Dear Floating Sandbox shipmates,

A few weeks ago we promised that after the 1.14 release we would reveal a roadmap for the future Floating Sandbox updates. Well, here we are to honor that promise!

We have many big work items planned for the future, and we believe it would be sensible to share our plans with all of you. Keep in mind, though, that as with all plans made by humans - and apparently also by mice - earlier milestones are more detailed than later milestones. This means that while we have a good idea of what and when is going to happen in a few months, we cannot be as detailed when it gets to milestones further away. New ideas in fact come up all the time, and priorities might get shifted - what looks to be a cool thing to add today, might not look so cool anymore after a better idea comes up. So take these future milestones more as "general directions" of where Floating Sandbox wants to be, rather than as episodes set in stone.

This said, without further ado, here's our plan.

Next Release

Our next release - nicknamed "the Eternal Patrol update" and expected a few weeks from now - will be a "continuation" of 1.14, in which we will add a few more electrical materials that didn't make it for 1.14 - namely pumps and flood doors - which will finally make submarine-making a reality. In this release we'll also retrofit more ships with electrical panels, and we'll add a few fixes and improvements for small issues found in 1.14, like the mouse wheel problems that have been reported by some of you.

EDIT (2022-04-16): delivered!

Next Major Release

The bulk of the development work after the next release will be the "frontier maintenance" algorithm, i.e. the work needed to make the simulator aware of the external *shape* of a ship. Being aware of the shape of a ship enables a plethora of other features, such as proper "hydrodynamics" - imagine sinking ships gliding underwater, water pressure making the ship implode, and, possibly, deformation of the ocean floor upon impact.

The development work for maintaining the exterior frontier of a ship is going to be long and convoluted, so at the moment we are not going to guess any dates for its completion.

EDIT (2022-04-16): delivered!

Next Major Release + 1

Once proper hydrodynamics is in place, we can focus on making all of you proper ship engineers. To this end we plan to have an in-game ship builder that will allow everyone to quickly create ships - complete with ropes and electrical elements - without having to deal with Paint, multiple layers, or JSON text files, like it is the case now. The ship builder will also likely feature physical tools to guide users towards proper ship building; imagine a "waterline predictor" that continuously calculates and displays the resultant waterline as you draw the ship structure!

Coding the ship builder will take quite some time, and the sad part of it is that none of this work will result in any improvements to the simulation itself, but we do believe it's going to be time well spent, as afterwards you will all be able to experience the joys of advanced ship building!

EDIT (2022-04-16): delivered!

Next Major Release + 2

While you go bananas making your own advanced ships, we may finally take some time to optimize the largest computational hurdle of Floating Sandbox: the spring relaxation algorithm. This is the algorithm that maintains the rigidity of physical bodies, and at this moment it's responsible for 40% of the computations needed for each frame. The problem with this algorithm is that the more stiffness you want for the ships, the more computation time you need to throw at it, and a nasty side-effect of this is the "jelly" look that some ships currently show when running with Simulation Quality set to 1. Our goal is to experiment with alternative mathematical formulations of the problem that promise to yield more stiffness with less computational resources.

Next Major Release + 3

With a better simulation in place, we might then have the time to focus on NPCs - or Non-Player Characters. We're still quite fuzzy on this as it's going to be far ahead, but imagine things like passengers and officers roaming around the ship.

Next Major Release + 4

Finally, either before or after NPCs become a reality, we will focus on collision detection, the hardest feature to implement in a particle system like Floating Sandbox. If we manage to get it right - and that's a big IF - we can then allow multiple ships in the game; imagine ships bumping into each other or icebergs staying still waiting for preys to hit them.

That's all we may conceive at this moment.

Again, this is not to be taken as a list of all of the future releases - many other smaller releases will come in-between the ones listed here, as we've got 100's of medium-to-small ideas to implement! These listed here, however, are the major releases that we expect we'll be making in the foreseeable future.

And now back to work on the next release!!!