Seafront Simulations

This is probably being caused by some of our legacy pre-animated models. It can be more apparent with some of the higher poly models like the Leopard Catamaran which was one of the first that we pre-animated in our St Martin scenery. As we move through updates we are replacing some of these with routed models. We are focusing on optimisation as a core part of our development efforts over the coming months.

The restrictions in the EULA are passed on from agreements and licences we hold with third parties for use of models and/or branding.

Hi All There is a dependency difference between the two global products and our line of coastal sceneries. Coastal Products (All require the free Vessels Core Library which contains the models) Vessels: Anguilla, St Martin & St Barts Vessels: Channel Islands Vessels: UK South East Vessels: The Balearics will also fall into this category when released Global Products Enhanced AI (can be used standalone - does not require the Vessels Core Library) Global Shipping (requires Enhanced AI. It re-uses some of the models) Edit 12th April 2022 All of our sceneries require the Vessels Core Library with the exception of Enhanced AI. This change was introduced with version 1.6.0 of Vessels Global Shipping, which previously required the installation of Enhanced AI. This change allows Xbox users to experience the Global Shipping scenery (as they can't currently use Enhanced AI) and reduces the overall cost to obtain Global Shipping. The Vessels Core Library is a large model library that underpins most of our sceneries. It won't provide any scenery by itself and its always been free. We've done this to stop people needing to download and store several GB of models many times over and also to streamline our update process. I.E. we only have to update 1 model library instead of patching in updates to every one of our coastal sceneries. I hope this helps clarify the setup. We will be publishing have published an installation guide on our site that better explains this. Regards Seafront Simulations

Hi @edpatino 1. There are some dependencies Vessels: Anguilla, St Martin & St Barts, Vessels: UK South East and Vessels: Channel Islands require the free Vessels Core Library. These are our core product line of regional sceneries. Vessels: Global Shipping requires Vessels: Enhanced AI (but Enhanced AI itself can be used standalone). These affect the sim globally. ...so Global Shipping and UK South East are not linked from a dependency perspective but you will obviously see a traffic boost with both together. 2. As independent but complimenting products we work on them separately. - Global Shipping will receive its own updates in terms of more model variety, more routes and more traffic. - UK South East will also be getting some updates over time although it is more or less feature complete at the moment. 3. We recommend 100% for leisure, ship and ferry traffic. I hope that helps.

Hi All We have rolled out wake updates and minor LOD improvements to both Enhanced AI (which also benefits Global Shipping) and the Vessels Core library which underpins all of our regional sceneries. Vessels Core also includes new models in support of the newly released Vessels: UK South East. Further wake and effect updates will be coming in the future across the products. Global Shipping will get additional traffic (including Great Lakes) and models in future updates too, although not necessarily all at the same time. We have posted changelogs and updates on the official forums here: [UPDATE v 1.3.0] Vessels: Enhanced AI | Seafront Simulations - Third Party Addon Discussion / Product Announcements - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums [UPDATE v 1.3.0] Vessels Core Library - Third Party Addon Discussion / Product Announcements - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums [RELEASE] Vessels: UK South East - Third Party Addon Discussion / Product Announcements - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums Enjoy!

Hi @riverreveal at the moment we can't control the rate of boats that are added. It's old FSX technology that apparently spawns boats based on/relative to the density of population in nearby towns and cities.

Thanks for confirming Henrik. Just a minor GUID collision somewhere or something else?

Hi All, We've posted some updates about the new updates over on the official forum and our site: [UPDATE v 1.1.7] Vessels: Enhanced AI | Seafront Simulations - Third Party Addon Discussion / Scenery Packs - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums Vessels: Enhanced AI v1.1.7 RELEASE NOTES: Seafront Simulations | Vessels: Enhanced AI (seafrontsims.com) [UPDATE v 1.2.6] Vessels: Global Shipping | Seafront Simulations - Third Party Addon Discussion / Scenery Packs - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums Vessels: Global Shipping v1.2.6 RELEASE NOTES: Seafront Simulations | Vessels: Global Shipping (seafrontsims.com) Enjoy!

