POWDERLINE
CHANGELOG

Updates

What changed on the mountain, newest first. Powderline is built by one person and ships small and often.

October 2026

A new course every race

Nothing left hanging in the sky

A new trailer on the front page

Deeper tracks in the snow

A new look for the site, and a dev blog

APRÈS FM, a deep house station

POWDERLINE FM never goes quiet

The hockey stop

Smoother frames, and rocks where they belong

A fairer leaderboard, and safer races

A finish line worth crossing

The 1v1 race used to end between two red poles under a chequered strip. Now it ends under a proper race finish: an aluminium truss gantry with padded, ballasted feet bedded in the snow, a FINISH banner tied on under the beam, and feather flags beside the towers. On top of the beam, a timing board runs your race clock live and holds your time once you cross. Below it, a red dye line runs across the snow between two timing posts. The towers are solid, so ride between them.

Bumping into your rival

Closing things, and your rival's rider

A new main menu

The start screen no longer blurs the whole mountain behind a stack of grey buttons. The menu now sits in a column down the left, and the rest of the screen shows the slope and your rider. FREE RIDE is one big gold button, 1V1 RACE sits under it, and the shop, closet, leaderboard, account and settings are in a list below. Each entry has an icon and a line saying what it holds.

New sounds, and a lofi radio

The old sound effects were harsh, so all of them have been redone. Under the board there is now a soft glide on packed snow, with a crunch when the edge bites in a carve. The wind is a deep stereo rush that comes in gusts and grows with your speed, louder in the air. Rails scrape like steel instead of whistling, and landings hit with a low thump of snow. Coins are mellow plucks that climb a scale along a line instead of beeping. The prize wheel clicks like wood, and its fanfare rings like bells.

There is also a radio. POWDERLINE FM plays lofi while you ride, and every track is written on the spot: its own key, tempo, chords and melody, played on electric piano, bass and dusty drums with a little tape warble. Each one runs about two minutes and shows its name in the corner when it starts.

A faster, harder mountain

Runs were lasting too long on snow that never asked much of you. The mountain now gets serious sooner and keeps pushing the deeper you go.

Settings follow your account

Signed in, your settings now travel with you. Turn motion blur off on your laptop and it is off on your phone too, and the same goes for sound and the time of day.

Snow kickers

The plain kickers were timber wedges with brown planks and a plank wall at the back, which never looked like they belonged on a mountain. Now they are big jumps shaped out of snow, the way a park crew builds them. The deck is groomed, with the snowcat's corduroy still on it and two tracks worn up the middle, and a red dye line runs across the lip and down both edges.

A new front page

The home page is new. It opens on a real run: the rider drops onto a gold-chevron booster beside a gondola line, holds a frontflip through the air and stomps it, filmed straight out of the game. Below it, a tour of what is on the hill, the six regions, the controls and the guides.

Gondola lifts

From about 900 m down, gondola lifts now run beside the run. Each line starts at a terminal cut into the slope. Its base is board-formed concrete, with a cabin garage and a service door in the tall downhill end. On top is a glass hall with a steel frame. The roof is thin, with a larch soffit and downlights, a band in the line's colour along the eaves, and snow and icicles on top. The end where the cabins come in is open, under a deep canopy. From there a row of tapered white towers carries the rope over the trees to a second terminal a kilometre or two below, and then there is open mountain until the next line. A clearing is cut through the woods under each one.

Rail boxes

A new feature in the park: the rail box. Some of the spots that used to carry a rail now carry a box instead. It is a 9 m steel-framed slider planted in the snow, with a graphite top between polished steel edges, blue panels with an orange band, and hazard stripes at both ends. You get on it the same way as a rail, by riding into the striped entry or landing on it, and it slides like one.

Rebuilt rails

The rails were a plain orange pipe on three black sticks. They are built like real park rails now. The orange powder coat is worn through to bare steel along the top, where boards slide, with paint chipped at the edges of the wear, grime down the sides and black collars at each end. The entry has a steel cap, and the exit kinks down into the snow instead of stopping in mid-air.

New trees

The woods were four models from four different places that never matched: a near-black pine, a lollipop birch, a red dead tree and a bush stacked like a burger. Every tree and bush is new and made for the game. There are snow-laden spruces with green showing at the tips and underneath, a gold larch, a bare larch with snow along every bough, a weathered silver snag with a broken top, and low dwarf pines half-buried in drift.

