...and yes, finally 1.16.5 is out of the door! If you've been following our devlog, you would know by now that this release has been a long and windy road, full of perilous numeric foes behind every corner.

First we had to smooth out the rendering of sharp waves; this quest led us into looking for new methods for dampening oscillations, taking us to a nice technique which greatly improved the way Floating Sandbox generates interactive waves.

Second, we embarked into the fantastic world of cracks, ending up into....Batik territory, no less!. We won't really disclose now how this is used in the simulator, but 100 points will be awarded to the first player that correctly guesses what Batik has to do with Floating Sandbox!

But the challenge whose outcome we are proud the most, is the static pressure simulation. The naïve implementation of hydrostatic pressure, in fact, generates phantom forces and torque all over the place, as we've explained in our latest video, making the simulation horribly unrealistic. After two months of experimentation and hard work, however, we have developed an algorithm that successfully minimizes net force and torque by modulating pressure forces on the exterior hull of the ship - with results that you'll be able to judge by yourself in this release!

These three hurdles, in any case, were not everything that has kept us busy during the making of this release. Here is the full changelist for 1.16.5:

• Added simulation of pressure

  • Underwater structures are subject to hydrostatic pressure, aka "Pressure Crush"

  • Abovewater structures are subject to atmospheric pressure, decreasing with altitude

  • Structures have their own internal pressure, which is exchanged with the environment through holes in their hull

  • The difference between external and internal pressure generates static pressure against the exterior hull of structures, causing implosions and explosions

• Added water impact forces - generated upon impact with water, and proportional to kinetic energy

• Revisited simulation of waves originating from water displacement

  • Taken inspiration from "Improving the stability of a simple formulation of the shallow water equations for 2D flood modeling", de Almeida et al.(2012)

• Added splash sounds at water impacts

• Added three new tools:

  • Inject Pressure: increases or decreases the internal pressure of structures

  • Blast: creates explosive force fields of different sizes and strengths

  • Electric Spark: generates electric arcs on the surface of a ship

• Added "silting" to the bottom of the ocean, allowing wrecks to lightly sink under the ocean floor over time

• Made air density adjustable, and increased range of water density adjustment

  • You can now get wild with both densities and see how they affect physical behaviors, including buoyancy, drag, and static pressure

• Revisited physics of explosions

  • ...and added yet another setting to adjust the power of bomb blasts

• Doubled world width to 10.0km

• Reorganized Simulation Settings window

  • The location of most settings has been shuffled around, but worry not - they're all still there!

• Physics probe panel may now be configured to be in the USCS system, and in the SI system with Celsius degrees

• Improved sound effects

  • Also improved scheduling to reduce cacophony during widespread destruction

• Changed default ocean depth to 1,000m

• Added "direction lock" to slice tool - hitting the SHIFT key during a cut locks its direction

• Improved rain

• Added "Night Vision" setting, allowing ships to be visible also at night

• Added a few more ships, among which:

  • Inflatable Balloon: demonstrates structures expanding with pressure

    • Expands and shrinks when internal pressure is regulated via the new "Inject Pressure" tool

    • The balloon is pre-pressurized at 1.35 atmospheres

• Added new "internal pressure" property for ship files, specifying the internal pressure desired in the ship

• Added two new materials ("Mylar" and "Mylar Hull") for flexible inflatable balloons

  • And in preparation for the upcoming ShipBuilder, added new colors for some existing materials, reaching a total of 188 structural materials

• Added new horn sound - thanks to Officer TimCan!

• ...and a few more small improvements here and there!

• Musical theme for this release: And One, entire discography

Last but not the least, this is the first Floating Sandbox release featuring a Linux package - the package has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint 20.2 (thanks to @TheCrafters001 !), and your mileage may vary. If you have a distro on which you are not able to run the game, get in touch with us and we'll see what we can do!

Enjoy the pressure, and see you all soon with some previews of our next big milestone...the ShipBuilder!

P.S.: as always, please remember that during the first few days of the release, Windows Defender will complain that the Floating Sandbox installer is not (yet) trusted. Follow the instructions in this post and you'll be fine!