development update #94
Hello everyone
Finally build 58 has been uploaded. It has been around three months since we last updated the build and that is really way too long to go without doing a build update. However we have managed to improve a lot of things players have asked us to improve and we have added new features that have been on the todo list for quite some time. Let's get started with all the new fish.
Blue Betta female:
Blue Betta male:
We mentioned these in a post a while ago. They were taken out from the game when we improved the betta fish models and a player asked us if we could put them back in. We repainted the old blue betta design onto the new models and here we are.
Boeseman's Rainbowfish Male:
Boeseman's Rainbowfish Female:
These have been waiting around to be finished for quite some time. If I ever get back into keeping fish again in the real world I would really love to have some of these lovelies.
Freshwater Angelfish Female:
Freshwater Angelfish Male:
Highly requested among players and now in the game. There will be more colour variations to come in the future.
Dwarf Gourami Male:
Dwarf Gourami Female:
Initially we painted the female to look quite similar in colour to the male but someone pointed out the females are actually quite colourless. After some research it turns out that some breeders are able to breed females to look more colourful because they sell better. That is quite interesting and will be part of a storyline in career mode.
Oscar Fish:
Albino Oscar Fish:
There is almost no visual difference between Oscar fish genders so there are only minor differences in the paint jobs we made. We thought we would throw in an albino variation since they look quite interesting and we had no albino fish in the game yet. This means we have a grand total of four Oscar fish with this update.
All our fish:
There is quite a lot of fish in the game already and we have many many many more still to add. I think the next group of fish we add will probably be more "basic" fish. We are in desperate need of some fancy goldfish varieties which no fish game should be without. Also common fish associated with aquascaping like Harlequin Rasbora, ember tetras among others should be in the game.
What else have we done for fish since the last update?
We got a lot of players telling us how their fish get stuck or cannot reliably find their way to food so a lot of effort was concentrated on pathfinding. We made a more detailed post about the pathfinding system a few posts back so I would recommend looking back there for the technical details. Now fish should not get stuck or lost when seeking food or a mate. Unless of course there is literally no way for them to swim to their target's location.
Fish getting stuck:
You may see this happen from time to time. Not every behaviour uses the pathfinding system for navigation. For instance wandering and shoaling behaviours use algorithms that have a similar but better version of the previous approach to navigation. They shoot out laser beams trying to find empty space and move away from close detected obstacles. This can of course go wrong if the fish get's itself into a tight area with small exit holes. In a funny way it is like a kitten climbing a tree but not knowing how to get down. This is something we are putting a lot of resources into solving but it is going to take time to get right and as long as you decorate your aquariums in such a way that there is space for them to swim based on their size then it should not happen too often. If it does happen then you can use the nudge tool to drag them out of their predicament.
Predation has been updated. All fish can eat fry as before but now larger more predatory fish can eat smaller fish so do be careful with what you house with the Oscar fish and Red terror cichlids.
Alerts:
We used to have a way of alerting players to trouble in their aquariums but it was not very good. We have revamped it to be better and configurable. In the above image you can see in the bottom left that there is a button for enabling/disabling the alerts overlay and there is a smaller button which enables the alert mask.
Alert Mask:
What the alert mask allows you to do is configure exactly what alerts you wish to see. For instance if you only want to see alerts for fish then you can turn off alerts for all other things making it easier to see what fish have problems.
At some point we may expand alerts to be similar to how Planet Zoo deals with alerts. By having a ui window with a list of all the alerts within. That system makes a lot of sense for planet zoo because the map is so big that players are not going to go around their zoo looking for alert icons. In fishery players have the advantage of seeing everything in their aquarium on screen at once most of the time. In this case it may not make sense to add a planet zoo style alert list. We will have to test and see if it feels right.
Hide UI:
The ability to hide the entirety of the user interface is something often requested by players and I kept saying we will add it in the near future and then rather embarrassingly got distracted by other more fancy features. Well now it is in the game. Players must enter photo mode in order to turn off the ui. If the whole point of hiding the ui is to immerse oneself into an uncluttered pretty world then it might help to adjust some camera settings like field of view or depth of field before doing so. It also now means that players can hide the ui before hitting F12 in order to make a screenshot to upload to steam. It is hugely embarrassing that I got that wrong.