Rebuilt boost kickers

The boost kickers looked homemade: blue and yellow stripes smeared across a timber wedge, a brown plank wall at the back and two traffic cones on sticks. Now they look like the park's proper engineered features. Gold chevrons stream up a graphite deck toward a lit lip, polished copings run along both edges, and a braced steel frame holds up the back. Every line is drawn sharp, however close you get.

September 2026

A real snowboard

The board used to be a slab: a flat box with two plates on it. It is a proper snowboard now — camber underfoot, rocker at both tips, steel edges, a printed topsheet, POWDERLINE across the base, and strap bindings with highbacks. The bindings sit under your boots wherever the ride puts them, so a boot never stands beside its binding or through it, and the rider now stands centred across the board instead of hanging over the heel edge.

A faster first load

The game's code and styles were leaving the server uncompressed. The web server was set up to compress them, but the way requests reached it switched that off for everything except the pages themselves. Now they are compressed too, and the first visit downloads about a third of what it did before. Nothing changes once the game is cached.

No ad script in the game

The game page no longer loads Google's ad script at all. The articles on this site still carry it, but nothing is ever placed over the ride itself. The only ads planned inside the game are optional ones: a short video you can choose to watch for a free spin of the prize wheel, and nothing if you would rather not.

Hikers

Riders are hiking up the hill now, boards on their backs. They walk a line up the fall line, stand a moment at the top, come back down, and go again; you will find them on the open slopes, the bowl and the piste, sometimes in pairs. They are as solid as anyone else on the mountain. Where a hiker is at any moment is a matter of the mountain's clock, not of your run, so both riders in a race pass the same hiker in the same place.

A smooth day on the mountain

The dynamic time of day was making the game stutter. Whenever the light changed, the sky was re-captured into the environment map that lights the snow — as it should be — but each capture handed the renderer a brand-new map, and the renderer answered by rebuilding the shaders of everything in the scene. That was a hitch every few tenths of a second through a preset switch and one every couple of seconds for about half of the dynamic day. The map is now refreshed in place, so a change of light costs a few GPU passes and nothing else.

The mountain in regions

The descent is no longer one long slope that slowly gets harder. It is cut into regions, each a few hundred metres to a kilometre long, each with its own character. DEEP WOODS closes the trees in tight. The BOULDER FIELD is rock after rock to weave through or hop. The SNOW PARK puts a kicker or a rail on nearly every stretch. The ALPINE BOWL is wide, bare and fast. On THE PISTE other riders stand about with their boards — the same rider model you wear, in outfits from the wardrobe — and they do not move out of your way. OPEN SLOPES is the mountain as it was, and it is always where a run starts. A banner names each region as you cross into it. Which region comes next is a property of the mountain, not of the run, so both riders in a race meet the same ones, and the kickers and rails you knew are where they were.

Races across networks

A 1v1 race between riders on different networks — one on home Wi-Fi, the other on mobile data, say — mostly never connected, while the same two devices on one Wi-Fi raced fine. When two routers will not talk to each other directly, the connection has to fall back to a relay, and the relay the game was leaning on had quietly gone away. The game now brings its own list of servers, fetched fresh for every lobby, relay included. When a link still cannot be made, the lobby says so — "no route between your networks" — instead of retrying into silence, and the browser console names the path the race took.

Drop in the moment you want to

After a wipeout, the way back onto the snow used to wait for the tumble and the card to finish arriving — a few seconds in which W did nothing. Now a fresh press of W, a tap on the pad or the jump button on a controller ends the run right there and puts you back on the hill the same frame. The ride is still logged and the score still posted on the way through. Holding W through the crash does not skip anything: only a press made after you went down counts, and a press in the first quarter second is taken as the jump you were mashing, not a decision.

Booster kickers

One kicker in three is now a booster. You will know it from uphill: gold chevrons on a deep-blue deck pointing at the lip, gold flags at the entry and a lit bar along the takeoff edge. Ride off it and the lip shoves you along the launch and lifts you a little higher — a bigger air with more speed to land, not a silly one; the landing windows are the same as on any kicker. Which kickers are boosters comes from the mountain itself, so both riders in a race see the same ones.

A day on the mountain

The time of day can now run by itself. The new DYNAMIC setting walks through dawn, midday, golden hour, dusk and night and round again, a full day every ten minutes, every change a slow blend rather than a switch — the sun, the sky, the fog, the light on the snow and the stars all move together. Each time of day holds for a while so it is recognisably itself before it eases into the next. A session opens at golden hour and never at night. Dynamic is the default if you have not picked a time; a time you chose yourself stays chosen, and T cycles through dynamic and the five fixed times as before.

