Application: The Powder Toy
Category: Game
License: GPL2 (source and license)
Description: The Powder Toy is a game of physics and fluid mechanics. You can play with different materials whose properties and influences are simulated. And it has explosives!
The helpfile contains a direkt link to the readme.txt in Other\Help. This provides information about keyboard shortcuts.
Requirements:
The Powder Toy requires at least a cpu with SSE instruction set.
The screensize is fixed to 629x424 by design. As a workaround screensize can be doubled to 1258x848 or set to fulscreen in the opions dialogue (round icon at the bottom, right to the sign in field).
Download The Powder Toy Portable 82.0 Development Test 1 [1.4MB download / 1.64MB installed]
(MD5: 92215e969b3d078169996a769b0269a9)
Note: This has been officially released here.
Release Notes:
82.0 Development Test 1 (2012-08-27):
Updated base app
updated PA.c installer to 3.04
78.1 Development Test 1 (2012-05-11):
Updated base app
updated to PA.c format 3.0
updated PA.c installer to 3.03
71.3 Development Test 1 (2012-01-27):
Updated base app
compacted with PA.c AppCompactor
70.1 Development Test 1 (2011-12-27):
Updated base app
65.5 Development Test 1 (2011-10-23):
Updated base app
65.4 Development Test 1 (2011-10-21):
Updated base app
changed data preservation method (with new command line switch) - same effect but less write cycles to the drive
64.3 Development Test 1 (2011-10-07):
Updated base app
Settings-file changed in base app from powder.def to powder.pref. Update should work but old powder.def could be deleted afterwards.
61.2 Development Test 1 (2011-09-21):
Updated base app
61.1 Development Test 1 (2011-09-11):
Updated base app
57.5 Development Test 1 (2011-09-03):
Updated base app
52.0 Development Test 1 (2011-07-14):
Updated base app
50.6 Development Test 1 (2011-06-15):
Updated base app and took care of new Saves folder.
(Yes, now it is possible to save creations locally)
47.4 Development Test 2 (2011-04-29):
Fixed some issues (missed folder and possible registry entries)
47.4 Development Test 1 (2011-04-26):
Updated base app
47.3 Development Test 1 (2011-04-11):
Updated base app
Renamed to The Powder Toy Portable to be conform with the base app
Switched hosting to sourceforge, incl. source code
Updating should be fine as the same folder (AppID) is used
46.4 Development Test 1 (2011-03-02):
Updated base app
Streamlined PAF setup - deleted unneeded DefaultData, moved user data.
Discarded SSE3 and Double Screensize Version since almost nobody used it.
45.2 Development Test 2 (2011-02-07):
Corrected and further completed helpfile
Made 2 Versions (SSE or SSE3 dependent)
Added Testrelease for screensizing
45.2 Development Test 1 (2011-02-06):
Initial release
uses PA Launcher 2.1 Beta 2
made with PA Installer 2.0.8
It's a quick test. Maybe not all parameters match the PAF 2.0. yet.
I'm longing for feedback 
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
see first post for details.
I'd be happy to get some feedback, especially which version is preferable.
I won't maintain all three versions. For compatibility reasons the standard version is my favourite as the double size version can be easily achieved with adding a commandline switch.
Updated base app.
I moved the powder.def to Data instead of Data\settings.
Should not break the update, but you could delete the obsolete powder.def in Data\settings as it is no longer used. Or move it to Data to preserve old settings. I have not tested if 46.4 works with older sttings. To be honest, I don't even now, which settings are saved there, apart from the display setting.
Now after over 140 downloads I would be really happy if anyone would post some feedback.
Regshot comes back clean on a clean XP SP3 virtual machine with administrator rights:
the only problem is the scale 2 pulls the window down and to the right towards where there is only ~1/4 of the window showing and this is probably the developers doing not yours, and now for the good news it works very well and leaves nothing behind, Good Job!
Thanks for testing!
The scaling is in deed a little big odd. It is just some kind of workaround to adapt the window to bigger screen sizes as it becomes pixelated that way. I think its due to performance as it even now needs a lot processing power.
It is rather unpredictable as the start coordinates seem to change with every change in scaling (a quick test on my machine brought x-coordinates changing from 25 to 190 to 215 to 25 to 74 to 96 and so on. y-coordinates are just as random...)
I have just realized that the scaling now seems to be persistent. Commenting out the scale:2 commandline leaves big scale in place. You now have to explicit change the commandline to scale:1 once to have the regular scale back again. I think that is new to version 46.4 but am not sure about this.
it is indeed very interesting! maybe they could implement a function much like armagetron's scale feature where they give you many screen resolutions, or just make the window sizeable, rather than having the random coordinates
and as for the command-line thing that is very odd, I don't remember having that feature when testing 46.4 in school a little while ago, maybe they did a refinement
see release notes for changes
Umm The download link brings one back to this page?Never mind just read the fine print lol
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” Dr. Seuss
Link is up
(temporary back to mediafire, as SF has this on pending for over 6 hours now).Sorry for the inconvenience.
-edit-
Sourceforge is ready now.
See release notes for changes.
Fixed some typos in the main topic. Seems nobody realized, I by mistake declared the previous download as 47.4 (although the download was 47.3).
PortableApps.com Format validation succeeded.
Information
A user at the Powder Toy forum gave me the hint to cover the folder "Stamps", that only is generated if stamps are saved (press 's' to save and 'l' or 'k' to load).
There also exists a (hidden?) option to register file extensions to The Powder Toy by pressing 'ctrl' + 'i'.
I added registry handling, but am not quite shure, if it is done properly. I decided to save the settings rather than discard them. Drive letter changing and directory moving is taken care of so now, once launched, the file extensions are automatically registered - provided the user at least once set them. And unregistered after closing of course.
I also move stdout.txt and stderr.txt, if created, to the Data folder, but think, I will remove that probably.
I would appreciate some feedback to the changes. Please test the registry handling under different conditions (drive letters etc.). I seems to run here but maybe I missed something (or did it completely wrong again...).
Thanks,
dj
See release notes for changes.
I think it is ready, more than 1000 downloads before the sourceforge stats broke and no bug report should be considered clean.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
I use the new (or undocumented until now) command line switch to set a data folder for settings, stamps and saves. No need to move files and directories around anymore.
Updating should be fine but the files stdout.txt and stderr.txt could be deleted in the data folder. I leave them in the app folder from now on.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
See release notes for changes.
Sorry for the long update delay, I was very short of spare time the last weeks.
See release notes for changes.
Another delay and some missed updates. I'll try to keep up with its fast release cycles but can't promise to catch every subversion...