Hello everyone,

Here is some more progress for you all to see.

Maintenance visualized:

I spoke about the maintenance feature for utility devices a few updates ago. The shaders have been tweaked to visualize this feature. Once a device is placed into an aquarium and time passes, the appearance of the device will become more dirty looking as it's maintenance value creeps higher. Players will know when a device is nearing it's breaking point because it will look filthy. Once maintenance is then performed by the player it will be nice and clean and fully functioning again.

Plumbing-like power generator prototype:

Back:
Front:
A prototype has been made of the new "plumbing-like" objects that are being added to the game. This one is the power generator.

Devices like these sit on the glass but are mostly outside of the aquarium itself. This one generates more power so other powered devices work within the aquarium where the power supply is already exhausted. There are ideas for more of these devices that are similar to the classic plumbing ones, like algae reactors, various types of gas injectors, and devices that harvest things from the aquarium etc. I sincerely hope objects like this can help make up for my removing the plumbing system from the game over time.


Open brain coral:

I have spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with various techniques to represent coral. Coral is quite highly detailed and difficult to represent visually when we have to be careful with how many polygons we use and how many texture maps we use. Soft coral especially looks very wrinkly when seen close-up with many other high frequency details appearing from species to species.

A few days was wasted because I spent quite a bit of time building a nice translucent shader for the new corals but then discovered that I couldn't quite complete the look I wanted because certain types of data is not available to me inside the unity engine in the way that I want/need. I am unable to have light falloff and light shadow map data be separated from each other and as a result I had to just make a simpler, less visually interesting shader. Translucency is very important for coral but I am just going to have to try to find some other compromise to get something nearer to that look. On the bright side I am narrowing in on the right techniques for coral that produces good results and stays within the visual look that the game has. That also means soon-ish there will be much more coral in the game.


There will be another update soon showing more progress and I'll talk more about plans for the next build. Obviously I cannot keep to deadlines for the game at the moment but a lot of work is being done and we are getting closer.


We hope you all enjoy another lovely weekend.

The Fishery Team.