Hello everyone,
Build 72 was uploaded a few days ago on Saturday. It includes a lot of tweaks, fixes and enhancements.
Lighting Help Text:
We have added help text for the overall light control buttons. We also modified it's naming so it does not cause too much confusion with the new lights that we added in the previous build.
Instead of the light control buttons being called "turn on light" or "turn off light" they are named to be less confusing and the new help text should better explain what having each set of lights on or off will do in regards to the light exposure of your aquariums.
To make it even more clear we have modified the name of light exposure to be "Day light exposure" which should also make it more clear that it increases only when day lighting is enabled. We also slightly modified it's help text too.
To be consistent we also made sure to match the naming change for the requirements for fish and plants etc. So now every organism that had a light exposure need now has a "Day Light Exposure" need.
Hopefully this should clear up any confusion that we have created on the subject of lights and light exposure. If not then of course let us know and we will see about making further tweaks.
Lighting Gobos:
We added another small feature to the new lights. They are called "Gobos" or "Cookies". Think of them as shapes put in front of the light to cast a shadow. They can be applied to directional and spot lights. They are useful for spicing up the lighting a little bit and creating more interesting light patterns. We have added 12 simple-ish shapes to begin with but later on we will add some more interesting and complex ones. When Gobos are applied to direction lights they will start to behave more like a a spot light in the way that it's position is taken into account more than when a Gobo is not applied. We will add Gobos to point lights at some point in the future too.
We made further tweaks to how fish swim, their general behaviours and other enhancements:
- Fish overall motion should look a lot more pleasant when they are shoaling together.
- Fish more noticeably swim at their preferred depth.
- When larger fish take a bite of their food they are closer to the food and it looks more natural.
- The shape of fish physics colliders are now a much better fit than before so there is less chance of them getting caught or knocked around in tight situations.
- Pathfinding is a more efficient.
- At night once fish have slept enough they will swim slowly around so it is less boring.
- Algae and Waste visuals have been tweaked to be visible in the amount that matches their saturation better.
- Algae and waste that appears on the glass now interacts with lighting and shadows and is not 100% bright no matter the lighting conditions. It has also been tweaked to look better.
- Algae and waste particles have been turned off because we could not get them to interact properly with shadows and they stuck out and looked ugly. We will turn them back on in the future if we solve this.
- water fog has been tweaked to be less bright.
We jammed a lot of fixes and tweaks into this build and we still have a lot of similar items on the to-do list for the next build which hopefully will be uploaded some time within the next one or two weeks. Very busy time indeed but it is great to make things work better.
We wish you all a very good week.
The Fishery Team