Dear shipmates,

After months of re-working the technical innards of the simulator, we have finally taken a decision: a new update will see the light in a couple of weeks, and it will be Floating Sandbox 1.15.2!

This release will contain a number of fantastic technical improvements.

First of all, we've re-calibrated some of the most important parameters of the simulation. What does this mean to you? In the first place, this means that the rigidity of structures has improved a lot; the "jelly" effect of some soft ships is now less pronounced. Secondarily, if you are one of those lucky ones with a fast computer, you should have noticed that the simulation has been running a tad too fast at full frame rate (which is 64 frames per second); with this update however 1 second of simulated time runs in 1 second of wall-clock time - when running at full frame rate. A consequence of this is that the simulation will generally behave more realistically on both slow and fast computers.

Secondly, we have finally been able to produce a 32-bit build. All of you running 32-bit versions of Windows 7, 8, and 10 will now be able to play Floating Sandbox, with limited frame rate loss (just 10% less). So if you are a 32-bit player, welcome onboard!

Thirdly, Floating Sandbox is now being localized! The upcoming release will see the light with English, Italian, and Russian, while we are busy seeking help for additional languages for future versions.

Lastly, as announced months ago, the rendering sub-system has been completely moved to a separate thread, resulting in performance improvements on multi-core laptops between 10% and 25%.

In conclusion, with this update we are buying ourselves some much-needed headroom to allow for some resource-intensive fantastic features in the future.

It will take us only a couple of weeks before this update is released. And after this update, the frontier work - which enables hydrodynamics and many other behaviors - will finally start in full gears!

Stay tuned and heads up for the update!