Dear shipmates,

Yet another Floating Sandbox update sporting new physics, thanks to the now legendary "frontier maintenance" work that's enabling so many new features.

As you should have gathered by now from the many teaser videos, this time around we've added water displacement, that is, generation of waves due to the "external surface" of physical bodies. This is the first, rough version of its implementation, which will undoubtedly receive more attention and improvements in the future of Floating Sandbox. Incidentally, this is also something we've been wanting to do since day 1 - i.e. about 3 years ago - and which has been patiently waiting for its turn tucked somewhere in our never-ending roadmap for the simulator.

Another physics simulation that sees the light for the first time in this release is aerodynamics, also made possible by the "frontier maintenance" work. This came as a natural extension of hydrodynamics, and its implementation has actually made the code simpler rather than more complicated - something we're quite proud of!

But that's not all - this release is packed with many new things!!! Here's the official changelist:

• Implemented coupling of physical bodies with water surface (finally! Been wanting to do this for years...)

  • Water is now affected by ships and other actions occurring close to the surface

• Added first implementation of aerodynamics

  • ...finally reconciling the underwater world with the above-water world

• Re-recalibrated drag forces

  • 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 simulator

• Added rendering of temperature field

  • Hot surfaces are rendered as incandescent

  • Disabled by default on single-threaded and lower-end computers; may be enabled manually under "Simulation Settings" -> "Rendering" -> "Heat Draw Options"

• Improved Repair tool

  • Reining-in chaos by leveraging spatial coherence of broken surfaces

  • Detecting and preventing generation of most - if not all - folded (aka "crooked") structures

• Added "Rot" tool - allows player to rot parts of a ship interactively

  • Accessed by holding down the SHIFT key while using the "Scrub" tool

• Pressing the SHIFT key while using the "Adjust Terrain" tool now locks terrain edits horizontally

  • Thanks to phase1studios2018 for the idea!

• Refactored bombs as instances of generic "Gadgets", opening the possibility for creating new "thinghies" that may be attached to a ship

  • Added first non-bomb gadget: a "physics probe" that continuously displays a particle's velocity and temperature

• Marginal optimizations, gained 3%/4% better FPS rate

• Fixed bug that would case engine sounds to suddenly stop

• Added 9 new ships

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

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!

Enjoy our latest release and stay tuned for more hydrodynamics work!!!

EDIT:

If you have encountered an error when starting 1.16.3 stating something along the lines of "Error compiling shader", we've released 1.16.4 with a fix for it.