Game
Floating Sandbox
6 years ago

The Frontier Maintenance Work Has Started!


After the extenuating marathon to deliver the 1.15.2 technical update, we're back to following the schedule that we announced months ago in our post, and specifically, we are now working on the preparatory work for hydrodynamics.

With hydrodynamics we mean the simulation of water drag against the hull of the ship, which in order to be proper, has to take into account the orientation of the surface of the ship with regards to the velocity of the particles. To this end the simulator must be continuously aware of which particles make up the border - or "frontier" - of the ship, and we plan to achieve this in two steps.

In the first step, upon loading a ship the simulator detects all the particles of that ship that lie on a border. We've been working on this step for the past few weeks, coding a "marching pixel" algorithm that takes into account the specifics of the tessellation in Floating Sandbox, with the results that are shown in this video:

A ship always has one or more external frontiers and zero or more internal frontiers. As you can see from the video, we are connecting particles along external frontiers in a clockwise fashion, while particles along internal frontiers are connected in an anti-clockwise fashion. Quiz: can you imagine why we're doing this? Hint: the answer has to do with surface normals...

The next step will be to maintain this border each time a part of the ship is broken or repaired. This will be the most complicated step of the two, especially considering that it needs to happen at lightning speed in order to prevent sudden lags when the ship gets destroyed to smithereens. Keep following us to get updates on our progress!

P.S.: we haven't forgotten about the 1.15.3 update - the patch for "Intel HD Graphics" cards that run the game at less than 1 FPS. The patch is ready, but this time we have ordered a code-signing certificate which should make it easier for anti-virus software to trust our executables. We are waiting for the certificate to be delivered, after which we'll publish the 1.15.3 update!

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