Hello everyone,
We will have a new build uploaded tomorrow (Saturday) rather than tonight because we want to do more testing to make sure the changes we made this week are not causing trouble but rest assured that it will be uploaded.
We were hoping to have more of the career system done this week and into the build but we just did not have time. The aim was to have first parts of the "Aquarium School" tutorials ready. For instance basic tutorials that teach players how the cameras work, selecting, de-selecting, creating objects and fish, caring for plants etc. There are going to be pre-made aquariums that are to be used as teaching aquariums which are loaded when players decide to try and gain qualifications and complete these tutorials. These aquariums will be loaded much like normal aquariums that the player creates.
However sharp eyed players might have noticed how long it takes to load an aquarium or make a new one. It is not horrendously slow but it's not super fast either. It can take anywhere from 8-15 seconds depending on the computer it is run on. The reason it takes this long is actually nothing to do with the aquarium it is loading. Every time an aquarium is loaded the entire gameplay scene is reloaded along with it. That means all the art assets and code is freed from memory and reloaded again. This is quite nice because it ensures that everything is loaded and setup afresh but it is not how it should be when players want to switch rapidly between aquariums.
The solution therefore is to just delete only the contents of the aquariums that were created by the player before recreating the aquarium to be loaded. It sounds easy bit it is actually quite tricky because so many of these objects connect to other parts of the game so they can simulate correctly. Removing all these connections has to be done quite carefully so parts of the code are not accessing memory that has been made invalid because an object has been deleted.
We finally managed to get it all working correctly and now the loading times that previously took 8-15 seconds now take around 1 second. Which is great. We also managed to increase the stability and reduce complexity of the main gameplay scene's loading code and greatly increased the stability and robustness of the aquarium manager where players actually manage their aquarium files.
In reality loading times, reading and writing files are quite uninteresting to most players but wasting 10+ seconds every time players want to load an aquarium is just not good enough. For instance if we manage to sell 100,000 copies of fishery and every player loaded one aquarium after the game booted and loaded itself once. That is approximately 1,000,000 seconds of loading which translates to approximately 11.5 days collectively spent just loading. If you extrapolate that over the course of the game's lifetime it quickly adds up to tens of thousands of years spent on loading.
But anyway, now that it has been fixed up and made more robust we can start adding the more interesting gameplay stuff so stay tuned for that in next week's update.
We have also been working more on designing the first art content for the plumbing system. Our research into the subject has found that it is common to have plastic pipes for such systems. However plastic is not the most interesting of materials so we have spent time trying to make the models themselves quite interesting and not just simple cylinders.
We have also made more progress with the design work for a few basic devices like filters and gas regulators but they are not quite ready for showing just yet. We will be able to show something next week along with a few other things.
January has gone by quite fast indeed. Although we have not got everything into the game that we wanted in this month, what has been added is quite important and we are glad they are off the to-do list. We wish you all a good weekend.
The Fishery Team