Aquarelle 1.7.9 — Linux x86_64

Aquarelle is a living coral reef in a sunlit lagoon, to watch on a slow camera tour, swim through as a diver, or explore through the eyes of one of its fish. Everything you see is generated in code and shaders when the program starts: the sandy basin and its shore, coral outcrops, anemones, seagrass meadows, boulders, old ruins and every animal in the water. There is no score and no objective. It is an aquarium to leave running, or to explore at your own pace.

The reef
At the default quality around 120 fish of 18 species share the lagoon with four sea turtles and about 10 other sea creatures of 5 kinds. They form a small ecosystem in which every species has its own habits and daily routine:
- Schools of neon tetras, guppies, lyretail anthias and hardyhead silversides move as one, now and then gathering into a circling ball. They snap at plankton, and anthias rise towards the surface by day.
- Silversides live high in the open water. Their mirror flanks flash with the light from above as they turn.
- Angelfish, discus, Siamese fighting fish and paradise fish cruise, hover, forage, inspect the reef, play and chase each other off.
- Ocellaris clownfish keep to their anemones, defend them and dive into them when frightened.
- Blue tangs, yellow tangs and Moorish idols graze algae from the rocks, and a tang school can descend on one rock together.
- Mandarinfish pick their way along the bottom. Yellow seahorses hover in the seagrass meadows.
- Stars-and-stripes puffers potter about the reef, rowing with their small dorsal and anal fins, pectorals fluttering and tail folded until they need a burst of speed, their big eyes rolling about each on its own. They nose over the sand, bite at the rocks with their beaks, come to look at a diver who keeps still, gape for the cleaners and sleep on the sand at night. Lunge at one, ram it with a fish or let the shark run it down, and it gulps water until it is a prickly ball the shark gives up on. Lesser upsets add up too: angelfish, paradise fish, bettas and the damsels now and then square up to a puffer and nip at it, and one that has had enough puffs up anyway. Blown up, it hangs there with its fins whirring until the threat has gone, then coughs the water out and yawns.
- Bluestreak cleaner wrasses keep cleaning stations on the coral. Their clients come by, tilt and hold still while the wrasse picks over their gills and flanks. Even the shark takes its turn.
- Bluespotted ribbontail rays glide over the sand and rest on it. A whitetip reef shark patrols the lagoon, rests on the bottom and grows more active at night. The other fish keep their distance: schools tighten and edge away, and shy fish hide.
- Green sea turtles graze the seagrass meadows and a hawksbill bites at sponges on the rocks. They fly through the water on their long fore flippers, a few strokes and then a glide, and every few minutes swim up to the surface for a few breaths. By day they wait at the cleaning stations while yellow tangs pick the algae off their shells. At night they sleep on the sand or tucked against a rock, often going back to the same spot after a trip up for air. Females and males take turns, the males with a long thick tail and a hooked claw on each fore flipper, and every third turtle is a young one, its head and eyes big for its size and its shell boldly streaked.
- Reef crabs, cleaner shrimp, sea snails and a nudibranch crawl over the sand, and jellyfish pulse through the water with a faint glow.

Light and time
The sun moves across the sky over the day, and the water, light shafts and rippling caustics change with it, through a long golden evening into night. After dark a diver's torch lights the way. The time of day can be set by hand, run on reef time (a full day every four hours) or follow your own clock. A new install starts at 17:10 reef time, with the cycle off.

Sound
The reef has its own sound, synthesized like everything else: the slow swell of open water, distant surf, water moving and gurgling around you, the crackle of snapping shrimp (loudest from dusk through the night), bubbles bursting from the streams on the sea floor and puffed out by the bigger fish, fish and turtles grazing nearby and, when you swim, your own breathing. The reactive music follows what you meet: a soft pad and bass move slowly through the chords, the creatures close to you each play their own notes as they pass, and now and then a melody comes in for a while, busier among big schools of fish. The Sound panel beside the time of day switches the reef sounds and the music on and off and sets their volume, and the Breathing panel beside it switches off your breathing, its sound and bubbles, for staying quietly in one spot. F9 opens a mixer with a fader for each layer of sound and music and a choice of instrument for the melody: piano, electric piano, synth stab or flute.

