Hello everyone,
A warm thank you for all birthday wishes that were written in the comments of last weeks post. I did in fact manage to take it easy this week and have a break. My colleague also felt the time was right to rest a bit so it was a much less intense week for both of us. There won't be an update to the game itself this week but there definitely will be one next week.
I did manage to add some small but interesting features to the game that have been on my mind for some time but it was done in a leisurely, stress free fashion.
Selecting objects at the moment can be quite tedious especially if there are many objects to be selected. A small feature was added to allow players to simply click and drag the mouse to select whole groups of objects without lots of tedious clicking. It is almost like a selection "brush" where players brush their mouse over the scene and it selects whatever it hits. It also solves the problem of selecting fish. Fish can sometimes move a bit fast and making a precise mouse click atop a fish can be tricky. Players can now just chase the fish with the mouse button held to select it and it is a lot easier. This feature can also be used when de-selecting objects.
The next step for easing selection tedium is to add marquee selection. Sometimes known as a selection rectangle. We have the main part of it working but it still needs some tweaks to performance before it can be added to the game. There is a good chance it will be in the game before the end of August.
This is quite a valuable feature to also reduce player annoyance when selecting objects. A selection mask. Essentially players can tell the game what type of object they wish to select in order to prevent them selecting something they have no desire to select but at the same time make it easier to select the things they do want to select. In the above example we are trying to quickly select all the rocks but because there are plants in the way they too get selected which is undesired.
This second example shows how simple it is to select the rocks when we tell the game to ignore the plants when calculating selections. It is much easier to select the rocks and there are no undesired selections.
More progress has been made with the Hibuna goldfish models. These were worked on more today and I think they are ready to go to the painting phase but I will sleep on it and have another look on Monday with fresh eyes to see if I there is anything that jumps out on them that needs tweaking. There is not really much difference in shape between male and female Hibuna's in real life, unless the female of pregnant, so I added some variation to the overall body shape and fins so both models are not identical. There will be similar small differences done to their painted textures that will allow players to see a difference between them more clearly without them look too dissimilar.
The forums have been a little busier than usual this week so more time was spent answering questions and researching fish suggestions. Before I officially add a fish to the fish list based on someone's suggestion I need to do a quick bit of research to make sure it is something we can actually do in terms of animation, model complexity etc. We made a list for food and for plants and already received some suggestions which have been added. There is a lot of Latin to be read on the plant list. More lists will be added soon so remember to check them out as well as the existing ones.
We are back to work on Monday so expect a nice game update next week with at least one new species of fish and a few small feature updates, bug fixes etc.
We wish you all a good weekend,
The Fishery Team