FISHERY News

[p]Hello everyone![/p][p][/p][p]This week's update includes build 84.[/p][p][/p][p]It is smaller than the previous update but stress responses are now back in the game. [/p][p]The puffer fish now inflate as they become more stressed. In future updates stress responses will vary among all species and in some instances might create an interesting outcome that players may find useful. For example stress certain plants so they release fertility hormones into the water and increase the speed at which fish breed and the number of their offspring per breeding event.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]There were also some fixes to the fish shaders. There were quite a few unnecessary calculations that were happening per pixel. There were also some bits of code that computed fish iridescence incorrectly. These are now fixed.[/p][p][/p][p]More updates are coming soon![/p][p][/p][p]We wish you all a very good end of the week![/p][p][/p][p]The Fishery Team[/p]

[p]Hello everyone[/p][p]Build 83 is finally on steam![/p][p]I won't go into too much detail and list all of the changes again here because they have been talked about in all previous news posts for the last couple of years, and those posts are much more detailed. However the most noticeable changes are the new user interface design and the support of many new languages. Those two features required so much work to get finished.[/p][p]Almost every part of the game has been changed in some way. 90% of the code has been changed, hopefully for the better. There is still a vast amount of work left to do in order to finish this game. Build 83 is just the start of us getting back on track with it.[/p][p]More updates will follow soon but probably not next week because I have to rest a bit. It took 3 weeks of 12 hour work days to get this build player ready and tested.[/p][p]The water chemistry system is back in the game and it is working but it will need some updates in order to get it properly balanced. However the game is still very playable and if the water chemistry system is a bit frustrating in certain circumstances then it can be turned off so that you can enjoy just being creative:[/p][p][/p][p]Expect another build by the end of this month. We wish you all a lovely weekend.[/p][p]The Fishery Team[/p]

[p]Hello everyone,[/p][p][/p][p]It has been a little while since the last post. I had to take a break to recharge and focus on some other things, and it did me some good because I have been getting lots of things off of the to-do list since returning to Fishery.[/p][p][/p][p]There has been a lot of focus on food.[/p][p][/p][p]Daphnia has been added. Though these are a little bigger than real life daphnia. These are a food item that your fish will eat. They can also breed and be placed in storage, which means players could have a dedicated daphnia breeding tank which, if maintained well, will produce endless food for player's fish.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Tubifex worms have been added. They are disgusting but fish love them. These are a placeable food item that players will place in their aquariums and they will be there until they are eaten. Small note: their animation is currently controlled by sin-waves but it looks a little too regular and repeating so before build 83 is released, their animation will be controlled via a traditional skeleton based animation loop and will look much better.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]It is summer and the mosquitoes are out. I took much pleasure is creating this dead mosquito and I hope players will have much pleasure feeding them to their fish.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Here is some placeable food for herbivorous animals. They are little tufts of seaweed that are placed by the player and nibbled by the animals that inhabit the aquarium. they also look nice and decorative.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]More dry food pellets have been added. They are organized into tiers of pellet food. basic herbivore food, deluxe herbivore food, supreme herbivore food. etc. (also tiered for carnivorous food). The tier of the food will affect their price and how well they nourish the animals in the aquarium. the cheaper pellets will also cause more algae to grow and they will nourish your animals less.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Nymphoides aquatica, otherwise called the "Banana Plant" has been added because they are just so fun looking.[/p][p]
[/p][p]This is a sweet baby seahorse. this is probably the most detailed look you will ever get of it because they are about as tiny as the fish fry that is in the game which is quite tiny.[/p][p]
[/p][p]Here is the juvenile seahorse. these grow to about the size of a rummy nose tetra before being replaced by a scaled down version of the adult seahorse that will then grow over time to full size.[/p][p]They will work very similar to that of the fish, where seahorses will have generic looking baby/fry and juvenile models which then transform into the adult model, which will differ depending on the species. The next step is to animate these things which oddly enough is going to use some of the same code that animates the daphnia, the daphnia code was based on code I wrote for another game that was used to animate butterflies.[/p][p][/p][p]New models and textures have been created for utility tablets.[/p][p] [/p][p]Dissolvable Co2 tablets.[/p][p][/p][p] [/p][p]Dissolvable Oxygen tablets.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Nutrients/Plant fertilizer tablets.[/p][p][/p][p]All of these are tiered similar how to how the food pellets are tiered. The lowest tiered tablets are fine for small-medium size aquariums, but the larger tablets are more suited for larger and larger aquariums because their concentrations are much higher and they are more expensive.[/p][p][/p][p]Build 83 is getting a lot closer to being ready. I am grinding through as much as I can, as fast as I can to get it ready for everyone to play. The only things left are to get the seahorses working, fix up the controls UI so all the controls are more clear to players, do final tweaks for the chemistry system, and then perhaps 1-2 weeks of really hardcore stress testing everything and fixing any bugs that are found. Then release! I dare not say a date when I think it will be ready, but I think it will be quite soon indeed, for real.[/p][p]Then after that it is just me grinding away some more to finish the rest of the game week by week until it is all done, releasing updates every month.[/p][p][/p][p]We wish you all a great weekend,[/p][p][/p][p]The Fishery Team[/p]

Hello everyone,

Here is some more progress for you all to see.

