The Lionfish was last February.
Things coming in the next couple of months:
-Dual monitor version of the Aquarium
-Marine Aquarium Time
-Graphic fish selection screen for both versions of the Aquarium
Further down the road:
-SereneScreen Freshwater Aquarium
Still further down the road:
-3D background for the Saltwater Aquarium
--the list of things being added here is huge, I think we'll see several evolutions over time
Develloping more creatures isn't that hard, and doesn't take that much time with ex. 3d studio, heck look at the toolkit package, it's complete with illustrated instructions.
We've had lengthy discussions in the past about "making our own fish", etc.
The important thing here is that for the first 2 years, Jim was programming the Aquarium himself from scratch without outside coding. Jim will tell you that he is an artist first, animator second, and programming is somewhere down near the bottom of the list.
It's still funny to hear him say this since every beta version of the Aquarium Jim has been released has been more stable than most ".0" releases from the huge software houses with 15 programmers at their disposal.
Still, this leads to slow going for the programming aspects. Jim announced in March of 2001 that programming responsibilities would be shifting to Prolific so Jim could focus on the artwork. This has taken longer than expected. Also Jim still wants to fully understand all the code that Prolific is producing (an unfortunate situation, in my opinion, but Jim feels it is essential to control the quality of the product).
Over the last 9 months, Prolific has been producing advanced development tools for the SereneScreen product line. Expanding on Jim's convincing but ultimately limited "collision avoidance" and other animation routines (written from an artist/programmer instead of a physicist/programmer perspective), Prolific has spent a long time working on routines just to handle fish movement in a more dynamic way.
Instead of trying to create 20 fish at once, Jim wrote one convincing fish animation engine and one fish model. Then he changed the model and created new textures for each fish. Every time a fin shape significantly changed, he had to hard-code in new behavior for that fin. Each fish presented new challenges. Also each fish was locked into a certain number of vertices (control points). So a fish with a more complex fin structure would require a from-scratch rewrite of the engine to handle that fish.
With the new tools, most of the limitations above have been resolved. Instead of lengthy programming, Jim is able to focus more on the artistic aspects.
The Freshwater Aquarium is being written on this new engine and development platform. Once the Freshwater Aquarium comes out, Jim will return to work on the Saltwater Aquarium. In the mean-time, it has been explained to me that the Saltwater Aquarium has been moved to the new engine/platform and awaits Jim's development efforts.
I share your frustration in what has seemed, to the outside, as a year-long standstill. But I have been assured that there has been a lot of progress, just that none of it is tangible at this time.
Jim, Reichart, correct me if I am wrong on any of this.