Drag a screenshot into feedback

The feedback form takes screenshots by drag and drop now: drag an image anywhere onto the card and it lights up to say so. Pasting an image from the clipboard while the form is open works too. The picker button is still there, and the limit is still three per report.

Adding the game to your home screen, one tap where the phone allows it

The little card that asked you to add Powderline to your home screen has been rebuilt around how each phone and browser actually does it. On Android in Chrome or Edge, Add opens the system's own install dialog — one tap and it is on your home screen. Where a browser cannot do that, the card says so at once and shows the few taps it takes instead, with the real names of the buttons: the Share sheet on an iPhone, the menu under More in Firefox, and on an iPad or a Samsung phone whose browser cannot add it at all, a button that hands the page to Safari or Chrome, which can. It shows on the start screen and after a run, never during one, and it asks at most a few times, weeks apart. It is switched off in this release while it is being checked on real devices.

The hill never flattens

There were spots on the mountain where the snow levelled out or even tipped back uphill for a few metres — a trough between two moguls, the bottom of a roller — and a rider who stopped there could stand still and hop on the spot for air points, for as long as they liked. The relief is now stretched down the fall line: the big rollers run about five times longer along the hill than across it, the undulation three times, so nothing can tilt the slope back level any more. The height of the mountain is unchanged; the swells you see ahead are the same size, just longer. Every metre of the hill now drops, so a board at rest starts sliding on its own, and hopping in place only sends you down the slope faster.

The website gets pictures, a glossary, a help page and a way to write in

Every guide page now shows the game as it actually renders — the kicker from the front, a carve throwing chunks off the edge, the splash of a long landing, the wipeout screen, a loadout worn on the hill — each frame taken from the game in the browser, not mocked up. Four new pages: a snowboarding glossary that explains what cork, misty, rodeo, knuckle, stomp and sketchy mean on a real hill and what they mean here; a help page for the problems riders write in about most (races that will not connect, frame rate, controllers, sound, sign-in, lost progress); a credits page naming every third-party asset and its licence, which the CC BY models were owed; and a contact page. Mistyped addresses now get a real "not found" page instead of a copy of the home page.

The privacy policy gains a section on advertising: the website's pages carry Google AdSense, and it says exactly what that means, what is asked of you in the EEA, and how to change your mind. The game itself shows no ads during a run.

The wardrobe, gone through one item at a time

Every cosmetic was put on the rider and looked at, and a lot of them were not what their name said. The worst was the jackets: the recolour only ever touched the sleeves, so twenty-seven tops were the same cream jacket with different arms. The body now takes the colour and the sleeves the accent, the orange zip and pockets can take a trim colour of their own, and the whole thing finally looks like a jacket in the colour you picked. Zebra Pants have stripes, Camo Pants have camo, Carbon Pants have a weave — patterns are painted into the fabric rather than promised by the label. Every hat was built for a head that is not the one the rider has: they all sat a nose too far forward and a finger too low, brims floated over the helmet, and the campfire burned above an open bowl where the helmet dome had been cut away. Hats now sit on the head as it is measured, a hat that replaces the dome closes it in the helmet's own colour, and the ones that perch on top — the cone, the party hat, the campfire — keep the helmet under them. The cowboy hat has a crown, the viking horns point outward instead of through the skull, the antlers are antlers, the pirate's tricorn is three brims and not a dome with sticks. Decks now take light from the sky the way the snow does, so they read as lacquered boards instead of dark strips. And the particle trails, which had quietly stopped drawing after the engine change and left only their ribbon on the snow, are back.

Then twenty-five new pieces: plaid, tiger, polka-dot, pinstripe, checkered-flag and snow-camo tops; plaid, tiger, checkerboard and snow camo pants; a Santa hat, party hat, bunny ears, flower crown and chef's toque; wood grain, rising sun, pixel hearts, topo map, snowflake and synth sunset decks; and embers, autumn leaves, frost and toxic trails. The wardrobe is 95 items.

Nine guides

The how-to-play page was one long scroll doing nine jobs. It is now an overview, and each system has its own page with the actual numbers the game runs on: the trick book and its arithmetic, the four landing bands, what ice and powder do, how the mountain is built and what deepens, kickers and rails, how a race works without a server, every control and setting, gear, the wheel and quests, and what it is all made of. Nothing in them is rounded off — if a page says a flip is credited within 57 degrees, that is the number in the code.

