Dear shipmates,

While you are enjoying NPC's flying around your ships, as we promised in our 1.19.1 release announcement we are now working full speed on the Android port of Floating Sandbox!

We have established an ambitious three-milestone plan to get there.

Milestone 1: Code Restructuring

Mobile platforms are in many aspects different from PC platforms. To start with, classic filesystem interactions such as choosing and loading ships from your computer's disk have to be shaped differently, and loading and saving files is a completely different ball game. Since Floating Sandbox has been conceived and developed for PC platforms, these aspects - admittedly more pervasive in our codebase that we'd wish - have to be re-written from scratch.

At the same time, we want to make sure that any new work on Floating Sandbox - new features, improvements, and bug fixes - can be released on both mobile and PC platforms as quickly as possible.

For this reason, in the first milestone we will restructure the existing codebase by abstracting out the underlying platform as much as possible, and by moving code around to ensure that entire game sub-systems may be dropped in-place on both platforms and just work.

At the end of this first milestone Floating Sandbox will have undergone profound code transformations, while retaining 100% of its current feature set and look-and-feel. Achieving this milestone will take around 4-6 weeks but work has already started and we are well ahead!

Note that this work will also be useful for ports to different mobile platforms one day - think iOS - and even for ports to gaming consoles!

Milestone 2: Code Port

Once the code is restructured, we will then reap the benefits - by air-dropping the platform-agnostic code into the Android build system, and then rewriting the "glue" ("GameController" in Floating Sandbox's code parlance) that is specific to mobile platforms.

At the end of this second milestone, the physics engine will be 100% functional and we will have a Ship floating on the sea; however, no user interactions will be possible yet (see milestone 3). We expect this phase to take up to 4 weeks.

This is also the most critical phase: at the end of this milestone we will finally know whether phones can run the Floating Sandbox physics engine in its entirety, and if not, we will have to fine-tune behaviors and may be maim some features here and there to allow the game to have reasonable performance. This might take a few more weeks.

Milestone 3: New UI Development

With the physics engine in-place, we can now focus on user interactions and on the entire phone user experience.

Now it will be the time to design a modern, touchscreen-friendly interface for the game - imagine selecting tools with swipes and touches. This will call for an entirely new framework, entirely written with OpenGL as its rendering engine. This will be the most thrilling part, and we're seriously looking forward to getting here!

At the same time, we will have to start exploring the realm of sounds on Android. From preliminary reading, it looks like that there's very little available to the developer of Android native applications - the closest thing being Oboe, which still leaves quite a lot of work to be done.

This phase will be completed in no less than 6 weeks - but when done, we will have a fully functional Floating Sandbox!

That's all for now - wish us good luck, and we will be back shortly with updates on our progress!

Gabe