About your issue with the texture sharing, make sure that your asset key for the tinted-hue textures has its members taken into consideration in the “equals” and “hashCode” methods, otherwise the equality will be wrong and the AssetManager will think it already loaded that asset
@ancalagon cheers 
good luck, so far its been well worth, 2 days in.
@Momoko_Fan thanks for the heads up, would not have thought of that!
Fairly slow day today, started work on a ProgressDirector class to help guide the player’s level progression (levelling up), which will eventually draw the player through the game.
Toyed with BSR and PSSM. Slapped around a few particle systems. Fiddled with the DOF to get more out of it, which has really lifted the visuals :
http://i.imgur.com/QBEVi.png
Played with the VideoRecorderAppState for the first time, and I must say it’s excellent, recording has always pained me, until now! Thanks for your top work @bortreb and @normen 
So I present to you the first gameplay footage to come from the Cove :
the Cove - very early WIP - YouTube
(720 ftw)
The video shows what will become an early ‘level’ in the game, hatching, then swimming around the Cove looking for food, of which there is currently none, and avoiding dangerous larger fish, all of who are currently incapable of harming the player ooh, and bare in mind these are placeholder assets until… well until I run out of time and they become final lol but hopefully not.
Cheers
James
3 Likes
Looks super good
looking hawt, gj
Looks awesome!!!
You need to add some bubbles
Have the fishes AI or is that cinematics?
@memonick cheers
@wezrule thanks… I don’t think I’ve seen your entry anywhere yet 
?
@gbluntzer cheers, for sure, I started work on particles yesterday with bubbles being a final goal.
@glaucomardano fish AI is controlled by a director class, no cimematics, they are all active NPCs.
That is the coolest looking game! Great work.
This afternoon I overhauled the water colour: I noticed it was starting to feel washed out, the water was sort of murky and I’m trying to go for a more tropical feel so I’m pulling back on the greens and going for ligher blues and clearer water. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking this, and the lighting, right up until the very end. I had always planned to dynamically tweak water colours to give different areas of the Cove their own unique feel, it should work out really nicely base on the results for these current tweaks.
Changes
- built and integrated GUI for level progression - fully working
- rebuilt the lighting - much brighter now
- added new coral type : ‘Finger’ - not yet fully configured
- re-did most textures for higher contrast
- added food pellets - for early game
- added bubble stream particle effect
- boosted the ‘level up’ particle effect
- migrated to TerrainLighting
- made up a point to see if anyone reads this
- added “eating” - player can currently eat all the other fish + food
- added some sound effects for eating
- added “focus” so a fish can have a target fish to either chase or evade.
- added picking so player can target a fish or a food
I think that’s it, might start keeping a list of changes so I dont gotta try and think of them all after the fact… I live in the moment, no time to rememeber what I did yesterday!
Cheers
James
1 Like
Wow, looking awesome! This has a very “spores” feel to it.
Wow this is going very fast! Impressive!
“- made up a point to see if anyone reads this”
I did
2 Likes
Just letting you know I will definatly be playing this! looks amazing and we can see the amount of effort put in it.
1 Like
the early phase of Spore and flOw are influences for some of the gameplay.
@dolfin thanks a lot mate, that’s really nice to hear
Updates:
I did some minor work on the ProgressDirector so the game now plays through the first few levels or stages of life. Part of my inital concept was to have 2 methods to get through each level, depending in how the player chooses to get through each stage of life will effect the species of fish they can eventually evolve to. One of the core game design ideas I had from the start was to not have a dificulty setting (ie easy/medium/hard), but let the player set thier dificulty through play style, rewarded for taking the more dificualt path with hard to achive fish species and perks e.g. the player can choose to try and hunt down the fast evasive fish rather than go for the slow dumb ones, which will result in unlocking a faster fish next level. I have absolutely no idea if this concept will play well or be a dismal failer, time will tell.
I built a guage UI element - currently used for “danger” - which will function kind of like a reverse regenerating life meter. I really don’t like the guage visual though, I’m trying to keep GUI to minimum and there is a much smarter way of comunicating this info… I just haven’t nailed it down yet - feel free to chip in your ideas
FSM for fish behaviour, currently built:
Idle - do nothing
SimpleWaypoint - basic swimming around
Pursuit - attack another entity
Evade - (not finished) try to escape a persuier
Added physics - this took a lot of time but was relatively pain free. This was probably my major milestone. It didn’t take long to warp all the coral in CollisionShapes, same for the terrain, I then added some test soccer balls to make sure it was all working - always satisfying. I then amused myself with the side effects of having fish spinning wildly out of control and being punched out of geometry and fired around the map. Then I went on a date with your mum. Now the physics is fully integrated the fish can’t overlap or swim through geometry or the terrain. This created a new gameplay element I had not anticipated: when the player is trying to evade a larger attacking fish, they can swim in/around/between/under coral where the larger fish simply cannot fit - the larger fish can’t close in on the target so gives up.
I added ‘reefs’ : a reef being a patch of coral and sea life, precurally defined with size, position, densisty and then a definition of the coral and fish species that make up that reef. Reefs are then scatter about the sea floor. I put a bubble stream in the middle of each reef which really helps with navigation, and gives bubbles a function. Exploring is now pretty fun since even I dont know what to find in each reef. All randomly generated content is seed based so it’s the same everytime. This is very important so I can hand code in special items / players / areas and they will always fit with the procedurally generated content. I also worked more on coral stacking and layout - trying to get more natural looking reefs, less random.
Today I spent most of the day optomising pretty much everything. Up until now I have been very liberal with the memory and CPU sticks, now with bullet running and multiple reefs which make the geometry count n times bigger, I was starting to see slowdowns. So I’ve been batching geometry grouping by reef, caching materials - before every peice coral had its own material (please dont hit me, I was prototying), and grouping collisionShapes by reef - hits a nice performance ballance between size and nuber of objects.
I started modelling 2 more fish bodies, a new coral species and started work on the first non-fish sea life: a turtle.
In game shots show a distant reef, the new stacking and the physics debugging turned on
I also gained 4 levels in Battlefield and my Gears KOTH KD went down 2 points due to bloody turbo Hammerburst idiots, grrrrrrr.
Thanks for reading
James
1 Like
That looks brilliant.
I was wondering, how do you feel about the underwater “aspect”.
I’d like to add some kind of animated distortion to the image so that it feels more underwater, but since your using it intensively, i don’t want to interfere.
Also from the contest point of view, it would feel a bit like i’m helping you…so i may postpone that after the contest…but still…what’s your opinion?
lol I missed this one