development update #38
Hello everyone,
It is the end of a very intense week but we have achieved much. A new build is ready to be uploaded to steam. We want to spend few more hours testing it during the day time after a good nights sleep so any obvious mistakes can be detected but for sure the new build should be available this weekend.
In the past few weeks we have re-written how players select and manipulate objects in the game. These changes specifically deal with the ability to select and manipulate more than one object at a time. In versions of the game before this one it has been rather tedious to decorate the inside of an aquarium by moving objects one at a time. Making complex plumbing networks was just as tedious. This update represents the first of many updates that will reduce tediousness and allow players to be creative at a speed they will enjoy.
What is the same?
A single left mouse click will replace the entire selection with the object at the position of the mouse.
right clicking or left clicking over empty space will clear the entire selection.
What is new?
Left click while shift is held to add objects to your selection.
left click while control is held to remove objects from your selection.
Clicking on empty space while holding shift or control will not change the selection. This is to avoid accidentally not clicking on something and clearing the entire selection.
Now that more than one object can be selected we need more capabilities in the area of manipulation.
The real point of multi-selection in my eyes is that ability to move, rotate and scale things as a group.
Moving multiple objects according to their coordinate space is where the code got way more complicated. This may not be something used often but it is good to have in the toolbox.
Rotations have even more options. The pivot point of the rotation suddenly becomes more important.
Rotating with a group pivot allows players to use the object selected last as the centre of rotation.
Rotating with the centred group pivot will put the pivot in the centre of the selection. Technically it is the averaged position of all the objects in the selection but quite often the position is close to the centre.
Rotating without a group pivot is still possible of course.
Scaling is more or less the same except we can now scale as a group.
Individual scaling still works the same.
Moving lots of objects in the plumbing system is also works and is robust enough to keep all the network's connections. Changes like this would previously require a lot of mouse clicks and sanity.
These new abilities also work with duplication.
And of course deletion.
Even if players select objects that are not supposed to be manipulated it wont screw things up. For instance we cannot move, rotate or scale fish but if you occidentally select a fish while selecting a large number of decorations the manipulator will ignore the fish and you wont be required to deselect it in order to make the manipulations work.
This seems like a lot of progress but it is just scratching the surface of what we are going to add over time to improve this set of systems.
Marquee selection:
One such improvement will be to add a drag selection marquee tool. This requires some clever programming because it would allow players to select the entire contents of an aquarium with a simple click and drag of the mouse but that could mean selecting thousands of objects in a single frame and there are performance considerations to take into account. But rest assured it will be in the game.
Selection sets:
It may take a while to select a large group of objects such as a tree stump covered in plants. Players may wish to move, rotate, scale that selection often. To avoid painstakingly re-selecting these groups of objects over and over again there will be the possibility to save and name that selection as a sort of bookmark. This means the player only needs to select this selection set from a menu in order to select that group with a single click.
Selection layers:
Sometimes when selecting things in an aquarium full of stuff it is very easy to accidentally select something that was not meant to be selected. Choosing which layers of objects can be selected will help reduce this frustration. For instance you might only be interested in selecting plants. But there might be a lot of fish swimming about in front of the camera. Turning off the selection layer for fish will keep the fish visible but disable the ability to select them. this will also work well with the drag marquee selection tool. If players want to select only the plants in the aquarium they could turn off all the selection layers for everything except plants and drag select the whole aquarium resulting in all plants being selected.
Prioritising work can be a bit of a challenge. A few weeks ago I wanted to get the first version of aquarium school into this update but multi-selections was just more exciting to work on and I think its probably better for players to have changes like multi-selections instead of tutorials at the moment. Not to mention that we should focus on more art content for a while. Great progress has been made with new fish in the past few weeks and more progress is still to be made. I can't say for sure what will be in next week's update but it will be interesting and fun.
As always we wish you very good weekend.
The Fishery Team
It is the end of a very intense week but we have achieved much. A new build is ready to be uploaded to steam. We want to spend few more hours testing it during the day time after a good nights sleep so any obvious mistakes can be detected but for sure the new build should be available this weekend.
In the past few weeks we have re-written how players select and manipulate objects in the game. These changes specifically deal with the ability to select and manipulate more than one object at a time. In versions of the game before this one it has been rather tedious to decorate the inside of an aquarium by moving objects one at a time. Making complex plumbing networks was just as tedious. This update represents the first of many updates that will reduce tediousness and allow players to be creative at a speed they will enjoy.
What is the same?
A single left mouse click will replace the entire selection with the object at the position of the mouse.
right clicking or left clicking over empty space will clear the entire selection.
What is new?
Left click while shift is held to add objects to your selection.
left click while control is held to remove objects from your selection.
Clicking on empty space while holding shift or control will not change the selection. This is to avoid accidentally not clicking on something and clearing the entire selection.
Now that more than one object can be selected we need more capabilities in the area of manipulation.
The real point of multi-selection in my eyes is that ability to move, rotate and scale things as a group.
Moving multiple objects according to their coordinate space is where the code got way more complicated. This may not be something used often but it is good to have in the toolbox.
Rotations have even more options. The pivot point of the rotation suddenly becomes more important.
Rotating with a group pivot allows players to use the object selected last as the centre of rotation.
Rotating with the centred group pivot will put the pivot in the centre of the selection. Technically it is the averaged position of all the objects in the selection but quite often the position is close to the centre.
Rotating without a group pivot is still possible of course.
Scaling is more or less the same except we can now scale as a group.
Individual scaling still works the same.
Moving lots of objects in the plumbing system is also works and is robust enough to keep all the network's connections. Changes like this would previously require a lot of mouse clicks and sanity.
These new abilities also work with duplication.
And of course deletion.
Even if players select objects that are not supposed to be manipulated it wont screw things up. For instance we cannot move, rotate or scale fish but if you occidentally select a fish while selecting a large number of decorations the manipulator will ignore the fish and you wont be required to deselect it in order to make the manipulations work.
This seems like a lot of progress but it is just scratching the surface of what we are going to add over time to improve this set of systems.
Marquee selection:
One such improvement will be to add a drag selection marquee tool. This requires some clever programming because it would allow players to select the entire contents of an aquarium with a simple click and drag of the mouse but that could mean selecting thousands of objects in a single frame and there are performance considerations to take into account. But rest assured it will be in the game.
Selection sets:
It may take a while to select a large group of objects such as a tree stump covered in plants. Players may wish to move, rotate, scale that selection often. To avoid painstakingly re-selecting these groups of objects over and over again there will be the possibility to save and name that selection as a sort of bookmark. This means the player only needs to select this selection set from a menu in order to select that group with a single click.
Selection layers:
Sometimes when selecting things in an aquarium full of stuff it is very easy to accidentally select something that was not meant to be selected. Choosing which layers of objects can be selected will help reduce this frustration. For instance you might only be interested in selecting plants. But there might be a lot of fish swimming about in front of the camera. Turning off the selection layer for fish will keep the fish visible but disable the ability to select them. this will also work well with the drag marquee selection tool. If players want to select only the plants in the aquarium they could turn off all the selection layers for everything except plants and drag select the whole aquarium resulting in all plants being selected.
Prioritising work can be a bit of a challenge. A few weeks ago I wanted to get the first version of aquarium school into this update but multi-selections was just more exciting to work on and I think its probably better for players to have changes like multi-selections instead of tutorials at the moment. Not to mention that we should focus on more art content for a while. Great progress has been made with new fish in the past few weeks and more progress is still to be made. I can't say for sure what will be in next week's update but it will be interesting and fun.
As always we wish you very good weekend.
The Fishery Team