Hello everyone,
Another week has passed and some very nice progress has been made. All our focus has been on getting the plumbing system ready for "end of month big-ish update". Needless to say there is no new build this week but we can of course still share the progress that has been made.
The models you see in these pictures are all only for testing purposes with the exception of the pipes. None of the colours and shaders are final either so keep in mind the look of these objects is all very "work in progress".
The water can now be modified by plumbing objects. The latest code goes through a list of connected plumbing objects and asks each one to modify the water in some way. Simple pipes only pass the water along to the next plumbing object in the chain. If the next object happens to be a filter, the waste component of the water will be modified and then passed to the next object for modification.
We have started making the UI panels. The most important aspect of these UI panels is that they need to show players exactly how each object modifies the water. Above you can see how much the oxygen content of the water is changed by this oxygen regulator.
One aspect of the game that we have been scratching our heads about has been power, specifically electricity. There will be objects inside the aquarium as well as inside the plumbing area that are powered by electricity. In the above image you can see that this slightly ugly test object is in fact a hydro-electric turbine. The water passes through it and generates electricity. This is much more interesting than just having a finite power supply come with each aquarium, as we had in the first release of the game. Doing it this way means players will have control over just how much power is available and allows for more problem solving in the plumbing area.
Daisy chaining waste filters.
The plumbing area's main constraint is space and we intend to add many many plumbing objects. Each object will have it's strengths and weaknesses. For instance a very basic waste filter will be able to reduce the overall waste in the water by e.g 20 points. If you need more waste removed then you could attach another filter to the output connector of the previous one and so on. This results in a daisy chain of filters that remove a lot of waste when combined. If space and cost is not a problem then you could just buy a larger, more powerful filter instead but this requires more space and may also require electricity to work.
The plumbing system will be expanded over time to include many more devices and the water chemistry will be upgraded to handle more components like salt, PH and disease.
The first release of the plumbing system will come with only basic objects. Pipes, a waste filter, oxygen and c02 regulator, algae filter, power turbine, heater. This will be enough to allow things to work but as was said above this is just the beginning. Over time we will keep adding new objects that modify the water chemistry in useful ways.
For instance too much oxygen in the water can become toxic to fish. This problem could be a result of having lots and lots of plants producing all that oxygen. One way of solving the problem would be to simply remove some of the plants or add more fish, however this might conflict with whole creative idea for the aquarium. There will be a device called an "Oxygen Scrubber" which can be placed into the plumbing that absorbs oxygen from the water at a fixed rate. This would allow you to solve the problem without compromising your creative intentions as long as you have enough plumbing space.
Now of course players don't actually need to to use the plumbing system if they don't want to. There will be career mode qualifications and jobs that require players to make aquariums that are completely natural. Later on there will also be achievements for creating natural self-sustaining aquariums. Like most things in the game the plumbing system is just a creative tool but it also allows players to push the boundaries of what is possible in the game.
80% of the most important code is working at the time of writing this. Most of the programming that is still needed is UI coding and robustness coding. We spend a lot of time playing the game whilst trying to make things go wrong and break. It also helps us get an idea of what performance is like across a range of computers. Time is spent testing on older, lower powered computers. This helps us see what is slow, if we can improve performance for the slowest machines it automatically improves performance on anything that is faster.
We hope you all have a good weekend, We shall be back next week with more juicy progress.
The Fishery Team