Signing up, and who gets to be on the board

Start typing into SIGN IN, realise you have no account yet, and the address and password you already typed now come with you to CREATE ACCOUNT — and back again if you switch the other way. It only ever fills a box you have left empty, so nothing you have typed gets overwritten, and the cursor lands on whatever is still missing.

Rider names are also checked now, everywhere one can be set: at signup, when you rename yourself, and on the guest name the leaderboard posts under. The check sees through the usual dodges — spacing a word out, swapping digits for letters, padding the letters, accents — and it runs in the database as well as in the page, because a public leaderboard cannot be guarded from the browser alone. Ordinary names are not the target: Scunthorpe, Cockburn, Hancock and Analiese all sit on the board unbothered — and if the check ever gets a real name wrong, an admin can set it by hand, so nobody is stuck with a name they did not choose.

A new engine under the snow

Powderline now renders through WebGPU where your browser has it, and falls back to WebGL2 where it does not — the same mountain either way, with the modern path spending far less of your CPU on telling the graphics card what to draw. Every surface in the game was rewritten as a shader graph to make that possible, which is why the sky, the snow and the far ranges look the same as they did: that was the goal, checked pixel by pixel against the old renderer.

On top of it, three things you can see. Valley fog that knows which way is down: the air pools in the bowls below you and thins on the ridges, so dropping into one now means riding down into the murk. A blizzard that thickens the deeper down the mountain you get, layered into that same air. And a speed blur that pulls in from the edges of the screen once the run is genuinely quick — off entirely below about 45 km/h, so it reads as speed rather than as a smeared lens. All three are skipped on the low quality setting, and the blur has its own MOTION BLUR switch in SETTINGS: turning it off keeps the fog and the weather, because a screen that smears is something people switch off for comfort, not for frame rate.

Kickers have sides, landings have weight

A kicker's deck is a shaped surface, and until now nothing stopped you riding at the side of one, climbing its wall like a bank and launching off a lip you never rode up. The sides and the lip face are now solid: come at a kicker from the flank and you hit it, the same as a tree. The entry is the way on, and the first metres of the sides — where the deck still lies flush with the snow — stay rideable. And a landing off a real air, more than a second and a half of it, now blows the snow out from under the board: the same powder the carve trail throws, thrown in a ring and left lying where it falls, bigger the longer you were up. Hops off rollers stay clean, so the splash means something when it comes.

One grab, and a carve that stands up

The rider used to fold a long way back through a turn — the body angulation was driven nearly twice as hard as the edge it was supposed to follow, and a heelside carve came out as a recline. The board still banks the full angle it actually pulls; the upper body now rides well inside it, so the turn reads off the edge rather than off a leaning torso. The heel-edge METHOD is gone with it: reaching behind the front leg arched the whole spine and looked wrong from the chase camera. Every grab is now the MUTE — leading hand on the toe edge between the bindings — straight, spun or flipped.

A first run that teaches itself

Your first ride now comes with a coach instead of a line of tiny text: one keycap and one word at a time — carve, hold for speed, jump, flip in the air, grab — each prompt clearing the moment you do the thing, with a SKIP button if you already know. Once through it, the HUD stays clean for good — the controls reference lives in SETTINGS. The wipeout card has real DROP IN AGAIN and MENU buttons for mouse and touch players (W and JUMP still work), and a pause button sits in the corner on every device. The main menu fits a short window without cropping the title, and leaving the tab mid-run pauses the ride instead of ending it.

The same mountain at 60 Hz and 240 Hz

Rollers used to unweight the board more readily on a high-refresh monitor than on a 60 Hz one — the check that decides when the snow lets go compared a per-step gap with a per-step threshold, and the two did not scale alike. It now reads the slope's actual curvature over a fixed half metre behind the board, and a landing touches down where the arc meets the snow rather than a whole step past it. A scripted ride over a row of kickers now ends within two percent of the same spot from 30 Hz to 240 Hz. On weaker machines the game also lowers its render resolution a notch when the frame rate sags and restores it when it recovers, and the rider's texture went from 2 MB to a sixth of that, so the first load is quicker. Old Safari gets its frosted menus back, and the sound has a limiter so a stacked thump and boost no longer crackle.

No more glowing track

The carve track used to trail the board as a bright white streak in low sun. Its faces were wound upside down, so the double-sided strip was lit from below by the horizon glow instead of by the sky. Wound the right way, and wearing the snow's own texture, the groove now shows through its shape and shading only.

