Hello everyone,
As promised we have uploaded build 71 which is the lighting update we talked about in last week's post.
When players load up an old aquarium from a previous version of fishery or create a new aquarium the lighting will look almost exactly the same as previous versions. This is so things are not too confusing and if players have no interest in getting into lighting yet then there will not be any visual disruptions. For those of you who wish to dabble with lights it is very easy to get to grips with.
By enabling the "Show Lights" button found in the bottom left of the screen players will then be able to see the light icons that exist in the scene. By default in every new or old aquarium there exists two lights. An ambient light and a directional light. They are always positioned above the aquarium so they are easy to see.
Once they have been made visible they can then be selected and manipulated like any other object in the game. There is a news lights category found in the inventory where players can create new lights from. We have added a few new parameters since last week to the lights selection ui. Mostly to do with shadowing. Shadow options can now be set on a per light basis rather than having the shadow settings in the main game options. Not every light needs to have shadows enabled and if they are enabled players may wish to further adjust their resolution and how dark they are.
There is now only one setting in the main options to do with shadows which allows players to stop fish casting shadows. I personally find they way that fish cast shadows onto themselves rather ugly especially on their fins which are quite thin and in the case of their dorsal fins face upwards which causes them to just look darker most of the time and the shadows flicker horribly. The way realtime shadows look in games in general is still not fantastic especially since we essentially compute shadows as an image from the perspective of a light and project it onto every object that is being shadowed. Often we can see pixelation problems and flickering depending on the type of light used and it can be distracting. Anyhow the option to prevent fish casting shadows on themselves is there for those who don't like how it looks.
We have updated all example aquariums and added a few new ones to include lighting. Here is the example known as "Tree Trunk" which we have lit to look like the sun is setting... or rising.
We have added both day and night lighting to all examples:
Day with light icons:
Night with light icons:
We hope players can have a good time learning from all these examples there are close to twenty now in the game.
New Fish!
Shubunkin Female:
Shubunkin Male:
We are getting through our list of goldfish species. I think next we will add a pair of black moor goldfish which were my favourite when I was little.
Rename Aquariums:
Renaming an aquarium is much requested feature that kept getting deprioritised and is now in the game. It is little features like this which are quite often overlooked by us but actually quite important.
We also fixed a lot of bugs and made quality of life improvements here is a short list of some of the more interesting changes:
- (Bugfix) Problems with fish getting stuck while nibbling algae
- (Bugfix) Fry and juvenile fish needs don't match that of their parents
- (Bugfix) Betta fish should require warm water instead of cold
- (Tweak) Re-textured dissolvables and added a new algae spore dissolvable
- (Tweak) O2 and CO2 simulate in a way that is less annoying and requires less constant tweaking from players
- (Tweak) Water changes can happen much more frequently
- (Tweak) Breeding takes a little less time to happen
- (Tweak) Water chemical utilities are more affective in larger aquariums
There are a few new issues in need of fixing that were introduced in this version. Particles such as waste or algae particles do not respond to lights as do the algae and waste that gets splatted onto the glass. These transparent materials need a lot of extra care taken when it comes to lighting otherwise things can slow down a lot so we are going to take more time to get them working fast. We will be working on their shaders next week.
We wish you all a happy weekend.
The Fishery Team