Sands of Time
A downloadable game for Windows
You've learned how to harness the power of time from grains of sand falling through an hourglass. But you're all out of grains of sand! Chip blocks of stone into grains of sand to grow evermore powerful!
To play: download the zip file, extract all its contents, and double press "vecs.exe" which should be near the bottom.
This is a downloadable game in a custom engine I wrote that is available at https://github.com/thepaperpilot/V-ECS. It is slightly unstable and *may* crash when resizing the window, so if you'd like it fullscreen I'd recommend doing that first thing after opening the program, because the game has no save/load feature. There's a error log in the debug console, which you can access by typing "~". It'll also get written to a file called "latest.log"
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currently working a scratch-version of this game
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/736363849/
it has more accurate measurements then this one
but graphics maybe is a little odd
Nice, I got a new computer few days ago and I can finally play this game!
Does this *really* need Vulkan?
My card doesn't support Vulkan, period.
I'd really like to check this out, but since this requires vulkan (even though there'd be plenty performant opengl implementations) I'm locked out.
I'm assuming you made v-ecs use vulkan as a learning tool, which I can certainly respect (after all, vulkan's shiny, new, and the lower level nature of it lets it be more performant than opengl, presuming it's done properly), but from the comments over here, it's made for a massive bugfest in the comments all over this.
Any chance we could get an OpenGL build of it?
It was definitely a learning experience haha. The whole thing is really just a vulkan renderer, basically. Supporting opengl would mean rewriting the whole thing.
Fortunately, I’ve already rewritten sands of time in a more balanced and fun way, although without the flashy background, as part of a larger project called Kronos. It isn’t public yet but you can see previews of it on my discord server.
Oh, nice! I've been playing 0.22 of Kronos for a little while, so knowing that it's basically incorporated sands of time (presumably into the "Experiment with Time" section) is plenty fine for me ^v^
my computer is using I3 version of intel.Not Sure that affect this
If your computer is using intel integrated graphics, then the drivers you need should be the ones here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005629/graphics.html
If that still isn't working, DM me the error message and I can look into it. Sorry for the difficulties!
Im using the 3th gen of intel. so i think i cant download the driver I need.
i think im worng
im using i5
Either way, if you don't have a dedicated graphics card, you're using Intel's integrated graphics, which would use the link given above
I remember this and i can play it now , because i got a new computer.
I download The Newest Garphics Drivers for my computer. And i still can't Run The game.
how do i run this game?
Download the zip, extract all the files, and run "vecs.exe". Note this is a windows-only game.
ok when i try to run the vecs.exe it says (its in Portuguese) {Não foi possível localizar o ponto de entrada do procedimento vkGetPhysicalDeviceMemoryProperties2 na biblioteca de vínculo dinâmico
C:\Users\Usuario\Downloads\SandsOfTime\vecs.exe.
that error message means your graphics drivers are out of date. This program uses vulkan, which is fairly new. You should be able to run the program if you download the latest drivers for your graphics card
thanks
I try to run vecs, It instacrashes. what do I do
Would it be possible to add vsync or frame limiter? The game runs at ridiculous fps and heats up my gpu unnecesairly.
EDIT: I managed to force vsync using nvidia control panel.
No save/load seems like a big deal.
EDIT2: Even with vsync the game uses way more gpu than it should for how it looks. You might want to look into that.
Someone on reddit suggested vsync and I've added it to my list of things to add to the engine itself. Serializing data to save/load state is also in the pipeline, the engine is just very WIP at the moment.
The high GPU usage is probably for the background, and disabling special effects should make that go down tremendously. The background is actually a slightly modified version of this shader on a flat plane, and if you read through what the shader is doing I think its understandable why it'd use the GPU as much as it does. I'd made the decision to use it because I thought it looked nice and the game still ran at many hundreds of FPS, but I added the toggle to disable it in case lower end PCs couldn't get to a reasonable framerate with it on.
Thank you for playing the game :)
could you please make a browser version the download is not working (or my computer is ded)
This is using a custom engine I made and uses several features preventing it from being ported to the browser. Most likely any issues you're having can be fixed by updating your graphics drivers, but if that doesn't work feel free to contact me with the error message you're receiving :)
oh ok thanks i will try again