Hello everyone,
The game build has been updated!
There is a lot to talk about so I will get right to it.
- The entire UI has been reorganised again to reduce clutter and make things less busy. We are also preparing to add UI for more features that are upcoming.
- settings for selections and manipulation have been tucked away more neatly.
- Water chemistry data is now placed at the top of the screen which is where most people expect to see it and it is visible while in plumbing mode
- Data showing the number of fish, plants, medicines etc have also been placed at the top of the screen. Their lists have been disabled for the time being because they are in the process of being redesigned to actually show useful information.
- The escape menu has been expanded to hold more functionality than before and buttons like the options, load, save buttons have been placed in their menu and not cluttering the screen anymore.
- In the next update the game will actually pause when this menu is shown.
- first version of the breeding system has been added. All fish breed in the same way for now. They all lay eggs. We have tweaked the numbers so they hopefully wont breed out of control.
- The selection uis of all objects have been modified to look nicer and show better information in a more clear manner.
- plants and fish now have a stress parameter. This is preparing for a "Stress response" feature where a fish or plant's behaviour might change when under a lot of stress.
- creation options for the shop/inventory have been better placed and simplified. They also have some quick help text that appears when players put their mouse of the name of each parameter.
- The creation placement brush has had it's best bits merged with the new and improved placement tool. A new brush tool that works way better will return to the game in the future.
- more particle fx have been added to plumbing objects help give them more life when they are turned on. Though it will be vastly improved.
- The way that algae is calculated has been modified to accommodate the new simulation system. There are still changes that need to be made the how it is visualised. Algae will grow on parts of the glass and we will bring back floating algae particles. Algae will also be a food source in the near future for some new fish we will add as well as some of the current ones.
- players can now add salt into the water. Alas there are not really any saltwater fish or corals in the game yet but they are coming very soon.
- when players choose aquariums they can now see the dimensions as cm or inches and volume as litres or gallons. however the button in the options to switch between them wont be added until later this week.
- Plumbing connectors have little arrows painted onto them. They are meant to look like someone drew them on with marker pen. We have been inspired by a lot of images and videos made by people on the internet who have made plumbing related systems out of household items. People breeding brine shrimp in old coke bottles, algae reactors in old kettles etc. We quite like the mad scientist vibe that we get when looking at their stuff and want to incorporate some of that in various plumbing items. It also makes things look a little more personal.
- pre selection UIs for plumbing objects show less information but it is more informative than just saying "connected".
- Selection UIs for plumbing objects have also been updated and all items that use electricity have the auto enable feature assigned to them.
There are a countless number of code tweaks which have reduced memory usage per item added to the aquarium. We have done our best to reduce how much code needs to execute in order to update everything.
All the new fish we have shown in previous posts have been added to the game. Along with a lot of the other features and tweaks that were talked about. New Co2 and oxygen regulators have been added to the plumbing system. The new versions of the nutrient injector and algae reactor have not been added. There are some more tweaks that need to be made before we are happy. There are a lot of plumbing items still to come. Different types of filters that come in different sizes. For larger aquariums it would not make sense to chain together lots of small filters but rather use a larger more fancy filter that gets the job done.
There are of course a few rough edges to this update. The breeding behaviour is still not quite right. The fish are meant to swim around each other in a sort of poetic way. This kind of works when there is a moderate size difference between the partners but if they are near the same size they sort of just face each other like they are kissing which is quite funny but not what we have intended.
I still need to add controls to the options menu that allows players to decide how they want their units displayed. cm, inches, gallons, litres, etc.
The data that displays for each fish in their info tab is not unique for each fish yet. I just need to update the data files with all the correct information about their size, care level, temperament etc. We also need to double check all the information to make sure that the sizes and water conditions are correct.
This update took so long because we decided to fix and implement an enormous chunk of our to-do list that has grown after the past year. As usually happens with programming fixing one problem requires fixing another and another and another.
This coming Friday there will be another post which talks about anything that I forgot to talk about in this post and more of the other things we are working on. Now that we can make saltwater aquariums we must add some things that actually require saltwater. That means soon we will add some coral and I promised someone on the forums that the first saltwater fish we add is a type of puffer fish so I better get started on that.
We should also be able to do another update to the build this Friday. There is still some work that needs to be done that I just could not squeeze into this update. Updating the in-game help with new images, fixing a few small ui bugs. They are not crash bugs. just things that don't always display the correct numbers and of course the usual tweaks to AI, shaders, etc
I'll spend some extra time on the forums this week replying to any posts that I have missed because we were too busy trying to get this update out. All questions shall be answered.
Thank you all for your patience and we shall update you with more progress very very soon.
The Fishery team.