Since we are speaking about ui, we adjusted about 70% of it again.
This is the fish selection ui. It is very important that when the alert icon displays on top of a fish that players can select that fish to get a deeper understanding of what is causing the alert. The problems are highlighted in red in this ui as is the same for plants, powered items, plumbing items etc. You may also notice there is a new 'Minimum Aquarium Volume' field which should give players and idea about which fish to put in their aquariums. We also keep track and now display the age of each fish. We do not have a lifespan for them just yet but we will do in the future. The amount of time it takes for fry to grow into a juvenile and a juvenile into an adult is much longer and more correct than it was before.
This information is also available in the info ui for fish found in the 'shop inventory' so players can know if the conditions are right for that fish or plant before it is placed in the aquarium.
The Delete Button:
A delete button has been added. The usual keyboard shortcuts of the delete and backspace keys still work but we had a lot of requests for a button so it has been added. Though in the near-ish future the way that things are removed from the aquarium will be slightly more complicated. Things will be sold, put into storage or deleted.
Sculpting UI:
The sculpting UI desperately needed improvement. There are also areas that you can hover your mouse over to get further info.
A lot of the water chemistry UIs have been modified to look nicer and be more clear. The one above that shows temperature has better colours and it is clearer what region the temperature is in.
This change also comes to the heater ui. Players can adjust the blue slider and it shows the region of temperature that the water will be heated too and it will not go beyond it.
Fish selection is now very easy. Until now just selecting a fish was tricky. Why? you ask. because the hitbox was a sphere placed near the front of the body:
Players would need to click their mouse over this invisible sphere in order to select it. This was done for a few reasons that are perhaps a little too technical and tedious to try to explain but it had to do with how the fish rotated and collided with obstacles.
Now we made some changes that made it make more sense to use a box. Thus as a side effect selection is much easier and less fiddly.
Time Manipulation:
Another highly requested feature that I kept insisting was not possible due to physics accuracy and other reasons is now in the game. The ability to speed up time allows us to hopefully fix a lot of problems with the game. We got a lot of feedback that things happen too slowly or too fast or too often or not often enough. We have now made the length of an in-game day longer and the speed at which things like hunger, breeding, suffocation etc happen are much slower. Even when things go very wrong in the real world it can take a while for their consequences to show. Anything short of a bath bomb falling into the aquarium usually allows for enough time to do something about it without panicking
When things get a little slow or tedious such as waiting for the night to be over players can increase game speed up to sixteen times.
Time can also be frozen so players can take their time to fix problems without too much pressure. It also gives players time to adjust their camera nicely for screenshots.
Those are all the biggest changes we made. We also did a lot of bug fixing and other small quality of life improvements. The clownfish were about half the size they should have been so expect them to be larger in your existing aquariums. Hopefully it won't cause too many problems. Water chemistry will also be different from when you last loaded a file because of changes we have made but in general it should not be too different. You may have to get used to the new speed that water chemistry changes. As was said before, in general things happen slower but in extreme circumstances like adding 20 airstones to a small aquarium things will happen quite fast.
There are some changes that we said we were aiming to put into this update which we were unable to finish. Live birth is almost ready but needs refining. As is the new debug settings for allowing fish and plants to ignore water chemistry so players can ignore the simulation aspects and just get on with being creative if they just want to chill out a bit. That will be coming very soon and we will return to our more regular schedule for build updates that come every one to two weeks.
Quite a lot of work went into this update but there are still quite a few rough edges in the game as whole and there is a tremendous amount of content missing. The next update will come next week and will probably include the usual assortment of small tweaks and bug fixes among other things.
It has been a while since we have added more decorations, plants and general creative content into the game. We often take a look at the screenshots uploaded by players and they are fantastic. It is quite surprising just how much can be made with the small assortment of decorations that we have provided but it really is time to add more so expect in the coming months more creative content.
