Dear shipmates,

It's been a while since our last status update on the development of Floating Sandbox. Let us begin by saying that we're all fine! It's just a busy period in our lives: work - the new working from home paradigm makes for busier and tiring days; family - home schooling and now summer holidays mean more attention from kids; and, last but not the least, Floating Sandbox!

Yes, these past weeks we have been really busy re-working one of the "foundations" of the game: the rendering engine. We are moving the whole graphics subsystem in fact to a separate thread, and those of you running Floating Sandbox on multi-core laptops will reap the most benefits - our guess is somewhere between 10% and 20% better frame rate. On top of that, this work we're doing now is going to enable a *plethora* of new graphical features for the future, as we can now go bananas with special effects without worrying too much about their performance impact on the frame rate of the game.

When we are done with this, we'll finally begin working on the "frontier" maintenance algorithm, as described in our "The Future of Floating Sandbox" roadmap. That work will also take some time, so it's likely that the next update is still quite far away - have some patience in the meantime. Unless we come up with some cool feature in the meantime that we want you to have right away, in which case we'll have an interim release!

In the meantime, we have just published a new Ship Pack - "Liamo's Ship Pack", a collection of 7 ships all with electricals. You might download the ship pack from www.floatingsandbox.com. Don't forget to donate to the author if you like the pack!

That's all for now; we hope the next status update will announce the completion of the graphics rework and the beginning of the frontier maintenance work, which will enable many exciting new features!