Dear shipmates,

We are proud - and at the same time relieved - to announce the release of Floating Sandbox 1.19: the NPC update!

It took sixteen months to cook NPC support in the simulator. During these sixteen months we have basically coded a whole new game in a game, and most arduously, we had to learn how to reason in terms of barycentric coordinates - the space occupied by NPCs inhabiting a ship. Nonetheless, through all the hardships, we had been making continuous, steady progress - each small step being documented with the videos that you can check in our YouTube channel.

Today, all that work has finally come to an end - or better said, to a BEGINNING! In fact, this new release of Floating Sandbox only brings the _basics_ of NPC support - the core physics, the interactions with the ship, and the NPC rendering engine. There are *plenty* of more articulated features missing in this release, and which we will be working on in the next few releases. Some of these are:

• Basic walk planning - while in this release NPCs happily walk into manholes, in future releases they will plan their walk ahead and avoid obvious pitfalls

• Complex behaviors - NPCs will do more things than just lemminging out on the ship - imagine sounding an alarm and seeing all NPCs group at assembly points

• ShipBuilder support for designing floorplans - in this release NPCs simply walk on hull floors, in future releases you'll be able to draw ad-hoc floorplans

• Doors - controlled via switches

• Lights shining on NPCs - in this release NPCs are dark at night

• Physics sounds - e.g. when NPC furniture hits a floor

• NPC packs - we'll have add-ons with new skins

• ...and a zillion new things (yes, possibly lifeboats as well!)

All of this will be worked on while we finally resume working on the mobile port of Floating Sandbox - more news about this in later posts.

Without further ado, here's the changelist for this release:

• Initial implementation of NPCs!

  • This release contains the foundation of the new NPC sub-system of the simulator

    • Additional functionality will come out with future releases

• Added new "Lamp" tool, allowing you to peer at wrecks into the darkness

  • Revisited darkness of wrecks in the process: ships now fade into darkness as they sink deeper and deeper

  • This new behavior may be controlled via "Settings"->"Rendering"->"Ship"->"Depth Darkening"

• Rendering improvements:

  • Improved flames

    • Each release brings flames closer to the way I've always wanted them to look...

  • Improved clouds

  • Marginal rendering performance improvements

• Revisited ocean floor friction and silting

  • ...mostly spurred from a lot of development in this area due to NPC work

• Added "shift lock mode": use middle mouse button to toggle SHIFT on or off, for easier exercising of advanced tool behaviors

  • Thanks to Damien for the idea!

• Added "Guide Mode" to Terrain Adjust tool: keep SHIFT pressed and you'll be able to draw terrain along straight lines

• Added new "Tungsten" material - the heaviest in Floating Sandbox's library!

• Added 28 new ships

• Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a ShipBuilder bug that was messing up copy-and-paste of electrical elements

  • Fixed a ShipBuilder bug with the electrical panel not reflecting some changes to the electrical layer

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

• Musical theme for this release: Carbon Based Lifeforms, entire discography

Enjoy!

Gabe

P.S.: since I had to change my code signing certificate, this release of Floating Sandbox will be the first one signed with my brand new certificate. As of this moment Microsoft doesn't have enough proof yet that this certificate is to be trusted, so for a while you will get popups like the following:

If you see that, click on the three dots, and then on "Keep Anyway":