Hello everyone,
This weeks update comes with a few, but very nice quality of life fixes and yet more re-organising of the shop inventories ui. We have also been working on the content update that is scheduled for release next week which is really coming together and should be a lot of fun for players. But we shall talk about that a little bit later. For now I'll talk you through this weeks tweaks.
Shop inventory re-organisation:
yes once again the shop ui has been changed around. There are now sub-categories for each main category. For instance, the decorations category has been split into four sub-categories. Natural, Garden, Wreckage and Misc. It is planned that the number of categories and their contents will expand greatly over time which is why we are doing this re-organising now rather than later.
Duplication tool:
players can now duplicate any object they have created in their aquarium. At the moment it can only be done via a keyboard shortcut, holding Left Control and pressing the "d" key, the aim of this tool is to eliminate more tedious clicking when creating similar objects. It works for everything, fish, food, decorations, medicine etc.
Camera zoom sensitivity:
sometimes when scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom the camera it can zoom more than we might like. especially if we are close to an object but only want to get a tiny bit closer. If players hold Left Control and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom, it will now zoom at a much slower rate so players can maneuver the camera to exact right position. This works for both camera control styles.
Free camera mode's framing functionality:
Double clicking or pressing F on an object will attach the camera to that object and zoom into it at a nice distance from the object. If this is done in free camera mode it was a bit crap. That is now fixed and the framing mode for the free camera behaves just like the orbital camera's framing mode which works much better.
Free camera zoom functionality:
The style of zooming with the mouse wheel works very nice for the orbital camera mode. For the free camera mode's scroll wheel action is not very good at all. Now the free camera mode's mouse scroll wheel zoom works just like the orbital camera's.
Tweaks to other smaller ui panels:
The ui panels for the substrate editor, water level editor, photo mode panel and backdrop editor were all not properly placed. They have now been moved to a better position.
Flashing ui alert icons:
The alert icons for the aquarium stats ui now flash on and off over the course of a second. Some players have not noticed the alerts when playing so this is an attempt to make them more visible to your peripheral vision.
That is what we managed to finish for this week's update. As I said before there has been a lot of work done for next week's update and we have been planning and testing large changes that will be talked about and released in November.
November will be a very busy month. We are going to rip the guts out of a lot of the existing code that manages the main simulation of water chemistry as well as fish ai and replacing it with something that is more fun and requires less tedious clicking from the player to get the C02 levels correct etc. We are also going to make the next version of all the shaders which should require even less calculations on player's graphics hardware which will result in faster rendering of the game.
Thanks again for all the feedback and comments, they are really helping us to make meaningful improvements. Stay tuned for next week's update, no doubt you will find it a treat.
The Fishery Team