Hello everyone
As we mentioned last week there will be no new build this week. However much interesting work has been done but this post will be a little shorter than usual.
The usual batch of bug fixes, code cleanups and performance tweaks have been worked on but the really interesting thing we worked on is the water change feature. We were as busy as beavers this week getting this all working.
Water change: (gif playback is about 2x speed)
This feature will certainly help players keep their aquariums a lot cleaner and the water chemistry a bit more stable. In the example gif a 75% water change is being performed. 75% of the water is removed and replaced with an equal volume of clean water. This removes approximately the same volume of water chemistry contents. You can see there is a large reduction in algae and waste but co2, oxygen, nutrients and temperature are also reduced by this process.
This could temporarily upset some of the less hardy plants and/or fish that are present in your aquarium so players will need to get a feel for what each species can handle. There are 5 options for the percent of water changed. 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%. Performing a 25% water change will result in less stress to some of your more sensitive fish and plants but you may have to perform the water change more often.
This brings us to the next feature that we are in the process of adding. Day and night cycles. The answer to the question "how often should I do a water change?" only makes sense if there is a concept of time that is familiar to all of us. Doing a 25% water change every 3 to 5 days makes more sense than doing one every 250,000 to 430,000 seconds.
Water changes and water chemistry in general depends a lot on the concept of a day because we can better calculate how things work and how long things should take. How long should it take for algae to grow to a point where something drastic must be done? We can begin to answer those questions.
From my own experience it can be as short as three days before algae growth gets to a point where I needed to change the water, clean the glass, clean the rocks etc all because of a simple mistake. The numbers in our game will be tweaked to follow these sorts timespans and this will hopefully avoid confusion and frustration to players.
There is a lot to talk about when it comes to day and night cycles but I shall save all of that for next week. Anyway there is still much to be done so we better dive back into it.
We wish you all a very good weekend.
The Fishery Team