development update #99
Hello everyone,
Build 64 should be uploaded some time tonight and we have made some nice changes indeed.
Red cap goldfish model:
Somewhat disappointingly we only managed to finish the model of our newest goldfish rather than have it finished, painted and in the game. It is quite a complex shape with a lot of overlapping forms which are very rounded and that means we have to use more polygons to describe the forms otherwise it looks very blocky. At the moment the model is close to 5000 polygons which is very small by today's standards but remember that it should be possible to have 50 to 100 or even more of these swimming around our largest aquariums which means that we have to take care to optimize the polygon count as much as possible. I'll probably spend a bit more time finalizing the model before it can be painted and yes most likely next week it will be finished and in the game finally.
Beach Shallows Backdrop:
A new backdrop has been added! If players are making a tropical themed aquarium it may help to have a backdrop that resembles their natural habitat. More of these types of backdrops are planned such as a riverbed, the bottom of a lake, large garden pond, under an ice shelf etc etc. This one is still not entirely complete. We want to populate parts of it with seagrass and coral rock and even have some crabs walking about. Coral rock and live corals are something we are working on little by little and hope to have it in the game relatively soon so players can populate their aquariums with it and we can finish off this backdrop.
Decoration Squishing:
One of the roughest of the rough edges that we currently have in Fishery is the way decorations and plants poke out of the aquarium. This is the first step to addressing that problem. In the above image you can see on the left side what this aquarium looked like before and on the right side how it looks after today's update.
For now we are only applying this to the floor for reasons I'll explain in a little bit. As the object is being rendered by the graphics processing unit it executes some code that prevents the polygons moving below the "floor" plane. It is very simple and because it runs on the GPU it is very fast but it does have some drawbacks that matter if we want to apply this technique to the sides of the glass too.
It would be nicer if the squished parts of the model disappeared when they came in contact with the plane instead of hanging around making the object look melted. But only disappear from the side of the glass facing inwards. From the outside of the glass it would look nice if the rock looked like it was cut to perfectly fit up against the glass.
One problem that this technique causes is something commonly called "Z fighting". When two or more polygons exist in precisely the same position the graphics card renders them both but wont render them both in the same order every frame. The result is that flickering which you can see. This is very undesirable and will require some fiddling with the maths to make it go away which may or may not be simple but I won't know until I get stuck into it.
Anyway for this particular problem, having ugly protrusions through the aquarium floor, the technique works very well. When players move their mouse over where the object would be if not squished it still highlights so there is no chance of it being undetectable if players move the entire object outside of the aquarium either by accident or design.
This technique is only applied to decorations for now. Plants will have a similar fix at some point we hope. For plants we have to do more than just have them squish up against the glass like this because it looks ugly. Ideally we would have the plant deform and sort of bend as it collides with the glass rather than just go flat. It is more mathematically complex but we will give it our best shot in time.
Look forward to the red cap goldfish next Friday and we may have a few more nice new decorations and or plants to add. Busy week indeed. We wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team.
Build 64 should be uploaded some time tonight and we have made some nice changes indeed.
Red cap goldfish model:
Somewhat disappointingly we only managed to finish the model of our newest goldfish rather than have it finished, painted and in the game. It is quite a complex shape with a lot of overlapping forms which are very rounded and that means we have to use more polygons to describe the forms otherwise it looks very blocky. At the moment the model is close to 5000 polygons which is very small by today's standards but remember that it should be possible to have 50 to 100 or even more of these swimming around our largest aquariums which means that we have to take care to optimize the polygon count as much as possible. I'll probably spend a bit more time finalizing the model before it can be painted and yes most likely next week it will be finished and in the game finally.
Beach Shallows Backdrop:
A new backdrop has been added! If players are making a tropical themed aquarium it may help to have a backdrop that resembles their natural habitat. More of these types of backdrops are planned such as a riverbed, the bottom of a lake, large garden pond, under an ice shelf etc etc. This one is still not entirely complete. We want to populate parts of it with seagrass and coral rock and even have some crabs walking about. Coral rock and live corals are something we are working on little by little and hope to have it in the game relatively soon so players can populate their aquariums with it and we can finish off this backdrop.
Decoration Squishing:
One of the roughest of the rough edges that we currently have in Fishery is the way decorations and plants poke out of the aquarium. This is the first step to addressing that problem. In the above image you can see on the left side what this aquarium looked like before and on the right side how it looks after today's update.
For now we are only applying this to the floor for reasons I'll explain in a little bit. As the object is being rendered by the graphics processing unit it executes some code that prevents the polygons moving below the "floor" plane. It is very simple and because it runs on the GPU it is very fast but it does have some drawbacks that matter if we want to apply this technique to the sides of the glass too.
It would be nicer if the squished parts of the model disappeared when they came in contact with the plane instead of hanging around making the object look melted. But only disappear from the side of the glass facing inwards. From the outside of the glass it would look nice if the rock looked like it was cut to perfectly fit up against the glass.
One problem that this technique causes is something commonly called "Z fighting". When two or more polygons exist in precisely the same position the graphics card renders them both but wont render them both in the same order every frame. The result is that flickering which you can see. This is very undesirable and will require some fiddling with the maths to make it go away which may or may not be simple but I won't know until I get stuck into it.
Anyway for this particular problem, having ugly protrusions through the aquarium floor, the technique works very well. When players move their mouse over where the object would be if not squished it still highlights so there is no chance of it being undetectable if players move the entire object outside of the aquarium either by accident or design.
This technique is only applied to decorations for now. Plants will have a similar fix at some point we hope. For plants we have to do more than just have them squish up against the glass like this because it looks ugly. Ideally we would have the plant deform and sort of bend as it collides with the glass rather than just go flat. It is more mathematically complex but we will give it our best shot in time.
Look forward to the red cap goldfish next Friday and we may have a few more nice new decorations and or plants to add. Busy week indeed. We wish you all a lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team.