Sandora Archive

I’ve picked up my Sandora project again since a few days and moved the code from SourceForge to Google Code. The new project page can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/sandora/. The official Sandora homepage is still http://mineth.net/projects/sandora/, so do continue to link to that (instead to Google Code directly). The SourceForge project page will close in a few weeks from now on.

Version 0.1.2 will be released next and will include a few bugfixes and will add support for Nokia N900 and N950 compilation (Maemo/MeeGo). If you have a N900 or N950 and want to help me test (I don’t have either device) or if you have any other handheld device capable running Linux with GCC and libSDL, please contact me and we’ll see what I can do to support more platforms. Version 0.1.2-RC2 is currently available in the trunk, so feel free to compile and test. A prepackaged PND will be released hopefully next week.

After this I’m planning to rewrite most of the code for performance and add some new particle types, since currently it uses quite some heavy stuff. Lots and lots of rand() calls each frame, a non-fixed framerate and a weird way of handling moved particles, just to name a few.

Someone has ported Sandora to the Nokia N950 phone, which looks really awesome!

It uses a slightly different key layout than the original Sandora version. See this topic for the announcement on the Maemo boards or this topic on the Meego boards.

Credits to Aapo Rantalainen.

A quick update of what I’m working on for the next version (0.2) of Sandora:

• A graphical GUI for selecting particles (no more remembering keyboard shortcuts for particles, although particle selection through the keyboard will stay available). This will be a pop-up window on either side of the screen when holding the L or R button, allowing you to select a desired particle,
• An option to not wrap particles on the screen edges, essentially meaning that the edges of the screen are solid walls and that particles won’t fall down off the screen,
• Faster/more smooth leveling piles of water, meaning a pile of water will get flatter/more horizontal faster,
• An option to show (and hide) the mouse cursor, for those that use the nubs and/or an external mouse, instead of the touch screen,
• Several bug- and performance fixes.

Thanks to the ideas and help from the users at the OpenPandora boards Sandora topic.

Here’s a quick video for Sandora. I finally got some decent performance for it on the Pandora! Although not optimal, it’s now playable and certainly enjoyable. I scaled each particle up to twice the old size (2*2px), which alone reduces the amount of memory (and particle checking) by 4. Plus I think it suits the high-DPI Pandora screen better.

The glowing effect you see there is from my smartphone camera and isn’t some funky OpenGL effect in the game.

So was messing around with my Pandora recently, right? And I was checking out games and stuff, and to my horror there wasn’t a Falling Sand Game/Hell of Sand game out yet for the Pandora! The blasphemy!! So what I did is grabbed some code, started porting it and lo: Sandora was born!

Sandora is a Falling Sand game for the Pandora I’m developing. Please check the project page for more info. Now I hope I don’t get sand in my Pandora, though.

Click for higher version.