The freshwater aquarium was announced in April last year. Almost 1 year later no sign of progress?
Outward signs are different from internal truths.
Q1) What is the hold up?
I was not aware Jim was working on your release schedule.
Q2) Have any freshwater fish been created?
1 at last count.
Q3) Has anything in the freshwater tank been done?
I'll let Jim answer this.
Cant Jim Copy the source code from the salt water tank, change the backgrounds, create the freshwater fish meshes and animate them. then add in soem freshwater stuff like plants etc and release that.
First, Jim does not "throw things together". That is what the other ~30 aquarium screen saver developers are doing. Second, what you loosely describe is beind done, but
properly.
Q4) How long does it take Jim to make a fish mesh?
2 weeks? a month? 2 months?
These are freshwater fish which have NEVER been done realistically in any computer program. To properly do them, they need multiple meshes with layers of transparency.
Q5) How long does it take Jim animate a fish mesh?
Right now, all the fish in the Saltwater Aquarium swim/animate the same way. Jim will tell you that even though this animation is better than the animation in the other ~30 aquarium screen savers out there, it is not correct and he is not satisfied with it. The fish really need to each swim with their own behavior according to how that fish species behaves in real-life.
Is Jim rewriting the Freshwater tank in Direct X 8.1 or DX 9?
No, because most people are running DirectX 7 and DirectX 8. The Aquarium still runs on cards for which there are no DirectX 8-compatible drivers.
Also
rewriting the Aquarium in DirectX 8 code was done in 2001. After Jim spent 3 months doing this rewrite, Microsoft broke the screen saver libraries with a SEVERE bug that still has not been resolved in DirectX 9. So that 3 months of effort is totally wasted.