Ways to watch
Tour: the camera drifts along a looping route. Key 1 follows the reef close to the bottom. Key 2 is the full tour: higher among the fish, along the surface and over the reef from a distance.
Swim: click the water to leave the tour and swim freely.
Fish: click a fish to see its name and take control of it. Steer it, dash, and let it go again.
Inventory: Tab opens a list of every species with a moving portrait. Change how many of each live in the reef and how many schools they form; the reef adjusts at once. Click a species for a page about it: where it lives, how big it gets, what it eats and a few paragraphs on its life and habits.
Miniature reef: key 3 swaps the lagoon for a small aquarium of about 20 fish, watched from one spot, with the reef's own sounds but no music. It runs lighter on laptops and older PCs, at any quality. Keys 1 and 2 go back to the full reef.

Installing
Aquarelle needs no installer. Extract the archive anywhere and run the program from there; to remove it, delete the folder. Settings are kept separately (see Settings below).

Linux
1. Extract the archive.
2. Run ./aquarelle from a terminal in that folder, or double-click it in your file manager.
3. If it does not start, the file may have lost its permission to run: run chmod +x aquarelle, or tick "Allow executing file as program" in the file's properties.

Windows
1. Extract the archive (right-click it and choose Extract All).
2. Run Aquarelle.exe.
3. The program is not signed with a paid certificate, so the first time Windows may show "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. Windows remembers this, so it only happens once.
4. Some antivirus programs are wary of new, unsigned programs. If yours blocks or quarantines Aquarelle.exe, you can allow it there.

macOS
1. Extract the archive by double-clicking it (Safari may already have done this). Optionally, drag Aquarelle.app into your Applications folder.
2. Double-click Aquarelle.app. The app is not notarized by Apple, so macOS refuses to open it the first time and says it cannot check it for malicious software. Click Done (or OK).
3. Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security and scroll down to Security. Next to the message about Aquarelle, click Open Anyway, confirm with your password, then click Open.
4. From then on it opens normally with a double-click.
If Open Anyway does not appear, you can clear the download flag in Terminal instead: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Aquarelle.app (use the app's actual location if it is not in Applications).

Start
The title screen shows the credits for a moment while the program briefly measures performance, then offers Low, Medium, HQ and Custom graphics quality, Reef tour (1), Full tour (2) and Miniature reef (3), and switches for Reef sounds and Reactive music, with a Start button below (or press Enter). It may suggest a different quality level. The choices start out at your saved settings; on first run, Full tour is selected, reef sounds and music are on. Custom opens a settings panel; changes are saved only when you press Apply. Your applied Custom settings become the selected quality on the next run. Keys 1, 2 and 3 select and save the tour or the miniature reef.

Controls
Mouse: look around in swim and fish modes.
WASD or arrow keys: swim or steer the fish you control.
P: save a PNG screenshot in the folder the program was run from (on macOS, in Pictures).
Wheel: forward/back on the tour or in swim mode; zoom in fish mode.
1 / 2: reef tour / full tour. The selected tour is saved. The keys in the controls panel can be clicked as well.
3: the miniature reef, until 1 or 2. Saved as well.
Space / Ctrl (or C): up / down.
Shift: faster tour, faster swimming, or a dash as a fish.
Click a fish: control it (use the crosshair in swim mode).
Click the water: leave the tour and swim freely.
Tab: open or close the reef inventory. Its + / - buttons change how many of each species live in the reef and, for schooling fish, how many schools they form. Click a species to read about it; Esc goes back to the list.
Esc: close the inventory, return from swim to tour, or release a fish into swim mode.
Right-click: release a fish, or return from swim to tour.
[ / ]: move time of day backward / forward.
T: turn the automatic day/night cycle on or off.
F: turn the torch on or off (at night only).
F2: cycle Low / Medium / HQ graphics quality and open Custom settings. The controls panel can also set quality or reopen Custom.
F3 (fn F3 on Mac keyboards): show or hide frame timing (GPU render time, CPU render time, GPU peak, frame rate and frame budget). CPU render time excludes fish simulation. Timing measurement is disabled when hidden.
F4: render the reef at 100%, 75% or 50% of the screen resolution, upscaled with FSR; the controls panel can also set it. On Retina and other high-density screens 50% is still as sharp as a normal screen and much faster.
F9: show or hide the sound mixer.
F11: toggle fullscreen.
H: hide or show the controls panel. After a few seconds of swimming, or idle on the tour, the panels fade by themselves, and H brings them back.
F12: quit.

