Dear shipmates,

This progress update is very likely going to be the last one about the progress with NPCs in our toy ship development environment, dubbed "BaryLab"; our next progress update will undoubtedly be about the work for integrating this prototyping code in Floating Sandbox!

Since our last update we have worked on three things:

1. Optimizations: once satisfied with the non-inertial physics work in barycentric coordinates, we've turned our attention to optimizing code and algorithms. In our benchmark with 8,192 NPCs, we managed to take down calculations from 2.7ms to 2.1ms!

2. Floorplan generation: even though future versions of Floating Sandbox will allow creators to construct custom floorplans for their ships, we still need to generate reasonable floorplans for ships that don't have any. To this end, we have worked on an initial algorithm that does exactly that and which is able to generate engaging floorplans from almost every ship structure.

3. Complex walk paths: an engaging floorplan is undoubtedly made of floors and staircases, and NPCs need to be able to reach all the crannies and corners of a ship. Thanks to an idea from our friend Dario Bazzichetto, our NPCs now detect the presence of alternative paths in the floor and decide which one to take.

This video showcases the latest version of the prototype:

(make sure to max your speakers as I find the soundtrack amazing!)

Tomorrow we will officially begin the work to integrate the NPCs in Floating Sandbox, after which some more work will need to be taken care of.

Some basic things in fact will need to be implemented soon - such as physical interactions with the world (e.g. explosions and fire), skinning and rendering, and floorplan visualization - while some others may come later - such as sounds, furniture, role-play of passengers, more complex behaviors, and the ability to build complex floorplans in the ShipBuilder - and thus we'll also have to plan what will be in the first release and what instead may come later in subsequent updates.

Talk to you soon with news about these NPCs in a real ship!

Gabe