Dear shipmates,

It has been almost 2 months on the day after the 1.19.0 release, and here we are again with a new release!

Today's 1.19.1 update smooths out some corners that were left a little rough with the NPC release. As a few examples, our little passengers are now a tad smarter and avoid falling into empty spaces, thermodynamics is a real thing with NPCs, and some proportions have been improved.

On top of this, the update brings a whole new dimension to the game: explosive NPCs! These are the NPC counterparts to the bombs you've grown accustomed with: they live inside a ship and interact with its interiors. Sprinkle a few of them here and there, send your ship to a tumultuous ride, and see what happens when they start bouncing on walls and floors!

Here's the full list of changes in this update:

• Added explosive furniture NPCs

  • ...adding a whole new dimension to the game!

  • Fine-tuned general explosion physics in the process

• Added thermodynamics and sounds to NPC simulation

  • With proper heat dissipation and transfer between NPCs and ship/ambient

• Improved Human NPC behaviors:

  • NPCs now "look ahead" when walking and avoid falling into holes

  • NPCs run away from running water

• Added new bomb type: Fire-Extinguishing Bomb

  • Use it to quickly extinguish fires, but watch out for its blast wave!

  • ...also added as NPC

• Added new "Move/Rotate Gripped" tool, aka "Physics Move"

  • Simulates moving or rotating a ship while it is being held by a grip

  • The old "Move/Rotate" tool is not really physical - it simply pauses simulation while the ship is being moved or rotated; this new tool, instead, moves or rotates a ship in a real "physical" fashion

• More tools interact with NPCs

  • Among which: HeatBlaster, laser cannon, fire extinguisher

• The Move, Remove, and Turnaround NPC tools may now be used on *groups* of NPCs

• NPCs on a ship are now lit by the ship's lamps

• Completed cloud rendering improvement work started in previous update

• Added option to prevent propellers from working above water

• Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a crash when using the repair tool on a part of the ship that had exploded (thanks to AlexGuy!)

  • Fixed a crash happening after adding and removing many NPCs multiple times

  • Fixed wrong decimal and thousands separators used for numerical settings (e.g. "12.5" instead of "12,5" on systems with "," as the decimal separator)

    • This bug had been there since day 1 of Floating Sandbox; many thanks to Pac0master!

  • Linux: fixed ShipBuilder window not opening up as maximized

• Reduced amount of graphics memory required by rendering engine (texture atlases and shaders)

• Added 27 new ships

• Added new background music: "Intervention", by Scott Buckley (www.scottbuckley.com.au)

• and a few more small improvements here and there!

• Musical theme for this release: Nils Frahm, entire discography

After this update we will finally take some time off the development of the "main" Floating Sandbox timeline in order to dive back heads down into the Android port. As you probably remember, we experimented with Android 1 year back, and results were encouraging. It is time now to set aside that proof-of-concept and restart the project like a pro. What I have in mind is heavy restructuring of the source code of Floating Sandbox to allow for drop-in porting of the physics engine IN ITS ENTIRETY. This will surely save a LOT of time that would otherwise have to be spent with porting features one by one, leaving more time to the tasks that are instead really time-consuming: optimizing for phones (read: NEON intrinsics) and designing a new user interface that makes playing Floating Sandbox on a phone a fulfilling user experience.

Wish me good luck as it's going to be a long rabbit hole from now on :-)

Talk to you soon,

Gabe