Powerboat VR News

This update re-enables the fish & shark spawners in game. Performance hit should be minimal but please let me know if you think it has reduced frame rates,

It does take a little bit of time for the fish and sharks to spawn in but you should be able to find them fairly easily.

Sharks have reasonable A.I. and will try to swim around objects and will not venture into very shallow water. However, it is possible that they'll get it wrong occasionally!

Smaller fish have basic shoaling A.I. but can clip through terrain and objects. In very rough weather they can sometimes fly out of the water (sharks can also be effected by extreme sea conditions but to a lesser extent).

This should fix save games not loading correctly.

This bug seemed to have been introduced a few updates ago - thanks to Raymanbs for finding and reporting it :)

***UPDATE***

I've traced the cause of the save games failing to load to the world resizing system so, for the moment, I've disabled the world resizer until I can implement a proper fix.

Another performance update mainly focused on the A.I. traffic system and trying to reduce the impact this has on frame rates.

It's still not perfect but it is definitely better!

1. Optimised the A.I. ships so they use less CPU when further away from the player.
2. Traffic manager optimised to use less resources.
3. Added Cloud Shadow options in the Video Options area so you can switch between various modes.
4. Swapped the starting boat when the game loads from the Flounder to the Bluefin so VR players don't feel so boxed in at the start!

Noticed a few challenges with the A.I. nav buoys not linking to other correctly which was causing the A.I. to act a little strange!

1. All rocks now have LOD levels
2. Fornells harbour has been semi optimised
3. Fixed UI camera which was causing a slow down in VR
4. Cloud level adjust for better performance
5. Terrain LODs enhanced for better performance
6. Various other minor tweaks and fixes.

As a benchmark I now get 16-18ms render times in Maupiti harbour. This is on a VIVE PRO2 running at full resolution of 2536 x 2536 @ 120hz per eye in Steam VR on a 2080ti.

Gameplay feels perfectly smooth although there is some reprojection happening it doesn't seem to be noticeable in game.

The biggest variation of fps in VR seems to be cloud level. Denser cloud formations do cause a slow down. I will be adding some configuration options so you can tweak clouds to your liking/system specs.