Dear shipmates,

Almost two months ago - technically, less than 24 hours after the release of 1.16.7 - we started coding the new "Ship Builder" subsystem of the simulator. As you probably know (after reading the roadmap article), the next release of Floating Sandbox will in fact sport an integrated ship builder that allows players to build ships from within the game, without having to deal with image editors, image files, and obscure pixel coordinates.

We are happy to report that development has been going at a steady pace and that we have been making steady and astonishing progress!

First of all it took us a few weeks to just nail down the coarse architecture; we knew we wanted some form of MVC (Model-View-Controller) but we were not so sure about the precise outline. We ended up with a Model-View-Controller-ModelController architecture that is working fantastically, enabling innovation while keeping code neat at the same time.

We then re-architected completely the basics of the on-disk representation of ships. Starting with the next version the official file format for ships will be, in fact, a new format that groups together all the various pieces of information (structure, electrical layer, ropes, texture, metadata, etc.) in a single file, easier to distribute and move around. Of course your old .png and .shp files will still work, but new ships created with the builder will be saved in this new ".shp2" file format.

After having nailed down these basics, we moved on to developing the basic tools for proper ship-making. At the time of writing we have nailed down the two most basic tools - pencil and eraser - and managed to get a long-time friend of Floating Sandbox to build the very first Floating Sandbox ship with the builder! Here's a recording of his quick'n'dirty session:

There is still a lot of work to complete, but fear not! For this 1.17.x series of releases we would like to adopt a new release strategy, consisting of many small updates, released quite often.

We plan in fact to release 1.17.0 "quite soon" (read: a few weeks), containing only some basic tools - e.g. pencil, eraser, and flood, usable only on the Structural and Electrical layers. After this release, we will follow-up with many subsequent smaller releases, each adding one or two features out of the ton of features that we have planned for the builder, some of which are summarized as follows:

• Support for the Ropes layer

• Support for the Texture layer

• Select/Copy/Paste/Cut

• Line tool

• Rectangle tool

• Sample tool

• Move

• Crop

• Automated structural analysis (think e.g. real-time indication of waterline)

• Quick start from texture

• Preview generation

That's all for this status update. We hope we've managed to whet your appetite in anticipation of the upcoming release, stay tuned and talk to you again in a few weeks!