development update #102
Hello everyone,
Ah yes the first update of a new year. Build 67 should be uploaded either tonight or tomorrow morning. Rather than hit the gas too hard coming out of the Christmas season we decided to work on some smaller quality of life changes that have been annoying us and players for some time and of course fixed some bugs.
The scale tool has been rewritten to work a lot smoother than before and it's sensitivity has been increased so it should no longer take a lot of mouse movement to make things bigger or smaller.
smooth as butter.
I also managed to program non-uniform scaling but it is not enabled for players just yet. Non-uniform scaling if when you scale an object on only one or two of it's axis allowing you to squash or stretch the object. This sort of scaling is quite important for an application like this because it helps make things look less repetitive especially when populating an aquarium with a limited amount of items. Changing the shape and rotating many copies of the same rock does help a lot in making it seem like there are many different rocks scattered about the place.
In the Unity manual Non-uniform scaling is discouraged quite strongly especially for physics objects. The rocks, plants and wood etc are not being moved by physics but they are used by the physics system for collision detection and we ask a lot of questions of the physics system as to where objects are so we can help fish navigate. According to the unity documents having non-uniform scaled physics objects will cause things to be less accurate and also slower. I have not seen this so far in my tests and it is my hope that this rule only need apply to mobile platforms where performance problems are more easy to trigger. We will enable it in the game soon and see if players notice any performance problems.
Placement settings UI changes:
A small change was made to the placement settings ui that becomes visible when players are placing objects into the world from the inventory. The 'Align to surface' parameter is now something that can be faded in or out to give players a bit more control over the orientation of their objects relative to the surface they are being placed onto. By default it is now set to 50% which I found to be jolly good.
Another minor change was to where the placement help text is placed. Now that we dont have a chunky inventory UI taking up space towards the bottom of the screen we can put some useful information there.
A touch of polish to button labels:
It used to be the case that the interactive button labels would just appear at the position of the mouse when it hovered over a button or rollover control and move with the mouse until the mouse was no longer hovering over the ui that activated it. Very crude and upsetting it was but now the labels are positioned nice an neatly where they wont offend the eyes.
We also fixed a few annoying bugs. The most annoying was a bug where when players pressed enter or return it would take a screenshot and stick it on the desktop. This would be especially annoying if players like to rename all their fish as they are required to press enter to complete the name edit. Can't believe I didn't see that during testing. I must have been too eager to start eating mince pies before uploading.
It is going to be a very busy year and this rather odd and obscure little game is going to get a lot more interesting and complete. We wish you all a happy new year and lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team
Ah yes the first update of a new year. Build 67 should be uploaded either tonight or tomorrow morning. Rather than hit the gas too hard coming out of the Christmas season we decided to work on some smaller quality of life changes that have been annoying us and players for some time and of course fixed some bugs.
The scale tool has been rewritten to work a lot smoother than before and it's sensitivity has been increased so it should no longer take a lot of mouse movement to make things bigger or smaller.
smooth as butter.
I also managed to program non-uniform scaling but it is not enabled for players just yet. Non-uniform scaling if when you scale an object on only one or two of it's axis allowing you to squash or stretch the object. This sort of scaling is quite important for an application like this because it helps make things look less repetitive especially when populating an aquarium with a limited amount of items. Changing the shape and rotating many copies of the same rock does help a lot in making it seem like there are many different rocks scattered about the place.
In the Unity manual Non-uniform scaling is discouraged quite strongly especially for physics objects. The rocks, plants and wood etc are not being moved by physics but they are used by the physics system for collision detection and we ask a lot of questions of the physics system as to where objects are so we can help fish navigate. According to the unity documents having non-uniform scaled physics objects will cause things to be less accurate and also slower. I have not seen this so far in my tests and it is my hope that this rule only need apply to mobile platforms where performance problems are more easy to trigger. We will enable it in the game soon and see if players notice any performance problems.
Placement settings UI changes:
A small change was made to the placement settings ui that becomes visible when players are placing objects into the world from the inventory. The 'Align to surface' parameter is now something that can be faded in or out to give players a bit more control over the orientation of their objects relative to the surface they are being placed onto. By default it is now set to 50% which I found to be jolly good.
Another minor change was to where the placement help text is placed. Now that we dont have a chunky inventory UI taking up space towards the bottom of the screen we can put some useful information there.
A touch of polish to button labels:
It used to be the case that the interactive button labels would just appear at the position of the mouse when it hovered over a button or rollover control and move with the mouse until the mouse was no longer hovering over the ui that activated it. Very crude and upsetting it was but now the labels are positioned nice an neatly where they wont offend the eyes.
We also fixed a few annoying bugs. The most annoying was a bug where when players pressed enter or return it would take a screenshot and stick it on the desktop. This would be especially annoying if players like to rename all their fish as they are required to press enter to complete the name edit. Can't believe I didn't see that during testing. I must have been too eager to start eating mince pies before uploading.
It is going to be a very busy year and this rather odd and obscure little game is going to get a lot more interesting and complete. We wish you all a happy new year and lovely weekend.
The Fishery Team