Dear shipmates,

As most of you know, these past few weeks we've been very busy working on the last physics simulation that has been made possible by the now legendary "Frontier Maintenance" work, namely Hydrostatic Pressure. The goal of this simulation is to make structures feel an amount of inward pressure that is proportional to their underwater depth, resulting in ultimate destruction at enough fathoms.

Problem is, it turned out that pressure is a force that is very hard to simulate - much harder than we had initially thought. This force works the way it does in reality because of the "microscopic" nature of the real world; however, when applied to a discretized universe - like Floating Sandbox, made of discrete particles - then "things don't add up easily". Translated for the math-minded among you, a line integral along any closed curve in a hydrostatic pressure field should yield zero, which is the reason why underwater objects don't move or rotate on their own just because of pressure. But in a discrete world with discrete curves and discrete forces, the aforementioned integral tends to yield non-zero resultant forces and torques...with the results that you may imagine.

This is not to say that we haven't managed to tame all of this and get a working version of the infamous "pressure crush" - we have indeed; but it's just that at the moment we are not 100% satisfied with it and there's another couple of tricks we would like to try before calling the simulation "done" or "retired". We'll see where that brings us. In the meantime, the answer to your question is "a few more weeks", be patient :-)

So just to not let you get bored, we've published a new ship pack to www.floatingsandbox.com - Kiko's Ship Pack, containing 12 ships from one of the first Floating Sandbox ship engineers. Go get it while you wait for the next release! https://floatingsandbox.com/ship-packs/