Dear shipmates,

We are proud to finally announce the release of Floating Sandbox 1.17.5!!!

Among various things, this release adds some more details to the experience of ships sinking into the abyss - such as lamps breaking at high pressure - together with the new Laser Cannon tool. See a preview with this video:

This release also sports the Copy-and-Paste tool in the ShipBuilder, which allows you to copy, flip, rotate, and paste portions of the ship.

As announced in our previous post, this is the last Floating Sandbox update containing major ShipBuilder work; with this last release, all the important ShipBuilder features that we had planned years ago are now reality, and from now on new Floating Sandbox releases will only contain ShipBuilder improvements such as minor tools and/or improvements here and there.

Here is the full changelist for this release:

• Added new "Laser Cannon" tool

• Improved behavior of lamps under extreme conditions:

  • At ocean depths

  • When subject to electric sparks

  • When their power generator is flooded

• ShipBuilder:

  • Added Copy/Cut/Paste tools

  • Added rectangle-drawing tool

  • Allowed electrical particles to be placed on rope endpoints, thus enabling construction of "electrical ropes"

  • Fixed a sporadic crash with the rope-drawing tool

• Added Ukrainian translation - thanks to Roman Shavernew (Dioxcode)!

• Added 6 new ships

So now the next big step along our master plan is to start working on optimizing 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 60% 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 which promise to yield more stiffness with less computational resources.

Enjoy this release and stay tuned!!!

Gabe