Snow Simulation Toy

Kim_Bruning 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Here's my variant on the same toy idea, using a CA, generated trees, and a few other tricks.

https://vps.kimbruning.nl/snow/2025/snow_singlecore_scalable...

Every year during snow season I try to make it faster/more flakes. After this year though in chrome, I think it'd be whiteout conditions ;-) (it'll auto-scale to try to match your system performance. Best effects in a clean browser with not too much else running/open at the same time)

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bananaboy 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very nice! I made a version of this effect for a little NYE thing years ago [0] (source here [1]). I first saw this effect in Iguana's Blastersound BBS intro [2]. I always thought that intro looked slick!

[0] https://www.horsedrawngames.com/nye

[1] https://bitbucket.org/izzo/hdgnye

[2] https://youtu.be/qPOoU44GU50

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101008 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Love everything about this. The idea of just do something because it's enjoyable for yourself, the retro style, the toyish-aspect...

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ygra an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, that's something I also did in QBasic ages ago. I since lost the source code, but it basically worked by querying the screen from bottom to top, finding snow pixels (white) and moving them down, unless there was an obstacle. The initial snow on the ground (and the snowman) were using a different color that was almost white so it wouldn't detect as snow. It worked fairly well in 320×200 at the time.

I've tried the same approach in Turbo Pascal with BGI in the hopes of having a faster language and higher resolution available. It turned out to be quite a bit slower, likely because drawing and querying pixels was a bit more involved when using an adapter layer like BGI.

A few weeks ago I tried rewriting all that in TypeScript for fun and also trying to integrate it as an easter-egg with our graph drawing library (which renders with SVG) and first had to figure out how to efficiently support arbitrary obstacles that are initially SVG as well as a potentially changing viewport of the whole scene. I got sidetracked and didn't finish it, but proper collision handling was so easy back then (just look at the pixel color), but now with vector graphics and reading pixels being a very slow operation in many cases, it was surprisingly complicated.

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petargyurov an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Love it :)

I also rate the author's slogan: "make things, not too much, mostly crap". A reference to Michael Pollan's "eat food, not too much, mostly veg".

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kleiba 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do some snowflakes stop in mid-air?

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wongarsu 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect that those flakes have hit another snowflake and are now considered "fallen" snow. And for fallen snow there's probably an optimization that only x% of particles are updated every step

	▲	timbit42 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I wrote a similar snow app a couple of years ago in Logitech Modula-2 for DOS. I used an array to hold the flake data. If a flake stopped when it hit another flake, it would go again on the next round because the flake it hit would also keep going.

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tetris11 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had to check if the author was Alphapapa

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TruffleLabs an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is fun to see :) thanks!

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throwaway290 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Powder toy deserves a mention here