Settings
Start with --quality=low (also default, high or custom) to choose the quality level, for example ./aquarelle --quality=low or Aquarelle.exe --quality=low. Low quality has fewer animals and simpler effects; High adds finer rocks, marine snow and drifting murk.
Custom settings include mesh detail, MSAA, FXAA, TAA, render scale, coral detail distance, frame limit, sun shadows and filtering, ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, fog, glow and depth of field. Optional reflections, AgX tone mapping and debanding can add effects beyond HQ. Ultra, available only in the Custom panel, starts with maximum mesh detail, MSAA, render resolution and lighting quality, plus reflections and AgX tone mapping. It keeps extra AA filters and strong depth-of-field blur off to preserve crisp detail. Press Apply to save and activate your choices; Close discards unapplied edits. Geometry changes rebuild the reef.
The quality level, applied Custom graphics settings, selected tour or miniature reef, inventory numbers, time and sound settings (including the mixer) are saved to settings.cfg in:
Linux: ~/.local/share/godot/app_userdata/Aquarelle/, or $XDG_DATA_HOME/godot/app_userdata/Aquarelle/ if XDG_DATA_HOME is set.
Windows: %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Aquarelle\
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Godot/app_userdata/Aquarelle/
Delete that file to return to the defaults.

System requirements
A 64-bit Linux or Windows PC with a Vulkan-capable GPU for the default Forward+ renderer, or a Mac with Apple silicon (Intel Macs from 2015 on may work but are untested). Without Vulkan it falls back to OpenGL 3, which can also be chosen with --rendering-driver opengl3. Some lighting effects differ in the fallback. Lower quality can help on slower hardware.

This archive contains the application, not its source. See LICENSE.txt for the terms of use and THIRD-PARTY.txt for the bundled engine and its components.
Questions and feedback: info@phorel.net, https://phorel.net

Changes

1.7.9
- New species: stars-and-stripes puffers, which blow up into a prickly ball when cornered or pestered by other fish.
- Click a species in the inventory for a page about it.
- The whitetip reef shark is remodelled: a short blunt head with its mouth underneath, cat-like eyes, a shark's tail with the backbone running up into the upper lobe, swept fins with free rear tips, pelvic fins, and white tips on the first dorsal and the tail. It swims with a longer, slower wave down its body, the head swaying with each stroke and the tail trailing.
- Angelfish, yellow tangs and Moorish idols no longer have a gap between body and tail.
- Right-click while swimming goes back to the tour, like Esc.
- The tour keys 1, 2 and 3 in the controls panel can be clicked.

1.7.8
- Sea turtles come as females, males and young ones: the males with a long thick tail and hooked claws, the young small, big-headed and boldly streaked. A third green turtle, a young one, joins the lagoon by default.
- Sea turtles graze at the edge of the seagrass and lie down only where the grass doesn't show through their shells.
- Miniature reef (3) on the title screen, or key 3: a small aquarium of about 20 fish watched from one spot, with the reef sounds but no music or shrimp crackle, for laptops and older PCs.
- The crackle of snapping shrimp is quieter.
- Rocks are smooth at Low and Medium quality too, not faceted.
- At Low and Medium quality the open water is a deeper, greener blue and the light a little softer, closer to HQ. With the OpenGL fallback, evening light is warmer and nights are no longer almost black.

1.7.7
- A Breathing panel beside the Sound panel switches your breathing, its sound and bubbles, on and off.
- After six seconds of swimming, as after a few idle seconds on the tour, the panels fade out and the Controls (H) tab fades in for ten seconds to show how to bring them back. H hides them at once, with the same reminder.
- New installs start with the music on as well as the reef sounds, at new default volumes.
- No more warnings about leaked instances and resources in use when the game closes.

