PHYSICS SIMULATOR Plop
Version: GIT Web: Caltrop256/plop https://github.com/
Did you enjoy Sandspiel from LXF249? Then you’ll probably like another game of that genre that we recently came across. Plop is a promising physics simulator and a fun playground where you can explore various materials: liquids, gas, radiation and many other elements.
Plop is a web program that you can try at https:// caltrop.dev/plop/, although we built it using make and then coping the files to /var/www/html to make Plop instantly available at 127.0.0.1:80 – it’s that easy if your Linux system runs the Apache HTTP web server.
The game looks a bit like an image editor: there are drawing tools to the left of the main area, and some categories above it. Although Plop, like almost all other simulators, hasn’t passed our regular test for the Pythagorean Cup (sadly, there’s no vacuum simulation), it performed very well in other tests. The game includes seven categories of things that you can use for experiments, including solids, liquids, gas, brittle, electronics, explosives and nuclear. It didn’t take much time for us to draw a dynamite-based bomb with a touch string for a delayed explosion, create electrical circuits, watch polonium decay into neutrons and plutonium, and play with various flammables. It’s possible to pause and resume reactions, save and load states, and even change the canvas size according to the scale of your experiment.
Knowledge of chemistry and physics will help you get the most from Plop – the more you know, the better usage scenarios you’ll come up with.
On the other hand, if you don’t have an academic background, the game can serve for enlightening and educational purposes. The game is impressive thanks to the endless playground possibilities it provides, but it also made our eyebrows rise when we realised how tiny Plop’s disk footprint is! All of the Plop assets need less than 0.5MB, with the main physics simulation logic being of just tens of kilobytes.