOM! Your work is lost. You're mad and then all your creativity is lost. You feel like recreating your masterpiece that took you so long is useless. You feel weak.
So, a lot will suggest login in and save your game frequently to prevent losing your work. Well, I say what if I'm somewhere where there's no internet connection. How can I save my work? I simply can't. What happened to the local saves?
Large screen/ Full screen Issues: I have a 21 intch, Full HD PC monitor. As you can imagine I can't see a thing. It takes effort to see better.
Suggestions:
- User-Friendly interface and evironment. Bigger buttons, better Zooming
- More in-game memory ---> More CTRL+Zs-->No work lost
- Local saves availability
- Higher definition. HD support? 1920x1680pixels? There are simple dots/ pixels nothing difficult in making the game HD. I have visited forums about better resolution but no clear answer was given!
- Moving Solids.-
- Physics. Or physics Mod. Talking about meta for instance. Destroyng a buildings base will make it collapse.
- In-game Wiki. Imagine. Selecting pump and a small wiki about pump apppears.
Thanks for your time. Awaiting opinions and other suggestion! :D
Let us not forget Toy--> FUN, Powder Toy--> Powder FUN so make it better!
Edited 2 times by MitroPan. Last: 28th Aug 2013 -
You can save locally by holding "ctrl" and then clicking the save button. You can go into large screen mode (just makes it look larger, there's still the same amount of particles across) or fullscreen mode by clicking the checkmark in the bottom right corner.
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What do you mean by a more user friendly interface? How can we make it look better and fit everything if we are going to do larger buttons? The buttons have tooltips on them already so most people know what they all do, and making them larger won't do much.
The reason there is only one ctrl+z is because it takes a lot of memory (not designed that well). It could be increased, but it can't just be something like increasing it to 4 previous snapshots, it would have to be something a little better. Maybe instead of increasing it it could be like my mod, which has multiple simulation tabs. You can press ctrl+s to save it anytime, and then hit the reload button to reload it to that point. You can also copy it into another tab and do anything without affecting the original. This helped me a lot when I made my most recent save, I wouldn't have been able to make it without it.
local saves have been there for a really really long time, just hold ctrl and click the now highlighted button. You could also use stamps.
We can't make the simulation larger at all, it has to be the same it always has been. It's not possible to make individual particles that you see HD either, since they are just one pixel each. Fancy HD graphics would require a large rewrite just to make a ton of lag and probably not look very much better. I can't even imagine how it would work, it just wouldn't. Use double screen mode or fullscreen mode if it's too small for you.
Please remove moving solids and physics from your list if you want to have any credibility ... this is a particle simulator not a physics simulator, and it's been designed for years in a way that does not allow either of these. It would take a new game to implement them.
Adding the tpt wiki in game might be a cool thing, but a link to the actual wiki might be better, and the wiki is community edited so it isn't always accurate. -
@MitroPan (View Post)
>non user-friendly interface
The window is supposed to be minimal around the screen which would be the center of attention, and as such it's small. You can search for elements with E for quick-ish access, or you could just kind of understand how the elements are placed?
@MitroPan (View Post)
>Secondly, memory and memory allocation. Like the worst problem of all. Let's just say you created a masterpiece and you delete something by mistake. By pressing CTRL+Z it will undo the erase. Now if you mistakenly click again before rolling back the changes...BOOM! Your work is lost.
How are undos related to memory allocation? :O
Anyhow,
Currently, undos are implemented by keeping a snapshot of the entire save state. This is pretty large in memory as TPT has many layers and elements have quite a few properties.. Keeping more than one would gradually use up a lot of memory, although I agree there could be another one or two undo cycles.
@MitroPan (View Post)
>Higher definition. HD support? 1920x1680pixels? There are simple dots/ pixels nothing difficult in making the game HD. I have visited forums about better resolution but no clear answer was given!
Uh, not simple dots/pixels. Particles hold 7 integers and three floats. Not to mention that you have many other layers which must scale accordingly... Velocity and pressure updates on a larger scale than this now are really slow.
@MitroPan (View Post)
>Moving Solids.-
Physics. Or physics Mod. Talking about meta for instance. Destroyng a buildings base will make it collapse.
lol, this has never ever been suggested before ever never ever ever
@MitroPan (View Post)
>In-game Wiki. Imagine. Selecting pump and a small wiki about pump apppears.
Imagine. Packaging an entire HTML rendering engine next to TPT. The most lightweight fully-featured rendering engine (to display the wiki pages we'll need all the features) is Webkit and it's 46.3 MB.
@MitroPan (View Post)
>Large screen/ Full screen Issues: I have a 21 intch, Full HD PC monitor. As you can imagine I can't see a thing. It takes effort to see better.
scale:2 -
You're not user-friendly.
"scale:2" Do you just assume that he will know what that means?..
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He whines about advanced stuff, let him figure out what it is.
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1: first of all, they made it that way to fit all the elements. 2. I agree with him, we should be allowed to go back more then just ONE TIME!!! 4. I can see everything fine. P.S. There's a zoom button. 5. Everybody, its obvious this guy is a noob. I mean seriously. Did he not see the thing that said "Hold ctrl to save saves locally to your computer" Did he not see tha? yeah i guess he didn't, but still, when i got back into powder toy, that was one of the first keyboard keys i found out about :P eh ill cut him so slack, but seriously a year and you dont know how to save local saves!? Also, what login?! You login when you make an account. When you go back on you are already on it! nice and convienent, dont even know what you are talking about. But i agree on the ctrl z thing. Not his ctrl z thing, but mine. Mods please reply! I really think that we should be able to press ctrl z more times, not make it stronger. So what he said is true. But then i lose all my work! Why doesnt ctrl z work two times!!!!??? I want it to work MORE than two times
Edited once by Schneumer. Last: 28th Aug 2013 -
"I agree with him, we should be allowed to go back more then just ONE TIME!!!" It's not that simple to make more possible undos...
PS. 1. 2. 4?
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gosh, use paragraphs and stop the whining about control Z.
Edited once by xetalim. Last: 28th Aug 2013 -
I think this guy's lying;he's got no saves and has posted only twice. And,man,the title...and the ending...
- User-Friendly interface and evironment. Bigger buttons, better Zooming
The interface is supposed to be minimal, and the issue you talked about can be easily taked care of.
And in my opinion, current zoom's just fine, a bit too fine even.
- Making something more user-friendly will definetely increse downloaders, creativity and ease in hundreds of sectors.
The logic of the last two...
- More in-game memory ---> More CTRL+Zs-->No work lost
Just save to a stamp or save often.Besides,more Ctrl+Zs will take more memory.
- Local saves availability
Ctrl+Save button
- Higher definition. HD support
I don't think this is possible.
- Moving Solids.-
- Physics. Or physics Mod. Talking about meta for instance. Destroyng a buildings base will make it collapse.
No.Complex to code,little incentive to code.
- In-game Wiki. Imagine. Selecting pump and a small wiki about pump apppears.
It'll take too much space,and you willl usually find a save on that element anyway somewhere.
Edited once by Cacophony. Last: 28th Aug 2013
