Hello everyone,
This week we spent a lot of time focusing on substrate. It's visual appearance has remained more or less unchanged since the initial release and it was high time that we worked on it. We were also able to add some more functionality to it and of course we could not resist the urge to optimise and improve it's code.
We have added an additional substrate 7 materials. I did so much painting this week that my thumb hurts from holding my art tablet stylus. The shaders, which are the small programs that control how the graphics card renders the substrate have been remade to use less memory and less computations while looking better than the previous version.
Each substrate now has the capability to modify the water chemistry. For instance some substrates that contain earth/soil increase the nutrients in the water while other substrates made of rocks and other minerals increase CO2 and oxygen. This means that the reason for choosing which substrate to have will not be based solely on appearance. Another way of thinking about it is that we are attempting to add the butterfly effect into the game in an indirect way. Every change the player makes to their aquarium by adding or removing something will affect the simulation. The full consequences of these actions will make themselves known later. That does not mean that every outcome will be sinister in nature. We want to allow to very cool positive things to happen and be made possible. A lot of the numbers that govern this are not final to keep in mind that an item's inputs and outputs are far from final as we test and test what works well.
What we have added is but a small sample of where we plan to go with substrates. We are going to be adding more varieties of materials in the upcoming months. Some materials are quite traditional while others are a little more creative and surreal.
Hotkeys for using the manipulator tools have been added. These have been on the to-do list for a while and this week someone mentioned it on the forums and we were able to squeeze it in at the last minute. The hotkeys are X, C and V. They allow players to activate the Scale, Rotate and Translate manipulators. The reason we have gone for these hotkeys instead of using S, R, T as suggested in the forum post are because they require less finger stretching to use them.
Their use is also historical. They were also the hotkeys used for the same purpose in a 3D program named Softimage which was one of the earliest commercial 3D programs which was used widely across the 3D industry. So we are confident in our thinking that players will find this comfortable since countless artists have collectively spent thousands of years using them.
As is usual most weeks this was not the only things we focused on. Typically we focus on a small set of things that we know are almost ready to be put into the game at the same time as working on more complex/larger things that take more than a week to get right. Occasionally our plans get derailed somewhat if there is an major bug or set of features that are really in need of modification. We have some quite useful and interesting things lined up to be added into the game this month. As usual they include things that we often say are "coming soon" or "are being worked on" but we really do mean it.
We wish you all a relaxed weekend.
The Fishery Team