Hello everyone,
It has been another rather intense week. We were determined to get back to releasing on a Friday and we are very happy to say we have succeeded. A lot of changes have been made. Bug fixes, optimisations, improvements to code robustness. We have also added some new art content, changes to the manipulators, fish ai and more.
These are objects that have been requested by players and since we need to test out some new code for these sorts of objects it was the perfect time to add them. This is just the beginning for these sorts of devices. There will be more ornamental objects that add gas into the water like the typical treasure chest that has bubbles coming from inside it to mini volcanoes.
This is a glimpse of the type of controls players will have when we add the plumbing system. There will be lots of devices like gas regulators, filters, heaters etc. that will be controlled by sliders that change that devices operation. It will be possible for players to have very precise control of water chemistry. Just as long as the devices are well maintained and have enough power. Power is not present in this example because that is being remade completely for the new plumbing system.
Here is another player request. The ability to change the coordinate space of manipulators. In a nutshell this means players can have the manipulator orientated towards the world or towards the object in question.
Switching is very simple. Click the little arrow in the bottom corner of the manipulator buttons and then choose a coordinate system.
We have made updates to the fish AI and added a new AI behaviour. Fish can now idle. Yes, they stop and contemplate digital existence for a while and then move on to something else. This was a much requested AI behaviour from players and it is high time we added it. This comes after we made huge changes to how fish are programmed and how the AI is programmed. It is now easier to add behaviours than before and takes less time. There is still work to be done to get things perfect but it means in the near future we can add more fish behaviours on a more regular basis.
Below is a slightly more detailed set of release notes and a roadmap for next week.
Fixes and improvements:
- Changes to the way fish AI is coded. Making it easier to add new behaviours without doing too much boiler plate code.
- Added an a new fish AI behaviour idle.
- Removal of lots of duplicate code shared between delectable items. This is part of a large reorganisation of the code so more creative item types can easily be authored without duplicating code.
- Translate and rotate tools now have the possibility to switch coordinate spaces.
- The first set of air stones have been added. Players can choose the ratio of C02 and oxygen released as well as the overall amount of gas released.
- Fixed a bug where the selection UI would appear in game modes where it shouldn't.
- Fixed a bug where renaming a fish to a name with an "f" in it would to the camera going into frame mode.
- Optimised the code for computing wander positions.
- Flock group target positions are not calculated every frame for groups that have no fish in the flock AI state thus reducing calculations where they are not needed.
- Flock AI steering direction will be re-computed based on the number of fish in the flock state and not based on the overall number of fish in existence.
- Added more robustness to the code that creates objects via the brush or drag placement mode. Objects that cannot be scaled will have their scale set to 1.0
Known Issues:
- Food and medicine still may not save and load properly. This is due to changes being made to their core code. We could not finish all their changes and could not make them savable at this time. This does not cause program instability. The items will simply not appear when loaded but players can still create new ones.
- Info UI for some items still don't work, this is being fixed soon.
What are we working on in the upcoming week?
- Experimenting with painting more realistic fish eyes
- Starting to make the new plumbing system
- New algae and waste textures
- Additional tweaks to fish AI
- Start coding for more interesting types of fish food. Like chunks of broccoli
- Cleanup more of the core item code
It has been a very intense week but we cannot wait to continue working on this stuff next week. Very exciting times lay ahead.
The Fishery Team