Fish motion and attributes
 

I've been a fan of this application for a long time now and have to say that I've been looking forward to the day that the fish take on real "fishy" motions.
That's not to say that it's not good, it's just that it lags behind the competition, DA.
Very seldom do fish in the wild move vertically or appear to slide of one another. Not to mention the lack of behavioral attributes like schooling, surface or bottom dwelling, coral hugging etc.

Just my 2 cents worth.

But I can't wait to run it up on my dual 1920x1080 displays at work. :)

Actually I could chuck it up onto ....oh am I drooling...

Remember that right now this is a Beta, it is not finished by a long shot.

All those things will be taken care of...........

What we are looking for now is that it runs on systems everywhere without problems. :)

Welcome to the forums.

Nothing has been done to the fish (neither behavoiur nor visuals) compared to MA2.6. Once a good portion of the remaining bugs have been weeded out, remade fish will follow.

This was my only complaint of the oterh versions. The movement of the fish was not really realistic, and I notice the same thing about this one. I'm glad to hear that that is a priority. For my two cents worth it should be the first priority, because without that it will never look as lifelike as it could no matter how nice it looks-- and it does look nice.

I'd say it's a good start. No crashes or any other issues so far. I have a Radeon X1800.

Fish movement
 

I sent this to Jim back in 2002, for fish behavioural / interaction ideas...

If you are interested download from this link,

http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N.../aquarium.html

(You may (like me) have to run it in compatibility mode if you are on XP or Vista).

Not pretty, but when we do get to see the new fish in MA3 hopefully some new, more realistic, rock picking, chasing, etc etc behaviours will be programmed in along this line...

Jim, any plans on putting in shadows from the fish on the rocks. This helps make it look real and not like they are floating in mid space. Also the lights though the water at top would be a nice touch.

Yes, I plan to have the fish and invertebrates cast chadows on the other objects, but only when they are very close. If you look at a real saltwater tank, the lighting is so diffuse that once a fish is an inch or so away from something, it no longer casts a shadow on it.

As for your other question, if you are speaking of light rays shining through the water itself, that just means one thing in a real tank - dirty water. Programming-wise, it would involve volume textures, which are extremely difficult and a real resource-hog.

If you are speaking of lightplay cast diagonnaly down the rear glass (actually a board behind the glass in a real tank), that is do-able, but also uses a lot of bandwidth. I'm considering it as an option.

OK, cool. I like your idea of casting shadows on close objects. Do these objects also include other fish?

Possibly.