** Starfish questions here -- See 99L FINAL for others **

[grape_jellyfish]

multivitamingrafx...

I'm not Jim but if you want the starfish back on the bottom either leave the automatic lights on and it will go there eventually or wait until he is near the bottom (at least one arm touching the sand) and turn the lights down yourself and he will get off the glass, just give him a little time to do it.

[ajlaban]

About 2 hours ago I saw the underside of the little beastie!

Jim, the detail and you are just incredible!

Wireframe really works! When I turn off the foreground lights and switch to wireframe, the starfish just JUMPS on the glass! Amazing!

[feldon34]

Do you want Jim to disable Wireframe while the Starfish is making the changeover?

Jim spent 2 weeks trying to make the Starfish move gracefully from the gravel up to the glass but was unsuccessful. Then he came up with the idea of taking advantage of automatic lights.

Maybe sometime in the future, the Starfish will be able to crawl up onto the glass in broad daylight. Just not this month

Overall, I'm quite happy with the Starfish and improvements to the Aquarium. And I'm not just saying that cause I run the Fan Site

[Socrates]

Feldon,
Thanks for deleting the picture. I thought about doing that this morning, but got real busy today straight into the evening.

Jim,
I tried the lights both up, both down, one up, one down, auto, etc. Nothing worked until I deleted the registry and put my code back in. Because no matter what I did the foreground could not go below around 1/4 in manual mode.

The dead starfish thing is kind of silly but do this:
Start the Aquarium in FULL screen. Hit space. Turn off all the fish. Click Exit. POOF! Dead starfish. Works 9 out of 10 times. It's a minor bug, and kind of a fun thing to find.

I wonder why doesn't anyone post the picture of the starfish on the glass itself. Then people won't be so confused, like me...

[Jim Sachs]

Someone turning off all the fish is not something that had ever occurred to me. I'll fix it in the next update.

[Digital Lungfish]

"Someone turning off all the fish is not something that had ever occurred to me."

Of course it didn't Jim, that's why we have beta testers. Programmers try to create and testers try to break that creation by doing everything the programmers normally wouldn't, but of course you already knew that.

Anyway, that's what we're here for Jim, well that and so that we can rant and rave about your work.

- DL

I just turned on the aquarium, left it for awhile and in less than an hour the starfish was on the glass. Actually I don't like the look - it looks like it's floating with the fish moving behind it. It looks much better on the bottom and I think it should stay off the glass. I'll probably go back to the earlier version.

[Shinsa]

After "killing" the starfish, I wanted to see what happened putting one fish at a time back in. Well, I started with #7 (my mouse just happened to be right there) and when I clicked "exit" the screen came back, with one fish (flame angel) and the SF in the corner. But nothing was moving. It did show the FPS at about 128 (my normal speed) varying just a little). I also have bubbles and sounf off.

It was locked up hard enough that CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing at all, even when pressed multiple times. I had to do a cold boot.

Lesson learned, be nice to your starfish

SocratesLGK was not the only one who couldn't turn the lights all the way down. I couldn't either via the arrow keys - I had to call up the contols via the "A" key instead and use the sliders.

Jim - can you look at fixing this one in the next release too ?

Regards, Tim

It's not a bug. Jim designed it that way. What you need to do is:

1. Turn UP the backlights.
2. Turn DOWN the frontlights all the way.
3. The foreground will now be pitchdark.
4. You can then turn down the backlights if you wish to. (though it doesn't matter to the starfish)

Hope this helps.

Well, call it a design fault if you wish. There's two conflicting ideas built in.

If you set both sliders to black, press exit, and then go back to settings, the foreground has been turned up slightly so that you cannot get all black.

But the starfish needs the foreground black. So if the behaviour above worked the other way around (i.e. the background had been turned up slightly) there wouldn't be a problem.

[Socrates]

Just for the Record, The Lighting BUG on mine was this:

I could not put the fore lights all down REGARDLESS of the position of the back lights. Even all the way up in the back didn't help.

It's not really a bug that would have ever mattered at all except that the starfish is there now.

Also, I seem to be the only one who had this problem.

My guess is that the registry value was corrupted in my registry somehow since deleting the whole key did the trick.

[Jim Sachs]

As you say, this could have been a Registry problem. I designed it so that the foreground and background lights can't be black at the same time. If they are set that way in the Settings screen, the foreground lights will come up to about 20% when you come back to the Aquarium. This is to eliminate all the "My screen is black!" customer service e-mails.

Also, in the next version, I'll probably have a "not on the glass" button in the Settings screen.

[Coelacanth]

The starfish is really cool! It moves very realistically. I just leave my PC and screensaver on and find myself checking it every once in a while to see where the starfish went. It doesn't seem to take THAT long for the starfish to start inching up the glass.

This is pretty neat. Hopefully Jim can expand on this and improve it (yeah, yeah, we customers are never satisfied and always want more )

I'd suggest:
1. True AI for the starfish, as you've planned.
2. The ability for the starfish to travel around anywhere on the 3D live rock and back and front glass (once the background is in true 3D).
3. The ability to drop a sinking chunk of food on the bottom of the tank and watch the starfish eventually find and eat it.
4. More starfish choices -- I would LOVE to be able to choose a purple linckia, blue linckia, orange fromilia monilis starfish, and maybe even a brittle star or serpent star (although I know these starfish move much differently, and faster).

[feldon34]

Jim could spend a year just on adding and perfecting (I think that's redundant with Jim!) all those. But I'm sure he has some of those things in mind

I saw someone mention this previously, but cannot find the post anymore…

If the starfish is not allowed to go onto the glass (foreground lights always on – I like it that way), it spends most of its time at the far left end of the tank in 99L alpha3. I’ve seen it beyond the blue coral once, after hours on the left. In 99L alpha1 the starfish is on the right after about 20 minutes. There may be more arm motion in apha3, but it seems like lateral motion is less.

However, I don’t think the starfish should be “sped up” more (I like it sedate), I would just like to see it utilize more of the bottom area. Maybe Jim could keep track of where the starfish has been in the last 15 minutes or so and give the random motion generator a little nudge in a new direction?

[feldon34]

The starfish follows a bit of a track, it's not random at all. I too hope that when Jim is afforded time, he'll add some randomness to the starfish, or at least increase the track to include both sides of the tank.

[Jim Sachs]

In the Alpha version, the starfish was on a track. With the release version of .99L, the movement is completely random. However, it does start out in the same place each time.