development update #34
Hello everyone,
It is the end of another very busy week. There is a new build but it has only a few changes to it.
There is now a main menu that will greet you when the game first loads. It is a little ugly. We are going to have fish swimming about with a nice arrangements of plants in the future.
We are getting ready to add the aquarium school feature and it will be accessed via this a main menu, as will career mode. We added the main menu now to help combat a rare bug that keeps popping up from time to time. Some players have reported incidents where the game gets stuck in the "recreating world" stage of loading.
The simplest way for us to recreate this error is to try and load the same file that is causing the problem for players. We have only ever been sent 1 such file by a player which allowed us to fix a bug. Players are of course busy or not in the mood to go searching their hardrives for files to send to us so we have found other solutions.
The new main menu serves as a workaround of the bug because players can now choose to try and load a different file instead of the automatically trying to load bad file. This wont fix the bug but allows players to avoid it until we fix it.
We have also enabled a very nice feature in the game engine that will detect a crash/error and send detailed data about this error to us for analysis.
As I am writing this a new crash report just came in which sheds light on this problem. The game crashed because it was trying to load a game file that was empty. I never encountered an error like this in all the time spent testing the game. But the world is a much larger testing lab. Even if you save a scene with only an aquarium inside it will save some data. Perhaps there was a power cut at the exact moment the game was being saved. The good news is that I should be able to fix this quite simply.
More progress has been made with fish. Above is the almost finished version of the new sunburst platy. Painting is hard for me and requires a lot of concentration. So much so that this week I have strained my neck and hurt my fingers. Next week I have to have a bit of a rest from painting and focus more on programming related tasks. No doubt There will be lots of bugs to fix now that we can have bug reports automatically sent to us. There are also lots of smaller features waiting to be tweaked and worked on.
Next week I will also continue to focus on making the next version of the fish shader. Here is a sneaky peak at our new sunburst platy flapping about in an odd manner. It looks weird because we are still putting the shader together and testing parts with exaggerated values.
At the moment all fish the animation is done by hand animating a skeleton which drives the skin. This is standard way of doing animation for games and feature films and is quite fun but it takes time.
Usually it takes 1-2 days of work depending on the complexity of the fish which is a quite reasonable amount of time. What we are doing with the new shader is using pure mathematics to animate the fish instead of animating them by hand. If we can have all animation work purely in the shader without the need to hand animate the fish that will save the 1-2 days of work but get the same or better result.
That does not sound like much time but we want to have 100+ fish in the game eventually which means this technique will save us 100-200+ days of work. It will also increase the in-game performance of fish because the data is handled on the Graphics card instead of the CPU which will enable us to have more fish on screen or the same amount of fish as now but using less power.
I am off to fix that horrible bug. I'll see if I can get a patch uploaded by monday at the very latest. I want to test it hard before victory is proclaimed. We wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team
It is the end of another very busy week. There is a new build but it has only a few changes to it.
There is now a main menu that will greet you when the game first loads. It is a little ugly. We are going to have fish swimming about with a nice arrangements of plants in the future.
We are getting ready to add the aquarium school feature and it will be accessed via this a main menu, as will career mode. We added the main menu now to help combat a rare bug that keeps popping up from time to time. Some players have reported incidents where the game gets stuck in the "recreating world" stage of loading.
The simplest way for us to recreate this error is to try and load the same file that is causing the problem for players. We have only ever been sent 1 such file by a player which allowed us to fix a bug. Players are of course busy or not in the mood to go searching their hardrives for files to send to us so we have found other solutions.
The new main menu serves as a workaround of the bug because players can now choose to try and load a different file instead of the automatically trying to load bad file. This wont fix the bug but allows players to avoid it until we fix it.
We have also enabled a very nice feature in the game engine that will detect a crash/error and send detailed data about this error to us for analysis.
As I am writing this a new crash report just came in which sheds light on this problem. The game crashed because it was trying to load a game file that was empty. I never encountered an error like this in all the time spent testing the game. But the world is a much larger testing lab. Even if you save a scene with only an aquarium inside it will save some data. Perhaps there was a power cut at the exact moment the game was being saved. The good news is that I should be able to fix this quite simply.
More progress has been made with fish. Above is the almost finished version of the new sunburst platy. Painting is hard for me and requires a lot of concentration. So much so that this week I have strained my neck and hurt my fingers. Next week I have to have a bit of a rest from painting and focus more on programming related tasks. No doubt There will be lots of bugs to fix now that we can have bug reports automatically sent to us. There are also lots of smaller features waiting to be tweaked and worked on.
Next week I will also continue to focus on making the next version of the fish shader. Here is a sneaky peak at our new sunburst platy flapping about in an odd manner. It looks weird because we are still putting the shader together and testing parts with exaggerated values.
At the moment all fish the animation is done by hand animating a skeleton which drives the skin. This is standard way of doing animation for games and feature films and is quite fun but it takes time.
Usually it takes 1-2 days of work depending on the complexity of the fish which is a quite reasonable amount of time. What we are doing with the new shader is using pure mathematics to animate the fish instead of animating them by hand. If we can have all animation work purely in the shader without the need to hand animate the fish that will save the 1-2 days of work but get the same or better result.
That does not sound like much time but we want to have 100+ fish in the game eventually which means this technique will save us 100-200+ days of work. It will also increase the in-game performance of fish because the data is handled on the Graphics card instead of the CPU which will enable us to have more fish on screen or the same amount of fish as now but using less power.
I am off to fix that horrible bug. I'll see if I can get a patch uploaded by monday at the very latest. I want to test it hard before victory is proclaimed. We wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team