The rider moves like a rider

A pass over how the snowboarder moves, animates and is controlled. Steering now rolls the board onto its edge over a tenth of a second instead of snapping to full lock, and the body leans as hard as the carve actually pulls — laid over at speed, barely tilted at a crawl — with the head turned into the turn. A jump is a push: the legs drive straight off the snow (and off a kicker lip) before the knees draw up. Flips pull the rider into a tight tuck, spins wind the shoulders ahead of the board and unwind as they brake, and the eyes drop to spot the landing. Grabs are now two, both with the leading hand: a laid-out METHOD flying straight and a MUTE through any rotation — each an authored pose with the mitten on the edge it names, and each named on the popup in place of plain GRAB. Limbs settle at their own pace, so a pose change reads as a body rather than a switch. The camera stays calm: it opens up a little on a real air and dips slightly with your knees on a landing. And a controller works out of the box: left stick or d-pad to carve, RT/LT to tuck and brake, A to jump, X or RB for speed and grabs, Start to pause — and it rumbles with landings, boosts and wipeouts.

The trick book

Tricks are now read off a fixed book instead of rounded to the nearest name. A flip is credited per full turn and a spin per 180°, and a step counts only once you have come within the landing window of it — 250° of yaw is a 180 landed long, never a 360, and half a backflip is no backflip. Every count has a name: QUAD and QUINT join DOUBLE and TRIPLE (a quad used to read TRIPLE), corks carry their FS or BS, and spins run on past 1080. Landings are tighter to match — clean inside 34°, sketchy to 57°, a wipeout beyond — and the stomp assist only settles a rotation you finished, where it used to level anything inside 70°. Rotation spools up and brakes faster, and a grab now rotates you half as fast again: it is the key to the multi-flip tiers, and a quad backflip finally fits a top-speed kicker air. The guide has the full book and the numbers.

Phone fixes

Powderline on other sites

The game can now be embedded on games portals — CrazyGames, itch.io, Game Jolt — straight from this domain, and it knows when it is. Embedded, it runs as a guest build: free ride, the closet, the leaderboards and share cards, and nothing a portal does not allow inside its frame — accounts, the shop, ads or links leading away. The full game, with quests, the shop and 1v1 races, stays here at powderlinegame.com, and where a portal allows it the guest build says so.

Share your run, and ride from your home screen

SHARE THIS RUN on the wipeout card turns the run you just ended into a card — the crash-cam view with your distance, score and top speed on it — and hands it to your phone's share sheet (or copies the link and downloads the image on desktop). Signed-in riders get a proper link: paste it in Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp or Reddit and it unfurls into the card, and anyone who taps it lands on the mountain with your invite code, so every share is also a referral. On phones, the game now offers to add itself to your home screen after your first run — full screen, no browser bars. Say no once and it never asks again.

Tracks in the snow

The board now leaves a real groove behind it. The old carve ribbon was a faint highlight that faded within a couple of seconds; the new track is a three-dimensional trough — berms of pushed-aside snow on both sides, a lit wall on the sun side and a shaded one opposite — and it stays on the mountain for about 400 metres behind you before it fades. It breaks cleanly under every jump, and hard carves throw clumps of snow that pile up along the lip and stay where they land — plus fist-sized lumps flung sideways off the slipping edge, arcing out and gone when they hit the snow.

The flickering peaks, Google sign-in, better e-mails

A rider reported rocks in the distance flickering in and out — thank you, it was real. The far ring of the horizon range sat beyond the sky dome and fought it for the same pixels; the backdrop now paints in strict distance order and the camera's depth precision is five times finer, so the horizon holds still. That report earned the first 200-coin feedback bounty.

Feedback with screenshots

Bug reports and ideas can carry up to three screenshots. Pick them in the feedback box, they are resized on your device before upload, and the patrol sees them next to the report.

Feedback & bugs, and phones that actually work

August 2026

Lighter snowfall

The ambient snowfall was cut to about a third of its particle count. It reads as weather now, not a blizzard, and weaker machines get the frames back.

Dusk by default

The mountain now opens at dusk. Phones in portrait get a rotate prompt instead of a squashed slope, and the footer gained the Instagram link.

Season opening: new rider, fitting room, fresh horizon

The biggest update so far, announced in-game as MOUNTAIN NEWS.

Grabs, invites, streaks

Powderline got its mark, used as the site icon and on Instagram.

Trick battle

A second race mode: no finish line, a clock instead, highest score when it runs out wins. Banked points survive a crash.

Powderline opens

First public build: the endless procedural mountain, carving, flips and spins, rail grinds, the prize wheel and closet, daily and weekly quests, rider accounts and leaderboards, and peer-to-peer 1v1 races. Sign-in was split from account creation the same day.

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