Hi @Espana Pete Global Shipping is focused on Cargo, Utility and some trawler activity rather than ferries but we may add some in future. Dover will get some attention in the next update. Can you send a close up of the ships you're seeing in Gibraltar please? It looks like one of the ships might not be ours so I'm wondering if Enhanced AI is working for you properly. You can send them to contactus@seafrontsims.com Thanks, Chris

Hi @Espana Pete Can you check if you can see our cargo ships moving through the Gibraltar Strait (LXGB) please? I'm not sure if it has installed correctly or not.

How did it go @Sesquashtoo?

Good luck! It needs to be a fresh install too apparently. We have tested around Nice, France in VR where there are a lot of the AI wanderboats and so far so good with the studio drivers but let us know.

Hi @Noooch apologies for the cross posting but someone over on the official forum has just suggested this could be a video driver issue and has it fixed (for them at least). Let me know if it resolves it for you. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/announcement-vessels-global-shipping-seafront-simulations/427438/73

Hi @Noooch I'm fairly sure (although not 100%) that in terms of appearance the 'wanderboats' that underpin the leisure traffic in Enhanced AI work on a different basis to the standard, routed ships that the other (default routed) bit of Enhanced AI, Global Shipping, Henrick's mod and the very few default shipping routes run on. I think they're more heavily 'optimised' so they don't show up from really far away. That would have made sense in the FSX days but we feel it more now. There's also the issue of the leisure boats being a lot smaller and therefore very little chance indeed that they'll show at those sort of altitudes. The wanderboats are really for low level flying as far as I know.

We've noticed that on VR too @Noooch. Everything seems to get sacrificed a bit with VR. Did you re-setup your sliders for the VR (as they're independent of the Desktop settings) - silly question perhaps but just checking? Also more out of interest, which VR headset are you using? EDIT: The sim seems to interpret the same settings differently in VR too.

Hi @riverreveal - Enhanced AI just changes the models but uses the default traffic so no you won't get an increase in leisure traffic but you might notice them more with the night lighting and wakes. Global Shipping adds a lot more traffic, but the focus for that is cargo, utility and some fishing trawlers, not yachts. Additional coastal leisure traffic is more of a focus for our core product range of sceneries. The South West is on our list to look at (you're not the first to ask 🙂 - it's a lovely area) but we have the South East and Balearics to complete at the moment so UK South West, if it happens, is some way off at the moment.

🙂👍

Hi @captain420 All of our LODs are set up to be visible from the very first opportunity and many are visible from FL300+. However, it obviously depends on the size of the ship itself. Some of the smaller and medium supply vessels or fishing trawlers are not visible from that height although there's a chance you could see their wakes. The sim still isn't perfect in that regard, as there are still some LODs (thankfully not lots) that aren't showing when they should be.

To be fair to MS/Asobo the wakes are just something we need to spend more time with and need more documentation/tutorials/samples for. I have no doubt the technology is there, it's just that all of the developers are having to learn a brand new system for creating effects and the only tutorials out there are for smoke. I'm confident we'll get there though!

Hi All, It's great to hear many of you are now seeing big improvements after SU5 HF2. We did indeed get hit hard by SU5 - (another lesson learnt for us)! The good news is now that's fixed we can concentrate on other improvements (including things like wakes)... We have added 7 new models + 2 variants for the next update together with improvements and fixes to several routes in order to create some more movement. Many shorter routes have also been added. Some LODs have been improved too. We aim to get this to you all within the week but need to go through the proper process for release. In the meantime here are some shots of just some of the routes in different areas across the globe. Note that due to the real-world data, the traffic may sometimes be quite a way out at sea (as it would be) and you won’t always see traffic alongside the coast when you might expect it. We will be looking at improving the overall experience with future updates including adding more traffic to the quieter routes (and maybe tweaking those that are getting a little too much). We will let you know when the new update is available but are hoping for tomorrow. Oh and we highly recommend the amazing LittleNavMap (free) https://www.littlenavmap.org/ if you want to go ship spotting. Hope you're all keeping safe and well. Seafront Simulations

Hi @fleety737 - Please can you load into a new flight from Gibraltar (LXGB)? If you don't see any cargo ships going through the Gibraltar strait its definitely not installed properly. We've had one or two people that have needed to do a fresh install/validation/verification of the files via OrbxCentral and also to look in the Content Manager within MSFS to see if it has been recognised.

