development update #130
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
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