Maintenance visualized:



I spoke about the maintenance feature for utility devices a few updates ago. The shaders have been tweaked to visualize this feature. Once a device is placed into an aquarium and time passes, the appearance of the device will become more dirty looking as it's maintenance value creeps higher. Players will know when a device is nearing it's breaking point because it will look filthy. Once maintenance is then performed by the player it will be nice and clean and fully functioning again.

Plumbing-like power generator prototype:

Back:

Front:


A prototype has been made of the new "plumbing-like" objects that are being added to the game. This one is the power generator.



Devices like these sit on the glass but are mostly outside of the aquarium itself. This one generates more power so other powered devices work within the aquarium where the power supply is already exhausted. There are ideas for more of these devices that are similar to the classic plumbing ones, like algae reactors, various types of gas injectors, and devices that harvest things from the aquarium etc. I sincerely hope objects like this can help make up for my removing the plumbing system from the game over time.


Open brain coral:



I have spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with various techniques to represent coral. Coral is quite highly detailed and difficult to represent visually when we have to be careful with how many polygons we use and how many texture maps we use. Soft coral especially looks very wrinkly when seen close-up with many other high frequency details appearing from species to species.



A few days was wasted because I spent quite a bit of time building a nice translucent shader for the new corals but then discovered that I couldn't quite complete the look I wanted because certain types of data is not available to me inside the unity engine in the way that I want/need. I am unable to have light falloff and light shadow map data be separated from each other and as a result I had to just make a simpler, less visually interesting shader. Translucency is very important for coral but I am just going to have to try to find some other compromise to get something nearer to that look. On the bright side I am narrowing in on the right techniques for coral that produces good results and stays within the visual look that the game has. That also means soon-ish there will be much more coral in the game.


There will be another update soon showing more progress and I'll talk more about plans for the next build. Obviously I cannot keep to deadlines for the game at the moment but a lot of work is being done and we are getting closer.


We hope you all enjoy another lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team.

Hello Everyone,

This week a lot of work has been done on finalizing all of the aquariums that will be in the game for the rest of the early access period.



There are now 30 aquariums of various shapes and sizes that will be available in the next update. I spoke in a previous news post about adding the initial small cylindrical and spherical aquariums.



This week the remaining 10 aquariums were added. Time was also spent refining how "squishing" features work for the spherical and cylindrical aquariums. The code that actually performs the squishing should run faster than before. Though before it was not exactly slow but I like to squeeze as much performance as possible out of everything. The "Squishing" features are what makes plants, rocks, and other decorations squish up against the glass even when players move part of these objects outside of the glass, making it so none of these objects ever poke out of the glass.

Initially I was not too interested in adding this feature into the game but players kept asking for it and it is now one of the things I am most proud of solving because it is quite tricky to setup, it runs on the GPU, and it looks really really good. It allows players to feel less restricted when decorating their aquariums.






You can see here the fish are all bunching up in the centres of the aquariums. Most likely the fish are getting the incorrect radius of the aquarium and they believe they are in smaller surroundings. Added to the bug list ;)

The largest of the new aquariums hold roughly the same volume of water as the largest of the cuboid aquariums. We wont be adding any larger aquariums during the early access period. The reason is that large aquariums hold more stuff and thus more stuff needs to be computed every frame. Physics attributes need to be simulated, behavioural logic for the animals needs to be updated, metabolism logic needs to be updated for anything that lives from fish to fungi. That means potentially thousands of things in the largest aquariums need to have all of these attributes updated all the time. They also need to be rendered onto the screen and that can be slowed down depending on how many lights players have added, and how many of those lights emit shadows.

That does not mean we cannot add certain species of fish that are quite large. Pacific bluefin tuna are going to be added to the game as part of a campaign storyline/objective. They grow to be extremely big when fully grown but our compromise is that they will only grow to be juveniles that are around 30-40cm or so. That will happen with a lot larger species that will be added because it is better to have them in the game in some form instead of not having them in the game at all.

So now aquariums are off of the checklist of things that are on the roadmap to finishing the game.

There will be another news post soon showing more progress.

We hope you have a great weekend,

The Fishery Team