Hi @Daytona125 - It's something we want to add but there are issues with the sim that prevent it from happening properly at the moment. Our early builds had them and they were appearing under the lakes with the wakes on the surface. There's some potential (untested) work we could do to introduce them but first we need to address other issues that are affecting the product and not producing the results we intended. It might cause 'flying ships' over the lakes when/if(?) it ever gets fixed by Asobo. Even though we've had a vast majority of positive feedback (we're glad you're enjoying it too!), we really wanted to deliver more than is being realised at the moment and want everyone to enjoy it.

Hi All, We have been able to further confirm that there's intermittent loading of our global shipping and will need to work with MS/Asobo to work out why. It seems that even changing the time/weather only give's the AI engine a little prod. Loading directly into the space where you expect to find traffic will usually (not always) give you the ships you expect (sometimes many more). With the inconsistency it is hard for us to diagnose what we now expect to be an engine issue. It seems there might also be some sort of caching between sim loading. After a fresh reboot this morning we started to see far more traffic on the water than last night with our current development build. Additional models will be coming in the near future, again focused on utility and freight, gas, oil. In the meantime a shot of the Solent, UK (one of the new models front and centre) and across the water from Dover from this morning - On other occasions at the same time and place only 0-1 boats have shown.

Hi again all, A brief update. Some users are reporting disappearing boats from our Enhanced AI set. This has been introduced as a result of SU5. We have reported this to MS/Asobo. It wasn't there when we were developing the product. We are also seeing many more loitering/static boats than there should be but are checking to see if that's the result of something that 'snuck in' during release or is also SU5. One separate but rather significant issue we have reported to MS/Asobo is the that the water traffic (ours and theirs) doesn't update with the plane's position (i.e ships don't appear ahead of your route). The sim doesn't track your position and bring in ground traffic relevant to where you are. So when you take off you might see some and then they slowly fade away with just a few of the coastal leisure boats appearing when you land. The only less than ideal work around we've observed is to change the weather and/or time to give the sim a 'kick'. MS/Asobo are looking into this too but we have no idea of timescales for a fix/update. I believe it was an issue pre-SU5 but no one really noticed until now. To the idea that we're trying to make a quick buck: After paying modellers (yes we use commercial models and are proud to support that community), source material, software, commission, other usual business costs and various taxes we actually receive very little from each sale, especially for the number of hours that have been invested over the last 11 months. For example with the free Channel Islands, St Martin, the practical re-work of the entire UK South East as a result of World Update 3 and the Balearics, working with a moving target, plus developing much of our tooling from scratch etc. Adding thousands upon thousands of boats to marinas, dressing the scenes and hand animating (for our other sceneries) is not a quick job. We have invested way more money and effort than many sane people would because we have and hope to continue to enjoy it. We have bought, converted, and remodelled/repainted lots and lots of models for the sim as you can see in St Martin - many don't lend themselves to freight, utility cargo however. The payware model is the only way we could sustain this hobby and that has meant setting up a company. It's our belief that no one wants to wait years and years for the additional traffic so this is how we've approached it. We saw a way of getting some real world AIS data into the sim to really lift the amount of traffic and wanted to bring that to people that were fans of our other products. We apologise to those that are not seeing what they expected, and we agree there are some areas that have far less than they should. No one wants that especially us. -We actually have enough data for some 250,000 routes but of course need to balance performance, loitering times etc. The sim is quite crude (currently) in how it deals with timings. We are working with MS/Asobo to rectify SU5 changes and historical issues that impact the releases negatively and are also making improvements on our side. We are being open and honest here about the what and why but for now please accept our apologies for focusing on the improvements and spending a little less time on the forums.

Hi @Nemo please can you PM us with what you're seeing or email us at contactus@seafrontsims.com so we can assist you. The wakes are definitely included.