1.7.6
- Breathing out sounds wet and bubbly, and louder; breathing in is a little louder and brighter.
- More breath bubbles, with fine fizz among them, the bigger ones pressed into wobbling domes. They drift past beside you when swimming slowly and break up before reaching the surface.
- The surf and moving water are quieter, the snapping shrimp louder and in spells, and grazing louder and less steady.
- Sea turtles on the bottom lie along the slope of the sand, front propped up a little, and crop the seagrass with slower bites at the sand's surface instead of pushing their heads into it.
- The sound no longer starts with a short loud burst before it fades in.

1.7.5
- The melody plays on piano by default, or on electric piano, synth stab or flute, in place of cello and alto sax.
- New default levels for the reef sounds, the music and each layer of them.

1.7.4
- Sound, synthesized like the rest: open water, surf, moving water, snapping shrimp, bubbles, grazing and your own breathing when you swim, with a Sound panel beside the time of day and a mixer on F9.
- Reactive music, off until you switch it on: a pad and bass through slow chord progressions, the creatures near you each playing their own voice, and now and then a melody on electric piano, cello or alto sax.
- Three sea turtles: green sea turtles grazing the seagrass and a hawksbill at the sponges, surfacing to breathe and sleeping on the sand at night.
- More bubbles: more streams on the sea floor, bursts from them now and then, and puffs from the bigger fish as they swim and graze.
- The title screen shows the credits first, then the choices of quality, tour, reef sounds and music, and waits for Start.
- The settings file keeps the version that last ran.

1.7.2
- A Resolution setting on F4 and in the controls panel renders the reef at 75% or 50% of the screen resolution, for smooth HQ on Retina screens.
- The app icon shows properly instead of a black square, the interface keeps its size on Retina and other high-density screens, and F3 shows the frame rate, also where the graphics driver reports no GPU timings (macOS).

1.7.1
- New species: yellowtail blue damsels and azure damsels, each keeping a favourite outcrop and chasing off fish that come too close by day.
- Fish of the same species vary a little in colour and markings, and guppies and bettas come in several colour strains. Each fish keeps its look when the reef is rebuilt; the inventory cycles through the strains.
- Bettas have fuller, rounder tails and fins that fold and billow as they swim and hover.
- The blue-spotted ray has raised eyes and a mound over its tail base, and glides between gentler wingbeats.
- A loading screen with the title and a swimming fish while the reef is grown, instead of a blank window.
- The phorel logo fish swims in, and the title screen stays two seconds longer.
- S moves backward again, completing WASD; screenshots are on P.
- New installs start at 17:10 reef time, with a new default mix of fish.
- A macOS build for Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

1.7.0
- Custom graphics settings alongside Low, Medium and HQ, saved on Apply and restored on the next run.
- F3 toggles an optional frame timing display to compare graphics settings.
- Title screen tour selection: Reef tour (1) and Full tour (2). The selected tour is saved; new installs start with Full tour.
- Faster fish avoidance through spatial lookup, preserving fish interactions and avoidance behavior.
- Distance-based coral mesh detail in Medium and HQ, with conservative transitions to preserve appearance.
- Ultra preset in the Custom panel, and P saves screenshots in the launch folder.

1.6.1
- Open water tour on key 2: higher in the water, along the surface and over the reef from a distance. Key 1 returns to the reef tour.
- New species: hardyhead silversides, schooling high in the open water with mirror-silver flanks.
- New species: bluestreak cleaner wrasses, keeping two cleaning stations. Angelfish, discus, paradise fish, tangs, Moorish idols and the shark come to be cleaned.
- Fish react to the shark: schools close up and move away, sometimes balling up, and shy fish hide. How far they keep away depends on whether it rests, cruises or hunts.
- Schools now and then mill in a ball, anthias rise towards the surface by day, small schooling fish snap at plankton, and tangs sometimes graze a rock as a group.
- New installs start at 16:45 reef time with the day/night cycle off.
- Fixed an error that a jellyfish could raise while drifting straight down.
- A Windows build and a new app icon.

1.6.0
- The title screen measures performance and suggests Low, Medium or HQ quality without changing it on its own. Quality changes fade through a covered transition, and the chosen level is saved on exit.
- Shift speeds up the tour 2.5 times.
- Smoother fish movement and transitions between activities. Sharks settle gently onto the sand to rest, lying in a relaxed curve.
- The highlight on a selected fish fades with its name tag, and selecting it again brings both back.
