Hello everyone,
A new build has been uploaded. There were not a lot of super fancy modifications done to it this week. The usual batch of non critical bug fixes and some small quality of life changes to powered items.
Part of this UI was reorganised to make things less confusing. Instead of the slider being attached to the power attribute it has been separated into it's own strength attribute and the power usage and in this case the Oxygen output update as they did before but now things are more neat.
Auto mode is now optional. There is a checkbox to toggle it. By default auto mode is turned off which means the device is turned on all the time as long as there is enough power. But when Auto mode is enabled the min and max thresholds are preset to something useful depending on the function of the item. For instance this air stone is outputting Oxygen so we have made the min and max thresholds correspond to what would be useful to keep fish happy. The same is done for Co2, in which case the thresholds are set to keep plants happy and not be toxic to fish. The same changes apply to all powered plumbing items too.
Additions to ingame help:
A larger batch of help subjects have been added. All the main water chemistry components now have some explanation. Algae, Co2, Oxygen, Nutrients, Power, Salinity, Temperature and Waste. The purpose of these texts is to give players some instruction as to what use each component has in an aquarium. They refer to some of the important quantities that players need to know about. For instance in this example it mentions that when nutrients levels get to around 85% there is a high chance that Algae will start to grow. It is not meant to be a tutorial but we want it to function as a reference guide that players can refer to when they need to know something. It will eventually cover pretty much everything in the game. We will keep adding to it every week.
The main reason why the changes to the build are a little light this week is because we have been hard at work on making lots of new content.
Red Terror Cichlid:
Finally we are replacing the googly eyed red terror cichlid with something that resembles the current version of the game's art style. This one is the male variant of the model. The females are not too different in terms of model shape except there are differences in the length of their dorsal and anal fins. Their sizes are quite different also. For sure there will be a lot of last minute tweaking to be done before it goes into painting.
Red Terror Cichlid Silhouette:
The most important aspect for making 3d models or any kind of sculpture in general is the silhouette. Hopefully anyone who knows anything about cichlids would recognise this as some kind of cichlid after viewing it for half a second. In a game where there will be so many fish species added it is very important to make each type of fish distinctive in this way.
Amazon Puffer:
Ah yes the lovely little Colomesus Asellus otherwise known as the Amazon puffer. This was promised to someone on the forums and one must try to keep ones promises. Apparently it is quite difficult to determine the sex of these puffer fish so we will only add some subtle differences to the male and female models but most differences will be in the paint job.
Hawaiian Whitespotted Toby:
Another puffer fish. Canthigaster Jactator, commonly called the Hawaiian Whitespotted Toby, is a marine puffer fish. We don't really have any marine fish in the game yet and this gorgeous fish had to be modelled once I saw it.
You may have noticed there are no pictures of our puffers all puffed up. When we add them to the game they will most likely have that ability. You might have noticed in recent updates to the game that each fish has a stress response detailed in their info. The actual code for stress responses is still being worked on and the stress response for puffer fish is to inflate themselves. We will try our best to get that into the game this month with all the content we are working on but if we don't get it into the game this month then it will be added in January for sure.
The special fish I teased you all with last week has been modelled also but I cannot say anymore about it.
Sponge Filters:
Yes, Sponge filters. These were items that I said I did not want to put into the game because they are ugly but after more research and a lot of thinking about it I am warming to them. They will also play a important role in the game when we add story mode and players are concerned about the budget of their aquariums. Sponge filters are relatively cheap but useful and anyone who gets into keeping aquariums usually has some experience with them so I thought why not. Their size relative to each other will change somewhat. They will be scaled to better represent small, medium and large.
There are going to be some very interesting things revealed next week so be sure to come back and check that out.
We hope you all have a great weekend,
The Fishery Team