development update #11.5
Hello everyone,
Big thank you to everyone who came to visit us at HeroFest in Bern over the weekend. We collected a lot of valuable feedback and had a lot of fun meeting you all. It was especially fun to see those of you who were inspired by the video from GrayStillPlays and decided to fill the aquarium with fish until the frame rate was around 2FPS. Amazingly the game did not crash.
The update schedule is a little bit out of rhythm at the moment. We seem to be updating the game on Mondays instead of Fridays for various reasons. This is mostly my fault. I (Undercover Cheese) get a little too ambitious at the beginning of the week with changes and then have more bugs to fix when it is time to upload it to steam. It is much better for players if we update on a Friday because nothing is more fun than to have the weekend to play with game improvements. I want to try to get back to our original schedule of Friday updates so this week the changes will be less large but nonetheless important.
Version 0.2.19 is uploaded and should be downloadable shortly.
Fixes/Improvements
- Majority of the water chemistry code has been modified to make things less confusing and less annoying for players. The amount of C02 and nutrients that plants consume is very low. This will enable players to have thousands of plants (like Glosso) in their aquariums and not have constant C02 and nutrients problems. More variation will be introduced to this system when the water plumbing system is added to the game. Then players will have better and more nuanced control over the whole ecosystem.
- The way that water chemistry is displayed via UI to players has been made much less complex with much less data on display. This is not the final way that the data will be displayed but this serves as an intermediate step towards showing only the meaningful information to players so things can be easily understood.
- Inanimate objects like rocks, wood etc. now contribute something to water chemistry. Organic objects like wood will add a bit of nutrients into the water whereas rock based objects will emit a very small amount of C02 or Oxygen into the water. This whole point of this is to add more variation to the water chemistry so every time players create a new aquarium the ecosystem will always behave differently based on it's contents. This core feature will also be expanded upon in the upcoming weeks/months.
- Minor changes have been made to some UIs. Descriptions are back for inanimate objects in the shop. In the next few versions item descriptions will make a complete return.
- Minor changes to item selection UIs. Removing the displayed number value of a status slider and a few more minor cases of redundant data.
Known Issues:
- Saved games loaded in this version which were saved in a previous version of the game may not load in exactly the same way. This will not result in a crash but some status values may largely differ. This is due to changes we have made in this new version which no longer read data from older files in the same way. This sort of thing will happen from time to time as we make changes to existing systems but we will try to make it an uncommon occurrence.
- Medicine and fish food may not be saved properly at the moment. This is because the changes we have made this week are only an intermediate version of the final state of this system and not all the pieces are in place. All it means is that food and medicine will be absent when loading game files but it can of course still be created during normal gameplay.
- The info tab for some item's selection UI displays incorrect data.
What we plan to work on this week:
- Configurable local and global coordinate systems for translation and rotation manipulators.
- Reduction in complexity of fish AI code to allow for easier modification and reduction of bugs. This will aid us to more easily and quickly add AI behaviors to fish on a weekly basis.
- More modifications to the water chemistry code allowing for more variation in plant needs and outputs.
- Preparing/designing new fish food content.
- Create the first set of air stones. (much requested content from players)
- Reduce more clunkiness associated with the creation and editing of objects in shop/creative mode.
- General cleanup of certain UI code to reduce memory allocation for strings during run time. (will result in less stuttering in frame rate in certain situations)
- Create new art content for algae.
The Fishery Team
Big thank you to everyone who came to visit us at HeroFest in Bern over the weekend. We collected a lot of valuable feedback and had a lot of fun meeting you all. It was especially fun to see those of you who were inspired by the video from GrayStillPlays and decided to fill the aquarium with fish until the frame rate was around 2FPS. Amazingly the game did not crash.
The update schedule is a little bit out of rhythm at the moment. We seem to be updating the game on Mondays instead of Fridays for various reasons. This is mostly my fault. I (Undercover Cheese) get a little too ambitious at the beginning of the week with changes and then have more bugs to fix when it is time to upload it to steam. It is much better for players if we update on a Friday because nothing is more fun than to have the weekend to play with game improvements. I want to try to get back to our original schedule of Friday updates so this week the changes will be less large but nonetheless important.
Version 0.2.19 is uploaded and should be downloadable shortly.
Fixes/Improvements
- Majority of the water chemistry code has been modified to make things less confusing and less annoying for players. The amount of C02 and nutrients that plants consume is very low. This will enable players to have thousands of plants (like Glosso) in their aquariums and not have constant C02 and nutrients problems. More variation will be introduced to this system when the water plumbing system is added to the game. Then players will have better and more nuanced control over the whole ecosystem.
- The way that water chemistry is displayed via UI to players has been made much less complex with much less data on display. This is not the final way that the data will be displayed but this serves as an intermediate step towards showing only the meaningful information to players so things can be easily understood.
- Inanimate objects like rocks, wood etc. now contribute something to water chemistry. Organic objects like wood will add a bit of nutrients into the water whereas rock based objects will emit a very small amount of C02 or Oxygen into the water. This whole point of this is to add more variation to the water chemistry so every time players create a new aquarium the ecosystem will always behave differently based on it's contents. This core feature will also be expanded upon in the upcoming weeks/months.
- Minor changes have been made to some UIs. Descriptions are back for inanimate objects in the shop. In the next few versions item descriptions will make a complete return.
- Minor changes to item selection UIs. Removing the displayed number value of a status slider and a few more minor cases of redundant data.
Known Issues:
- Saved games loaded in this version which were saved in a previous version of the game may not load in exactly the same way. This will not result in a crash but some status values may largely differ. This is due to changes we have made in this new version which no longer read data from older files in the same way. This sort of thing will happen from time to time as we make changes to existing systems but we will try to make it an uncommon occurrence.
- Medicine and fish food may not be saved properly at the moment. This is because the changes we have made this week are only an intermediate version of the final state of this system and not all the pieces are in place. All it means is that food and medicine will be absent when loading game files but it can of course still be created during normal gameplay.
- The info tab for some item's selection UI displays incorrect data.
What we plan to work on this week:
- Configurable local and global coordinate systems for translation and rotation manipulators.
- Reduction in complexity of fish AI code to allow for easier modification and reduction of bugs. This will aid us to more easily and quickly add AI behaviors to fish on a weekly basis.
- More modifications to the water chemistry code allowing for more variation in plant needs and outputs.
- Preparing/designing new fish food content.
- Create the first set of air stones. (much requested content from players)
- Reduce more clunkiness associated with the creation and editing of objects in shop/creative mode.
- General cleanup of certain UI code to reduce memory allocation for strings during run time. (will result in less stuttering in frame rate in certain situations)
- Create new art content for algae.
The Fishery Team