development update #81
Hello everyone,
Build 52 will be uploaded in a few hours. It has been a busy-ish week. Time has been spent all over different parts of the game. Making new models for fish, plants and hardscape items. 3 new music tracks have been added. A lot of tweaks to the underlying simulation numbers have been made and of course more UI changes.
Freshwater Angelfish (Pterophyllum Scalare):
Our first Angelfish pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. This is a much requested fish. We will of course be adding various varieties of marine angelfish in the not too distant future too. When we actually add these freshwater ones into the game we will try to have two colour variations per pair which means 4 distinct fish added all at once.
Food population UI:
A new UI panel has been added that shows information about the food that has been dropped into the aquarium and also gives some nice information about the perils of over feeding. This UI will be updated in the coming weeks to show all the different diet types of the food currently in your aquarium. Soon we will add some carnivorous and insectivorous food to the game and that is when we will update this UI.
A lot of time has been spent tweaking various numbers in the game:
This is a look at some of the values that govern the metabolism of plants. If we take a look at the variable called "s_co2_in". This is the number that governs how much Co2 is consumed by a plant per second. It is multiplied an approximation of the mass of the plant in question. e.g if the plant was made up of around a cubic inch of plant matter then you multiply s_co2_in by 1 during the update. Players can scale plants to whatever size they want and that will increase the Co2 consumption.
The actual value that the mass is multiplied by, which is the part to the right of the equals character, is a very small number that is computed by dividing the maximum co2 capacity of the smallest aquarium by the length of a day in seconds and then dividing that number by 1200. This gets us a very small number. Somewhere around 0.01. Which means every second every plant will consume 0.01 co2 multiplied by it's approximate mass. Then of course all the other values are doing their things as well.
It is slightly complicated to test because we have to test it with different numbers of plants in different sizes of aquariums. We ask ourselves questions like "How long should it take for an aquarium full plants to consume all the nutrients in the water?" We read lots of information about keeping planted aquariums and aquascapes that have a huge amount of plant life and sometimes the maintenance involves adding fertilizer every 4 days. Some even recommend adding a small amount every day. We have to take all that information and try to distil it into something that is interesting for players to do without being frustrating. Though I think at the moment it is mostly frustrating and it is hard to get right but we will get it right eventually.
Hopefully anyone playing this week's update should see a difference in how the numbers change in their aquarium. All the numbers except for the algae calculations have been modified. Algae is whole different beast that will be tackled in due course. These changes have been made to make things not happen so fast. Fish don't deplete their energy as quick and plants don't require as much resources to live. For sure this is not the last time we tweak these numbers at all.
Next week I will model the first pair of Gouramis, add more help text into the game as well as tweak many more numbers and add even more UI that will show more meaningful data to players.
Busy times ahead. April is going to be a content heavy month but more on that next week. As usual we wish everyone a happy Friday and lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team
Build 52 will be uploaded in a few hours. It has been a busy-ish week. Time has been spent all over different parts of the game. Making new models for fish, plants and hardscape items. 3 new music tracks have been added. A lot of tweaks to the underlying simulation numbers have been made and of course more UI changes.
Freshwater Angelfish (Pterophyllum Scalare):
Our first Angelfish pair has been modelled and is ready for painting. This is a much requested fish. We will of course be adding various varieties of marine angelfish in the not too distant future too. When we actually add these freshwater ones into the game we will try to have two colour variations per pair which means 4 distinct fish added all at once.
Food population UI:
A new UI panel has been added that shows information about the food that has been dropped into the aquarium and also gives some nice information about the perils of over feeding. This UI will be updated in the coming weeks to show all the different diet types of the food currently in your aquarium. Soon we will add some carnivorous and insectivorous food to the game and that is when we will update this UI.
A lot of time has been spent tweaking various numbers in the game:
This is a look at some of the values that govern the metabolism of plants. If we take a look at the variable called "s_co2_in". This is the number that governs how much Co2 is consumed by a plant per second. It is multiplied an approximation of the mass of the plant in question. e.g if the plant was made up of around a cubic inch of plant matter then you multiply s_co2_in by 1 during the update. Players can scale plants to whatever size they want and that will increase the Co2 consumption.
The actual value that the mass is multiplied by, which is the part to the right of the equals character, is a very small number that is computed by dividing the maximum co2 capacity of the smallest aquarium by the length of a day in seconds and then dividing that number by 1200. This gets us a very small number. Somewhere around 0.01. Which means every second every plant will consume 0.01 co2 multiplied by it's approximate mass. Then of course all the other values are doing their things as well.
It is slightly complicated to test because we have to test it with different numbers of plants in different sizes of aquariums. We ask ourselves questions like "How long should it take for an aquarium full plants to consume all the nutrients in the water?" We read lots of information about keeping planted aquariums and aquascapes that have a huge amount of plant life and sometimes the maintenance involves adding fertilizer every 4 days. Some even recommend adding a small amount every day. We have to take all that information and try to distil it into something that is interesting for players to do without being frustrating. Though I think at the moment it is mostly frustrating and it is hard to get right but we will get it right eventually.
Hopefully anyone playing this week's update should see a difference in how the numbers change in their aquarium. All the numbers except for the algae calculations have been modified. Algae is whole different beast that will be tackled in due course. These changes have been made to make things not happen so fast. Fish don't deplete their energy as quick and plants don't require as much resources to live. For sure this is not the last time we tweak these numbers at all.
Next week I will model the first pair of Gouramis, add more help text into the game as well as tweak many more numbers and add even more UI that will show more meaningful data to players.
Busy times ahead. April is going to be a content heavy month but more on that next week. As usual we wish everyone a happy Friday and lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team