As usual we wish you all a very pleasant rest of the week,
The Fishery Team
Finally build 58 has been uploaded. It has been around three months since we last updated the build and that is really way too long to go without doing a build update. However we have managed to improve a lot of things players have asked us to improve and we have added new features that have been on the todo list for quite some time. Let's get started with all the new fish.
Blue Betta female:
Blue Betta male:
We mentioned these in a post a while ago. They were taken out from the game when we improved the betta fish models and a player asked us if we could put them back in. We repainted the old blue betta design onto the new models and here we are.
Boeseman's Rainbowfish Male:
Boeseman's Rainbowfish Female:
These have been waiting around to be finished for quite some time. If I ever get back into keeping fish again in the real world I would really love to have some of these lovelies.
Freshwater Angelfish Female:
Freshwater Angelfish Male:
Highly requested among players and now in the game. There will be more colour variations to come in the future.
Dwarf Gourami Male:
Dwarf Gourami Female:
Initially we painted the female to look quite similar in colour to the male but someone pointed out the females are actually quite colourless. After some research it turns out that some breeders are able to breed females to look more colourful because they sell better. That is quite interesting and will be part of a storyline in career mode.
Oscar Fish:
Albino Oscar Fish:
There is almost no visual difference between Oscar fish genders so there are only minor differences in the paint jobs we made. We thought we would throw in an albino variation since they look quite interesting and we had no albino fish in the game yet. This means we have a grand total of four Oscar fish with this update.
All our fish:
There is quite a lot of fish in the game already and we have many many many more still to add. I think the next group of fish we add will probably be more "basic" fish. We are in desperate need of some fancy goldfish varieties which no fish game should be without. Also common fish associated with aquascaping like Harlequin Rasbora, ember tetras among others should be in the game.
What else have we done for fish since the last update?
We got a lot of players telling us how their fish get stuck or cannot reliably find their way to food so a lot of effort was concentrated on pathfinding. We made a more detailed post about the pathfinding system a few posts back so I would recommend looking back there for the technical details. Now fish should not get stuck or lost when seeking food or a mate. Unless of course there is literally no way for them to swim to their target's location.
Fish getting stuck:
You may see this happen from time to time. Not every behaviour uses the pathfinding system for navigation. For instance wandering and shoaling behaviours use algorithms that have a similar but better version of the previous approach to navigation. They shoot out laser beams trying to find empty space and move away from close detected obstacles. This can of course go wrong if the fish get's itself into a tight area with small exit holes. In a funny way it is like a kitten climbing a tree but not knowing how to get down. This is something we are putting a lot of resources into solving but it is going to take time to get right and as long as you decorate your aquariums in such a way that there is space for them to swim based on their size then it should not happen too often. If it does happen then you can use the nudge tool to drag them out of their predicament.
Predation has been updated. All fish can eat fry as before but now larger more predatory fish can eat smaller fish so do be careful with what you house with the Oscar fish and Red terror cichlids.
Alerts:
We used to have a way of alerting players to trouble in their aquariums but it was not very good. We have revamped it to be better and configurable. In the above image you can see in the bottom left that there is a button for enabling/disabling the alerts overlay and there is a smaller button which enables the alert mask.
Alert Mask:
What the alert mask allows you to do is configure exactly what alerts you wish to see. For instance if you only want to see alerts for fish then you can turn off alerts for all other things making it easier to see what fish have problems.
At some point we may expand alerts to be similar to how Planet Zoo deals with alerts. By having a ui window with a list of all the alerts within. That system makes a lot of sense for planet zoo because the map is so big that players are not going to go around their zoo looking for alert icons. In fishery players have the advantage of seeing everything in their aquarium on screen at once most of the time. In this case it may not make sense to add a planet zoo style alert list. We will have to test and see if it feels right.
Hide UI:
The ability to hide the entirety of the user interface is something often requested by players and I kept saying we will add it in the near future and then rather embarrassingly got distracted by other more fancy features. Well now it is in the game. Players must enter photo mode in order to turn off the ui. If the whole point of hiding the ui is to immerse oneself into an uncluttered pretty world then it might help to adjust some camera settings like field of view or depth of field before doing so. It also now means that players can hide the ui before hitting F12 in order to make a screenshot to upload to steam. It is hugely embarrassing that I got that wrong.
