Dear shipmates,

A quick status update, 27 days after our last post!

Despite the exacerbating impact of additional covid-related restrictions on our daily lives, work on Floating Sandbox has been going on as frenetic and productive as always.

This time around we've added yet another notch to the belt of Floating Sandbox's physics improvements: we have finally reconciled - and elegantly at that, we'd say - the underwater world with the above-water world.

Earlier versions of Floating Sandbox, in fact, had two completely distinct physical "regimes". If a particle was underwater, it would have been subject to an "underwater regime", consisting of forces such as buoyancy, drag, and, as of very recently, hydrodynamics; on the other hand, if a particle was *not* underwater, then it would have been subject to the "above-water regime" - with forces such as wind and air buoyancy. This completely artificial dichotomy was the result of isolated, incremental improvements over the original codebase from 2018, and carried with it some obvious nasty side-effects such as discontinuities at the water-air interface, which would translate into structural instabilities under specific conditions.

We have now got rid of this nasty dichotomy, after embracing the principle that "nature abhors discontinuities". The above-water and underwater regimes are now a full continuum, gradually turning into each other (read: interpolating) in the neighborhood of the water-air interface. What goes underwater also goes above-water now, albeit with different magnitudes. So for example as a particle penetrates water, air buoyancy gradually turns into water buoyancy, air friction gradually turns into water fraction, and air pressure drag (aerodynamics) gradually turns into water pressure drag (hydrodynamics).

For the less-nerd among you, one of the most tangible results of this redesign is that Floating Sandbox now sports aerodynamics! You may see it in action here:

As part of this redesign of the physics, we have also re-recalibrated all the drag forces in Floating Sandbox's world. As a result the Titanic bow now sinks at a speed between 10m/s and 12m/s, which is way more realistic than the 6m/s speed in the previous versions of the game.

On a separate note, we've also been busy getting a MacOS build for Floating Sandbox. Our friend The_SamminAter has finally had success at building the game and running it. We've been busy working around some issues with high-DPI resolution support, and soon we'll be working on packaging. It might still take a while, but a MacOS version might be in the future of Floating Sandbox!

In conclusion, we're still busy adding a few new things before the next release, so before you ask, let us tell you that a release is still weeks away. Please be patient, 1.16.2 turned out to be a very solid release with zero stability issues, something we're quite proud of, and we'd like to make sure that 1.16.3 will stay that way as well!

Stay safe and keep your metal dry!