development update #39
Hello everyone,
This week has been a very good week indeed. Very significant progress has been made in the areas that deal of fish performance, animation and time taken to add a new fish into the game. A new build which includes these changes will likely be uploaded on Monday. There are also some long overdue improvements to the fish behaviour that we would like to squeeze in over the weekend.
Non-Floppy:
Floppy:
Fish floppiness. It sounds silly but it is a very important part of making the fish movement feel nice and fluid as they change direction while swimming. It is now calculated entirely within the fish shader which runs on the GPU rather than using a traditional bone based method. The code that calculates the direction and intensity of the floppiness has also been improved to be more accurate and faster than previous versions.
Animating each fish's swim cycles was also done using traditional skeletal animation but now runs entirely in code on the GPU too. By simply tweaking the numbers we can tailor the movements to match the body shape of each fish so it's movements look natural and less generic.
Now that we have all of this stuff running on the GPU, the CPU does not need to run as much code. This will allow us to have more fish present in an aquarium at one time and they can be more detailed. Fortunately we have already been remaking the fish currently in the game as well as making new species. The above gif shows a test scene. Before we made these changes we could handle around 150 fish before I became annoyed at the performance cost. Now we have around 400 and performance is still very acceptable. Of course there is still work to be done to squeeze every last bit of performance out of this.
Bit of a short update this week. Completing these changes has taken a major weight off of our minds. Now that it is much faster and less tedious to add new fish into the game it will save us around a year's worth of work. Once we have sorted out a few more things in the game we are aiming to be in a position where can add a new fish species every week along with new decorations and plants. We are not there yet but we are close.
The update we will be releasing on Monday will include the new Neon tetras, Cardinal tetras and green neon tetras. Six new fish in total because each species has a male and female which are separately painted and their models differ in size and shape. Then in the coming weeks we will replace the old fish still in the game like the tiger barb, sunburst platy and common goldfish etc with their new versions.
Once that is done we will then start adding fish from the incomplete list of fish that you can find on the forums. People have given so many suggestions that the list has grown quite large indeed. Rest assured we are going to try and add all of them into the game. Be sure to check it out and submit more suggestions.
As always we hope you all have a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team
This week has been a very good week indeed. Very significant progress has been made in the areas that deal of fish performance, animation and time taken to add a new fish into the game. A new build which includes these changes will likely be uploaded on Monday. There are also some long overdue improvements to the fish behaviour that we would like to squeeze in over the weekend.
Non-Floppy:
Floppy:
Fish floppiness. It sounds silly but it is a very important part of making the fish movement feel nice and fluid as they change direction while swimming. It is now calculated entirely within the fish shader which runs on the GPU rather than using a traditional bone based method. The code that calculates the direction and intensity of the floppiness has also been improved to be more accurate and faster than previous versions.
Animating each fish's swim cycles was also done using traditional skeletal animation but now runs entirely in code on the GPU too. By simply tweaking the numbers we can tailor the movements to match the body shape of each fish so it's movements look natural and less generic.
Now that we have all of this stuff running on the GPU, the CPU does not need to run as much code. This will allow us to have more fish present in an aquarium at one time and they can be more detailed. Fortunately we have already been remaking the fish currently in the game as well as making new species. The above gif shows a test scene. Before we made these changes we could handle around 150 fish before I became annoyed at the performance cost. Now we have around 400 and performance is still very acceptable. Of course there is still work to be done to squeeze every last bit of performance out of this.
Bit of a short update this week. Completing these changes has taken a major weight off of our minds. Now that it is much faster and less tedious to add new fish into the game it will save us around a year's worth of work. Once we have sorted out a few more things in the game we are aiming to be in a position where can add a new fish species every week along with new decorations and plants. We are not there yet but we are close.
The update we will be releasing on Monday will include the new Neon tetras, Cardinal tetras and green neon tetras. Six new fish in total because each species has a male and female which are separately painted and their models differ in size and shape. Then in the coming weeks we will replace the old fish still in the game like the tiger barb, sunburst platy and common goldfish etc with their new versions.
Once that is done we will then start adding fish from the incomplete list of fish that you can find on the forums. People have given so many suggestions that the list has grown quite large indeed. Rest assured we are going to try and add all of them into the game. Be sure to check it out and submit more suggestions.
As always we hope you all have a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team