Hello everyone,
Unfortunately there is no update to the build this week. We have made some very good progress but as sometimes happens we just could not get everything done as we had hoped.
There have been some large scale changes done to how gameplay is saved and loaded. Reducing the use of slower procedures during these processes will be very useful for when players save and load aquariums with thousands of objects within. This also revealed areas in part of the code that were not needed at all anymore and could be deleted which is always good.
There have also been a lot of organisational changes made to the code that make it easier to eliminate a certain class of bugs and reduce the size of the code overall which I have been wanting to do for a while.
We made some really nice progress with getting plants to change their simulation behaviour depending on whether the light is turned on.
We also fixed some minor non-crash bugs that players reported.
The Oscar (Astronotus Ocellatus)
I felt a little deflated when it was time to do this post on Friday because even though much changes have been made to the code it is not something that can really be shown. Improving the speed of certain operations and reducing memory usage by maybe 8 bytes per object is not something that is easy to show or even noticeable to most players but believe me it matters. To make it feel like something of interested has been achieved this week I modelled a new fish yesterday and for part of today .
The Oscar fish has a bit of a notorious reputation but adding the Oscar allows us to begin to add various new features to the fish behaviour. You should never house an Oscar with some Neon Tetras for instance. It will not end well for the Neons. The next iteration of our fish predation behaviour will be to enable larger fish to eat smaller fish in one gulp.
We already have that working in regards to fry being eaten because every other fish is bigger than a single fry. However we need to put in place some logic that allows each fish to know what fish they can eat whole and which they cannot. Adding the Oscar gives us a reason to start working on this.
After so much programming in the last weeks I feel the need to make more art content so after some loose ends from this week's build are tied up I will model some more fish and other things. My colleague is currently working on making the first floating plants to be added to the game very soon.
If all goes to plan we shall have a new build uploaded in the coming week and some nice new art content to show.
We wish you all a relaxing Sunday.
The Fishery Team