moonsbox

A falling sand game written in C++ with SDL2. Inspired by established falling sand games, moonsbox lets you experiment with different materials and their interactions in a 2D grid world with great performance.

The main inspiration for moonsbox is sand:box by smellymoo, along with Sandboxels, Powder Game and The Powder Toy.

Web Version

Play web version! No need to download any executables, just click and play.

Features

• Material palette: Choose materials with a visual palette
• Heat simulation: Temperature exchange based on heat capacity and thermal conductivity of materials
• Sounds of gameplay: Some materials can play sounds on interaction
• Advanced renderer: Zoom and heatmap display are supported
• Saving system: Save your progress, share your buildings, schemes or silly states
• Standalone simulation: Simulation can be run headless. You can code a frontend for any platform

Social

Join our community!

• For English speakers, come chat with us on discord server.
• Если вы знаете русский, подписывайтесь на наш телеграм канал. Новости там появляются быстрее, чем в дискорде. (Telegram channel. News appear there faster.)

Building from sources

Dependencies

Common:

• C++23
• CMake 3.20+

simulationengine (simulation backend):

• minizip (may be disabled)
• pybind11 (optional, for Python API)

moonsbox (desktop SDL2 frontend):

• SDL2 (including SDL_ttf, SDL_image)
• SDL2_gfx
• SDL2pp

webmoonsbox (web frontend):

• Emscripten SDK
• zlib

Installing dependencies in Arch-based distros:

# Update your system
sudo pacman -Syu
# simulationengine
sudo pacman -S base-devel cmake minizip
# moonsbox
sudo pacman -S sdl3 sdl2-compat sdl2_gfx sdl2_image sdl2_ttf
yay -S sdl2pp
# webmoonsbox
yay -S emsdk
emsdk install latest
embuilder build zlib

Building and running commands

# Desktop version
git clone https://github.com/KlasterK/moonsbox.git
cd moonsbox
cmake -S. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
build/moonsbox/moonsbox

# Web version
emsdk activate latest
. emsdk_env.sh
git clone https://github.com/KlasterK/moonsbox.git
cd moonsbox
emcmake cmake -S. -Bbuild-wasm 
cmake --build build-wasm -j$(nproc)
python -m http.server &
xdg-open http://127.0.0.1:8000/webmoonsbox/index.html

License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 License -- see the LICENSE file for details.