Hi future moving solids enthusiasts slash critics! If The Powder Toy still is using the engine it's used forever, do link here to tell people about -why- moving solids can not be used! Here's a link to use.

/cavejohnson

@asdf123 (View Post)
Basically, The Powder Toy works like this.
You have an array that holds all types of elements.


Every blue square represents a space in a grid the size of the entire game area (later: stage).


Here's a simple moving powder. The particles don't need to make surrounding particles move with them so it's relatively easy to determine which moves where.
First of all, one of the three bottom row pink ones fall to the center hole, then the top pink one replaces it. The powder simply needs to go directly down, down and left or down and right. It needs not move other particles with it.


Here's a more complicated example. How should I move all these together?
Here's the problem.
TPT's arrays update like this.

The particles are "numbered" by when they were placed, 0 comes first and it ticks on to 1,2,3,4,5...
The problem with this layout is that it breaks even elements like PSTN.
When a particle moves down and another particle is in the space being moved to, what will happen? Stacking into itself was why when moving in a bad direction, sponge did this. (What this shows is that the bottom row moves along because it has nothing in its way while the rest of the shape stays still due to colliding with itself)
To make sure we move all the required particles at once, we'll need some sort of shapes. Some definitions to shapes would be a Circle, a Polygon and a Rectangle. It wouldn't work well, because the grid with regular particles would need to interfere with shapes somehow, and they are totally different so how will it work? Making sure a point is inside some area of a Circle or Polygon would be really speed consuming... (And we all know how much you desire that extra 5 FPS on this game)
After all this there's also the problem of how to rotate things. The closest thing to a polygon we have right now are SOAP bubbles, and they aren't very stable, but they work. They do lack something inside them, nor do they interact with the outside in any other way than to break up.

---

And your argumentation:
Merging solid and powder code.
Merging code isn't going to create something in between the both, like merging liquid and powder code won't provide us with a powdered liquid. All it does is consume time and speed while doing nothing at all.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what my knowledge extends to.

--last edit: 17 December 2012

@therocketeer (View Post)
CLST just doesn't fall diagonally down-left or down-right, similar to STONE in Dan-Ball. For what it knows, it can only fall downwards(Exception being air-related movement)