Hello everyone,
A new build should be uploaded some time tomorrow (Saturday) if all goes smoothly with testing. We did not get to finish as much as we wanted this week but we still managed to get a new fish in the game.
Female Green Grass Guppy (updated fin colours):
Male Green Grass Guppy:
Finally I have finished the male green grass guppy and updated the female guppy's fins to match the colourings. These are halfmoon guppies. We are also going to add as many of the other types of guppies as we can such as spear tail, flag tail, round tail etc and we will paint as many varieties of colourings as we can too. There seems to be an endless amount of colourings so feel free to check out the fish list on the forums and make suggestions for guppies that you would like us to prioritise. Also feel free to make suggestions for all other types of fish too. The list keeps growing and it gives us a clear picture of what fish are most important for us to include in the game.
Next week I will make the new models for the common goldfish. I also feel a bit of a tingle in the brain to model another variety of goldfish too, perhaps a Ranchu or a black moor.
Fungi:
Fungi has been added into the game. They are a new object type that we introduced in last week's post. The main purpose of fungi is to help remove waste from aquariums without the need for an artificial filter. There are going to be story lines in career mode that require players to gain knowledge about how to create 100% natural and self sustaining aquariums that don't use any plumbing and fungi are just another tool in the toolbox to help players achieve that.
The white mushroom is called Psathyrella Aquatica. It was discovered in 2005 and is the only known gilled mushroom that lives completely submerged underwater and was found anchored in rivers that have quite strong currents. Naturally we had to include it in our game. You can expect to see some more species of fungi added in the future.
There have also been some tweaks to how shadows work. We are using a technique called "Cascaded shadow maps". To put it simply it allows us to calculate the shadows of objects close to the camera with more detail than objects further away. This not only makes things look better but reduces shadow rendering time for objects further away from camera. Objects further away from camera usually take up less screen space, therefore they are seen with less details and we can use a much lower resolution shadow map for their shadows.
Remember to check our progress next week to see some nice new fish models as well as some nice progress in other areas of the game. As usual we hope you all have a good weekend.
The Fishery Team.