Pixelbolt v0.14.0

0.14.0

Falling sand, for agents and for games: a material grid of sand, water, fire, smoke, lava and more that runs live in a game loop and compiles to one-shot clips. A Powder lab to play with it in the studio. Parallax planes and haze that survive export to Tiled and Godot.

• Falling sand: a new source format, pixelforge-powder (pixel_help topic powder, pixelbolt/powder).
  • Every pixel holds one material from a table: powders, liquids, gases, fire, fixed solids and solids that fall. base: "sandbox" starts from sand, water, stone, wood, fire, smoke, steam, oil, lava, ice, ash, moss and wall, with their reactions.
  • Motion that reads:
    • falls speed up, landings splash and liquids pour in arcs;
    • pools level and come to rest;
    • heat, phase changes, burning and reactions between neighbours;
    • moving air lifts smoke into plumes, a wind blows and a blast opens a crater.
  • Structures collapse when what holds them up burns away. With pieces: "tumble" they topple and tumble as rigid bodies, float and come to rest.
  • Live: createLivePowder steps it every frame with paint, erase, wall, heat, push and burst from the pointer. Recorded strokes pack into a few bytes and replay exactly. A busy 320 × 180 sandbox takes a few milliseconds a frame, and settled regions cost almost nothing.
  • Compiled: pixel_compile and pixelbolt compile sample one-shot clips of palette grids from one run, with scripted inputs. The same source draws the same pixels everywhere.
  • New presets: hut fire, lava falls, quarry blast, rain on fire and stilt hut.
• Powder lab (/powder.html in the studio): a falling-sand sandbox in the browser.
  • Paint any material, or erase, wall, heat, cool, wind or blast, and pause or step through frames.
  • Open the presets, and download a GIF, recipe or source next to the matching CLI and MCP calls.
  • Copy a replay link that reopens the scene on the same frame with the same pixels.
• Parallax and haze in game engines:
  • scene.tmx layers carry each plane's parallax, and hazed placements draw from hazed copies of their tilesets.
  • Each plane is also exported as an image with its haze baked in.
  • A Godot scene.tscn scrolls the planes with Parallax2D. With the camera on whole pixels and pixel snapping on, every plane lands where Pixelbolt draws it.
• Fixes from a review of this release:
  • Falling sand no longer stops partway down through water.
  • A puddle drains into a hole dug beside it.
  • Thick pools come to rest.
  • A piece thrown off the top comes back down.
  • Cutting one piece into many keeps to the piece cap.
  • The compile's work limit counts scripted inputs and tumbling pieces.
  • Clearer errors for colours, sizes and scene fills.
  • The Powder lab says when a link is damaged or a recording is full, and a replay can be stopped.
  • Scene planes round half a pixel as Godot does.
  • --force re-exports remove stale planes.
  • MCP scene exports return their warnings.
• Other fixes:
  • Bodies matches drawn as video frames match the compile.
  • Tiled maps keep tiles above or left of the map.
  • Long tile-set names draw their test map.

Known issues:

• Thin smoke in falling sand still reads as dark blobs.
• Compiled falling-sand recipes are large (0.2–2.5 MB), because flames and heat glow touch most pixels.
• base: "sandbox" uses 76 of the 89 colours a source may have, so custom materials over it must share colours.
• With Godot's pixel snapping, a camera between whole pixels can put a parallax plane a pixel from where Pixelbolt draws it.
• Tails of five or more short links can thrash.
• A far elbow can snap between frames in walks of 32 or more frames.
• Left-facing jumps, attacks and hurts aren't mirrored.
• A plank nearly as wide as its pool, thrown in fast, can be launched out of it.

The full list of changes is in CHANGELOG.md.

The bundle keeps its 0.8.0 name, pixelbolt.mcpb (checksum pixelbolt.mcpb.sha256). The pixelforge command still works as an alias.

pixelbolt.mcpb contains the local Node.js MCP server, its eight tools, schemas, authoring help and the shipped examples, so every preset compiles from the bundle. The server makes no network requests.

Download pixelbolt.mcpb and open it in Claude Desktop, or use Settings -> Extensions -> install from file. Choose a workspace for recipes and generated artwork, then ask the agent to call pixel_help. The bundle uses the client's Node.js runtime (20 or newer); it does not include Node.js.

Download pixelbolt.mcpb.sha256 beside the bundle to check its SHA-256:

sha256sum --check pixelbolt.mcpb.sha256
gh attestation verify pixelbolt.mcpb --repo skulitom/Pixelbolt --signer-workflow skulitom/Pixelbolt/.github/workflows/release.yml

On PowerShell, (Get-FileHash pixelbolt.mcpb -Algorithm SHA256).Hash should match the hash in the checksum file.

The GitHub release makes the bundle available immediately. MCP Registry publication is a separate, manually dispatched step after testing; see Publishing.

What's Changed

• [compass] Fix: bodies matches as video frames draw what the compile draws (P-092, P-095) by @skulitom in #111
• [compass] Fix: Tiled maps keep tiles drawn above or left of a tilemap; long tile-set names draw their test map (P-091, P-094) by @skulitom in #112
• [compass] Feature: game integration guide points Unreal Engine users to the tested Paper2D import by @skulitom in #113
• [compass] README and llms.txt: point Godot and Tiled users to the tested tile set guide by @skulitom in #115

Full Changelog: v0.13.0...v0.14.0