Hello everyone,
It has been another week and we have remade another fish! No update to the actual build this week as we had hoped which is very disappointing but we shall explain why further down.
The Sunburst Platy.
The model had been remade a few weeks ago but on closer inspection we felt it needed another day's work to get it's overall silhouette correct and clean up parts of it's wireframe topology. That is why we are a little late with this post. Perfectionism forced us to delay by 1 day. However we think it was worth it.
Female:
Male:
There is not too much difference between male and female platy fish in real life. The females tend to be a bit bigger and the fin next to their butt is a different shape. We did add some differences to their models and skin which hopefully you can see in these tiny compressed gifs.
This is what the inventory looks like at the moment. Players will be able to choose explicitly whether to add a male or female of a given species. We are also exploring the idea of having players be able to pick baby or juvenile fish from the inventory but their gender will be determined at random once added. We won't be adding any non-adult fish just yet though.
Hopefully in the coming week we can upload a new build. The reason it is taking so long is because we are also working on a serious update to fish behaviour. Specifically we needed to change the flocking behaviour in such a way that males and females of the same species would swim together. We have also worked on generally improving how flocking works in terms of creating something that looks pleasing to the eye. We have also improved the performance in some small areas which is also good. We are also working on adding the capability for fish of different species to flock together. That means for instance that guppies and neon tetras could swim together in flocks. Not sure when that will be in the game but it will come soon.
Here is just a quick example showing the latest version of the flocking. We are also working to improve the code for obstacle avoidance. Sometimes the fish swim into objects as if they did not see them which is undesirable and makes them look a little too stupid for our liking so obstacle avoidance has been worked on more and improved. It is still not perfect but each time we go back to try to improve it we do actually improve it which is good.
In the coming week we will work on replacing the current neon blue tux guppy with brand new versions and actually have a new build for you all to play with.
Thank you all for being patient and have a great weekend.
The Fishery Team