We can reveal that hot on the heels of our next scenery Vessels: The Balearic Islands will be Vessels: The Virgin Islands!
Yes we’re going back to the beautiful Caribbean Sea and complementing our Anguilla, St Martin & St Barts scenery with its neighbours…
Welcome to the US, British and Spanish Virgin Islands, a paradisiacal archipelago in the Caribbean Sea! As home to 8 airfields and 2 seaplane bases (not included), we have populated this beautiful chain of islands with nautical life. Take a flight over the recreated marinas and ports that skirt these islands together with typical sailboats, catamarans, motorboats and luxury yachts travelling the coast! We have even added more cargo and cruise ships travelling between The Virgin Islands and St Martin to connect these great destinations.
Want some even better news?.. Development is now complete and it is in the queue for release!! In the meantime here are some screenshots to tempt you all. You’re welcome😁
I love the boat traffic, however the scenery is still unrealistic with the missing watermasks. The lagoons should be turquoise and the vegetation color on the islands is too dark green. Search for some pictures on google to see what I mean. The boats and ships are well modeled though!
Hi @DarkerJoker1 - The release will include watermasks . Our focus is nautical side of the sim so we don’t cover the vegetation. There are some other great sceneries that cover elements of the terrain and airports.
Looks like I got some island lapping to do again. Really surprised to see this release so soon after the last one. I’m loving how they’re in a sort of way starting to interconnect where appropriate. Perfect direction to go in I reckon. The Caribbean/Atlantic as a whole, not only a specific area should start looking busier right?
I’ve been doing a slow clockwise coastal cruise for a few days from Gibraltar and now I’ve headed east from A Coruna back into the Spanish side. The whole time doing this I’ve had very few moments where I haven’t seen any traffic but then a cluster will suddenly appear. Things have been really good on the Portuguese coast, this is more like it.
Our Vessels: The Virgin Islands pack is now available for Xbox and PC. We have also discounted the neighbouring Vessels: Anguilla, St Martin & St Barts pack by 50% for the next two weeks to celebrate the launch.
Tortola, St John and to a certain degree St Thomas all appear to be hubs or hives of activity but outside of them, there’s nothing much going on. I followed a strip from Necker, Gorda, Ginger, Peter and Norman Islands and it was dead quiet, not un-reasonable to expect several boats weaving around these islands and some other smaller islands in the region. Like families and rich folk desperate to find a quiet island or cove to themselves.
St. Croix was dead with only a handful moored but none active. I was even hoping for something that might represent a Richard Branson yacht at Necker.
I feel that there was only a third or half the boats that there was meant to be. Like many simply never loaded in. The render distance problem hits hard as the marina activity only starts showing as you’ve almost already past it, I definitely miss a lot and have to backtrack to see. I hope this will be treated as a WiP and we’ll see some further enhancements to this area.
Thanks @RandyFlagg9653 for taking the time to provide the feedback. Based on the satellite imagery there are indeed busier and quieter islands but nevertheless using some creative license we will look into adding more traffic around and between the other islands too. The next update to the Vessels: Core Library already includes improvements for render distance and we hope that it will be with you as soon as possible. There’s a bit of a moving target with that with regards to the sim engine optimisation. Thanks again.
EDIT: Note that there’s a glitch in the sim with animated boats not always showing. You may have indeed only seen half. A time change sometimes gives the sim a ‘kick’ to reload this properly around you so please try that too (but we will look to add more as well).
We could cite a “Post-Corona Tourism Boom” for the creative license lol. Still technically realistic no? I wouldn’t want a full on Mardi Gras/ D-Day Military style Armada situation going on because that for sure would be a bit too far.
Yes this needs more work for the Xbox, especially the Series X as it looks the S seems to perform better for some reason. I’m hoping AMD’s Fidelity FX R&D will extend to the Sim. There probably is a little more that can get squeezed out, who knows.
I’ll report what I’m experiencing once the update drops which hopefully won’t be too far away. There is an Xbox YouTuber out there to who loves your work, what it brings to the sim and sees it as a “must have”. This has to work somehow at this stage now.
Cheers for putting up with my ramblings but I only do so out of the best intentions and trying to be helpful even if a little blunt.
I feel that way more than I’d like to but then I come here and suddenly my minds at ease lol.
Knowing the loading issue, it’s now made me wonder whether or not we’re actually seeing everything we should be for all the packs. We also have another dreaded SU dropping moments away which sparks paranoia wondering what else will break.
Have you got them all? Would you care to elaborate your experience good or bad?
I have both Caribbean packs and the UK one. I’m on xbox x with SU9 beta. With all of them the boats don’t appear until I’m close enough but I’ve accepted that as it’s still a great addon.
There seem to be more problems with the new Virgin Islands addon for me anyway. I get horrible stutters flying around the area now (mainly been flying the Goose) which do not occur in other Seafront addons. I briefly uninstalled and the stutters went away.
I don’t have the stutter problems with their first Caribbean addon and even have the airport addons as well in that area. No airport addons in Virgin Islands.
I’m on Xbox Series X and also want to report getting very noticeable stutters with the Virgin Islands add-on when my watercraft related Traffic settings are at 100%. This does not happen with the Global Shipping add-on or the Anguilla add-on. If I remove the Virgin Islands add-on or if I lower the traffic to 25% then it’s smooth again. It was still very noticeable at 50% and I haven’t tried any settings between 25% and 50% yet. I was also testing while flying stock aircraft as well as the Goose.
I really like the Seafront Simulations add-ons and the extra immersion they bring. I hope you’re able to determine why the Virgin Islands add-on is causing stutters where the other 2 packages I have don’t.
Thanks all for reporting this. It looks like it’s mainly Series X users that are experiencing this. We test with a Series S so it will be useful to know if any Series S users are experiencing the same. We are aware that the Xbox has some memory challenges that Asobo are investigating. Of course, the packages also go through MS/Asobo’s own Xbox testing before they make it to the marketplace so it should be picked up before it gets to you.
We also used a slightly different process for watermasking in the Virgin Islands (although it is the same as the latest Anguilla release) so will look at that too.
If users experiencing this can test at various traffic settings that would help us to determine if traffic is having more/less of an impact than other factors such as busy marinas or watermasks.
The Series X has more memory to work with than the S. However, the X also loads detail out to a much further distance than the S which is probably why the X can experience more stutters than the S at times. I have both consoles and the difference in rendering distance is very noticeable. If you’re able, you may want to get an X to test on as well as an S. I don’t think Asobo tests 3rd party packages for performance or anything beyond basic loading and ensuring they meet the security criteria.
Not just rendering distance, resolution too. On Series S the game renders at 1080p, while on Series X the game renders at 1440p with reconstruction up to 4K.
. Our focus is nautical side of the sim so we don’t cover the vegetation. There are some other great sceneries that cover elements of the terrain and airports.