development update #6
Hello everyone,
It has been another rather intense week with quite a few different things being worked on at the same time. Some of which shall be revealed fully at a later date but most of them can be talked about here and now.
A lot of the important cleanup has been done to some of the most important parts of the game logic code. Quite often when we are making big changes or fixing problems the code that is written to do the work is not especially neat and tidy. This can often take the form of "duplicated" code. Sometimes there are instances where we want similar things to happen under different circumstances with slightly different outcomes. For the sake of making progress and getting the correct outcomes copying and pasting code gets us to where we want to be much faster. However it is not a great idea to keep things that way for a long time. A lot of what was done this week was reducing instances of duplicate code and writing it properly. This often leads to less code overall. That has saved us many hundreds of lines of code and less code means less complexity and less potential for bugs in the future. It is not the most interesting or glamorous thing to have in an update but it is extremely important.
We have received good feedback from players about the brush creation tool that was added last week. More time has been spent refining how that tool works. Specifically we added a preview to the brush that shows the object that is currently assigned to the brush for creation as well as it's potential scale and rotations. We found that is was a big problem to predict exactly what the brush will create, how big it the objects will be and how they are oriented. This preview functionality should make these things more clear.
This has also made us re-prioritise the undo feature. Quite often the player might create objects with a brush or spend a while moving, rotating and scaling objects before deciding that actually those changes do not look good and they want to undo their actions. We have begun properly planning the undo system and we hope to get the first version of that in game very soon.
There have been a lot of quality of life changes made. For instance it is now possible to select fish, medicine, pills or fish food whilst in a manipulation mode like move, rotate or scale. You cannot actually move these items since they are pure simulation objects but you can at least select them.
The camera framing action for the orbital camera has been tweaked to not jump around to it's new position when players double click an object or select it and press "f". This was broken after we completely changed how the orbital camera worked but now its fixed.
Deleting objects whilst in a manipulation mode will now hide the manipulator after the object has disappeared.
Players have noticed that having other input devices plugged into their computers were making the camera behave very strange in it's movement. We have turned off the ability to receive some of those inputs. It is not possible to properly test 100% because there are so many types of input devices and not all of them communicate in a standard way. But this should help with some of the problems. Otherwise players will just have to unplug these devices as they play fishery until we can fix it all.
Each object that can be placed or brushed into creation has it's own defined values for random rotation and scale. This means that each object's random rotation and scale will make sense for that specific object, for instance creating a plant with random rotation turned on will only rotate in its upward facing axis and not be created upside down which would make no sense at all.
More art content has been created for the end of month update. There will be some nice new decorations as well as some new small-ish features which we have not talked about and a new background. It is quite a lot of fun making this update.
We have a big to-do list that we will be focusing on for the next two weeks so stayed tuned for more progress.
The Fishery Team
It has been another rather intense week with quite a few different things being worked on at the same time. Some of which shall be revealed fully at a later date but most of them can be talked about here and now.
A lot of the important cleanup has been done to some of the most important parts of the game logic code. Quite often when we are making big changes or fixing problems the code that is written to do the work is not especially neat and tidy. This can often take the form of "duplicated" code. Sometimes there are instances where we want similar things to happen under different circumstances with slightly different outcomes. For the sake of making progress and getting the correct outcomes copying and pasting code gets us to where we want to be much faster. However it is not a great idea to keep things that way for a long time. A lot of what was done this week was reducing instances of duplicate code and writing it properly. This often leads to less code overall. That has saved us many hundreds of lines of code and less code means less complexity and less potential for bugs in the future. It is not the most interesting or glamorous thing to have in an update but it is extremely important.
We have received good feedback from players about the brush creation tool that was added last week. More time has been spent refining how that tool works. Specifically we added a preview to the brush that shows the object that is currently assigned to the brush for creation as well as it's potential scale and rotations. We found that is was a big problem to predict exactly what the brush will create, how big it the objects will be and how they are oriented. This preview functionality should make these things more clear.
This has also made us re-prioritise the undo feature. Quite often the player might create objects with a brush or spend a while moving, rotating and scaling objects before deciding that actually those changes do not look good and they want to undo their actions. We have begun properly planning the undo system and we hope to get the first version of that in game very soon.
There have been a lot of quality of life changes made. For instance it is now possible to select fish, medicine, pills or fish food whilst in a manipulation mode like move, rotate or scale. You cannot actually move these items since they are pure simulation objects but you can at least select them.
The camera framing action for the orbital camera has been tweaked to not jump around to it's new position when players double click an object or select it and press "f". This was broken after we completely changed how the orbital camera worked but now its fixed.
Deleting objects whilst in a manipulation mode will now hide the manipulator after the object has disappeared.
Players have noticed that having other input devices plugged into their computers were making the camera behave very strange in it's movement. We have turned off the ability to receive some of those inputs. It is not possible to properly test 100% because there are so many types of input devices and not all of them communicate in a standard way. But this should help with some of the problems. Otherwise players will just have to unplug these devices as they play fishery until we can fix it all.
Each object that can be placed or brushed into creation has it's own defined values for random rotation and scale. This means that each object's random rotation and scale will make sense for that specific object, for instance creating a plant with random rotation turned on will only rotate in its upward facing axis and not be created upside down which would make no sense at all.
More art content has been created for the end of month update. There will be some nice new decorations as well as some new small-ish features which we have not talked about and a new background. It is quite a lot of fun making this update.
We have a big to-do list that we will be focusing on for the next two weeks so stayed tuned for more progress.
The Fishery Team