Hello everyone,
Build 48 is uploaded. It has been another week of bug fixes and "quality of life changes".
Changes to substrate sculpting:
After de-clunking how players can create and place objects into their aquariums last week the next mostly clunky tool was the substrate sculpting tool. It has been moved from the substrate mode and can now be activated from the normal manipulation menu on the left of the screen.
The brush gizmo has also been changed to take up less space while on screen. When it intersects inside an object it can still be faintly visible so players can still have a feeling of where it is in 3d space. There is also a line sticking up out of the brush shape that illustrates how much intensity will be applied in each brush stroke.
We have removed the ui sliders for controlling the radius and intensity of the brush. The brush itself is attached to your mouse so when you move your mouse to a ui slider on the left side of the screen to adjust it's radius or intensity the brush that you are adjusting ends up behind the ui you are using to adjust it. It is just terrible.
So our solution is to change the brush radius and intensity using hotkeys. Simply hold down the spacebar and hold down left click and then move the mouse up or down to adjust the intensity and left or right to adjust the radius. When these adjustments are being made the gizmo does not move with the mouse so you don't have to chase it around the screen with your eyes while you are adjusting.
More adjustments can be made via hotkeys. Holding down either left or right shift will temporarily turn the brush into a smoothing brush. This makes it less fiddly when sculpting.
A similar adjustment can be made using either the left or right control keys. This will turn the direction of sculpting to be negative. By default the brushes will move the substrate upwards. This wont always be the desired outcome and it can be quickly switched using these keys to modify the behaviour.
These are standard hotkeys used by most of the 3D software we use for doing brush based modelling. I was reminded of it by someone who suggested it in a recent post so thank you very much to that person.
We also added a new tip ui that notifies players of these hotkeys and techniques when they activate the sculpting tool.
New algae reactor:
The current version of the algae reactor that is in the game is a bit boring so we have replaced it with something a bit more fun. The old version has not been removed yet because we don't want any players who are currently using it to suddenly have it disappear from their games. That should only happen when we do a major update.
Salt Filter:
The way that salinity currently works in the game is not that great. It is not a terribly complicated part of the game but we have still managed to make it less fun than it should be. This is the first step to fixing our mistakes. Now players actually have a way to remove salt from the water. The next change we will be making is to make it so players have a more precise control over adding salt to the water. Currently you can just add a dissolvable pill that takes a while to add salt to the water and players often get the dosage wrong but that will be changed.
We have also done some small tweaks to some fish behaviours. Some fish get a little stuck if they are trying to nibble algae but something suddenly prevents them from moving. They better detect if they are obstructed and then exit the behaviour if they cannot reach their target.
We also fixed some weird structural bugs that seem to be occurring when the game is closed. It does not actually matter to players because it is happening when as they quit and it happens rarely but we get confusing bug reports that make things less easy to understand in such cases which is not great.
Next week there probably won't be update to the build because there are some fairly tricky things that are being worked on and it will most likely break the game until it is properly integrated. These will be more quality of life fixes, bug fixes and the beginnings of the day and night cycle integration.
We hope you all have a good weekend
The Fishery Team