Hello everyone,
My goodness it has been a somewhat disappointing end to the week. Tis in fact Sunday which is not the usual day to post an update at all and unfortunately there is no new build this week. There has been a lot of good changes made to fish behaviour and fish animations this week but the problem is that I have managed to somehow make it so the obstacle avoidance part of the code is not doing it's job properly and the fish are just swimming into things and getting stuck. Most likely it is some stupid mistake I have made in the vector maths or something equally silly somewhere else but I'm just a little too tired to realise what it is so I can fix it.
disappointed puffer
We did manage to get stress behaviours working. this means that certain semi-aggressive and aggressive fish will seek out other fish and attack them when they are stressed out. Puffer fish just inflate and sort of swim around in a cumbersome manner which is quite fun. When fry get too stressed they just die. Other fish just stop eating.
When a fish is being attacked it will try it's best to flee it's attacker if it is of a peaceful temperament otherwise it will fight back. Though if it fights back it could easily be confused for mating so a little more polish needs to go into the first iteration of that behaviour before we release it.
Predation is almost in the game. We have focused on predation of fry first. If fish are really hungry and there is no food in the aquarium but there is fry then the fry becomes food to them. More aggressive fish will not wait so long to eat them. If they are slightly to moderately hungry and have a choice between fry and some non-living fish food then they will choose the fry. There will of course be more nuance added with this as we make progress but this is the first version because certain fish have more "rules" when it comes to eating fry.
We have also made careful preparations in the code for adding the day and night cycle. Having the concepts of day and night will have drastic changes on how behaviour in the game is triggered. For instance certain fish like to spawn first thing in the morning when the lights come on. Other fish spawn at night in the moonlight. It also allows us to make algae growth dependent on light as well as nutrients levels. Plants breathe in oxygen and breathe out Carbon dioxide at night. The concept of age actually becomes a proper thing with a day and night cycle. Suddenly the length of time something has existed in the aquarium can be measured in days which means fish, plants and the aquarium itself can have age related parameters which allow for more interesting things to occur. It will also mean that fish will only need feeding once a day. We will be able to fix a lot of those kinds of issues that are related to the frequency of things occurring.
So time for a little rest and then back to work making this game better.
The Fishery Team