Since we are speaking about ui, we adjusted about 70% of it again.
This is the fish selection ui. It is very important that when the alert icon displays on top of a fish that players can select that fish to get a deeper understanding of what is causing the alert. The problems are highlighted in red in this ui as is the same for plants, powered items, plumbing items etc. You may also notice there is a new 'Minimum Aquarium Volume' field which should give players and idea about which fish to put in their aquariums. We also keep track and now display the age of each fish. We do not have a lifespan for them just yet but we will do in the future. The amount of time it takes for fry to grow into a juvenile and a juvenile into an adult is much longer and more correct than it was before.
This information is also available in the info ui for fish found in the 'shop inventory' so players can know if the conditions are right for that fish or plant before it is placed in the aquarium.
The Delete Button:
A delete button has been added. The usual keyboard shortcuts of the delete and backspace keys still work but we had a lot of requests for a button so it has been added. Though in the near-ish future the way that things are removed from the aquarium will be slightly more complicated. Things will be sold, put into storage or deleted.
Sculpting UI:
The sculpting UI desperately needed improvement. There are also areas that you can hover your mouse over to get further info.
A lot of the water chemistry UIs have been modified to look nicer and be more clear. The one above that shows temperature has better colours and it is clearer what region the temperature is in.
This change also comes to the heater ui. Players can adjust the blue slider and it shows the region of temperature that the water will be heated too and it will not go beyond it.
Fish selection is now very easy. Until now just selecting a fish was tricky. Why? you ask. because the hitbox was a sphere placed near the front of the body:
Players would need to click their mouse over this invisible sphere in order to select it. This was done for a few reasons that are perhaps a little too technical and tedious to try to explain but it had to do with how the fish rotated and collided with obstacles.
Now we made some changes that made it make more sense to use a box. Thus as a side effect selection is much easier and less fiddly.
Time Manipulation:
Another highly requested feature that I kept insisting was not possible due to physics accuracy and other reasons is now in the game. The ability to speed up time allows us to hopefully fix a lot of problems with the game. We got a lot of feedback that things happen too slowly or too fast or too often or not often enough. We have now made the length of an in-game day longer and the speed at which things like hunger, breeding, suffocation etc happen are much slower. Even when things go very wrong in the real world it can take a while for their consequences to show. Anything short of a bath bomb falling into the aquarium usually allows for enough time to do something about it without panicking
When things get a little slow or tedious such as waiting for the night to be over players can increase game speed up to sixteen times.
Time can also be frozen so players can take their time to fix problems without too much pressure. It also gives players time to adjust their camera nicely for screenshots.
Those are all the biggest changes we made. We also did a lot of bug fixing and other small quality of life improvements. The clownfish were about half the size they should have been so expect them to be larger in your existing aquariums. Hopefully it won't cause too many problems. Water chemistry will also be different from when you last loaded a file because of changes we have made but in general it should not be too different. You may have to get used to the new speed that water chemistry changes. As was said before, in general things happen slower but in extreme circumstances like adding 20 airstones to a small aquarium things will happen quite fast.
There are some changes that we said we were aiming to put into this update which we were unable to finish. Live birth is almost ready but needs refining. As is the new debug settings for allowing fish and plants to ignore water chemistry so players can ignore the simulation aspects and just get on with being creative if they just want to chill out a bit. That will be coming very soon and we will return to our more regular schedule for build updates that come every one to two weeks.
Quite a lot of work went into this update but there are still quite a few rough edges in the game as whole and there is a tremendous amount of content missing. The next update will come next week and will probably include the usual assortment of small tweaks and bug fixes among other things.
It has been a while since we have added more decorations, plants and general creative content into the game. We often take a look at the screenshots uploaded by players and they are fantastic. It is quite surprising just how much can be made with the small assortment of decorations that we have provided but it really is time to add more so expect in the coming months more creative content.
As usual we wish you all a very pleasant rest of the week,
The Fishery Team