v1.9.0Latest
Game-Ready Water, Waves, Open-World Performance & Physics
August 3, 2026
- ✨ Game Ready for Unreal Engine 5.8, with validated support for open worlds, multiplayer, dedicated servers, and Editor, Development, and Shipping targets
- ✨ Approximately 60% higher performance than NextGen 1.3.0 in representative water-heavy scenes; results vary by hardware, scene complexity, camera view, and quality settings
- ✨ Sharper coastlines, richer breaking waves, persistent foam, and rebuilt buoyancy and swimming that remain synchronized in multiplayer
Sharper Shorelines & WaterInfo
- New WaterInfo render pipeline captures water height, ground height, velocity, signed shore distance, and shoreline gradient in one unified system
- GPU Jump-Flood SDF replaces the legacy RVT water-depth and shoreline pipeline with sharper, more stable terrain-aware data
- Infinite oceans use a camera-following capture window while finite water bodies retain fixed local bounds
- World Partition landscapes are gathered from the streamed cells intersecting the active capture window
- Water depth and opacity masks now clamp safely to valid WaterInfo coverage instead of flattening or leaking beyond the captured terrain
- Additional Water Mask blending restored to maximum-combine behavior for predictable material masking
Waves, Breakers & Foam
- New procedural shoreline breakers use the signed-distance field, shoreline gradient, and water depth to form curling waves at the coast
- Breaking waves skip open-ocean and invalid capture regions, preventing false breakers where no coastline exists
- Production foam pipeline adds crest-locked breaker foam, spectral foam persistence, configurable decay, and smooth cascade hand-off
- Per-cascade wave render-target resolution and a unified quality control keep Near, Medium, and Far simulation bands synchronized
- Altitude-aware Near-to-Medium-to-Far morphing is shared by wave displacement, normals, foam, and QuadTree tessellation LOD
- New synthesized detail normals preserve small-scale surface motion across every cascade, including distant water
- Spectral wave parameters now update reliably across materials, Niagara, presets, surface rendering, underwater rendering, and CPU physics
- One world water clock keeps every water body, renderer, Niagara system, and dedicated-server query in sync
Open-World Performance
- Hidden-water capture pausing, change-driven shoreline updates, shared lake wave resources, and reduced per-frame work deliver the largest performance gains in this release
- Exact GPU water-visibility queries pause wave captures when water is fully hidden and resume them without a stale frame
- View-aware capture cadence skips hidden or unnecessary cascade work while forcing a complete refresh whenever the capture window moves
- All lakes share one managed wave render-target set instead of allocating and updating a full set per lake
- WaterInfo and shoreline SDF captures update only when their inputs or capture window change
- QuadTree rebuilds, material parameter pushes, underwater post processing, ocean audio, and far-mesh generation avoid redundant per-frame work
- Analytic wave bounds improve culling accuracy for both infinite oceans and bounded water bodies
Buoyancy, Swimming & Multiplayer
- Rebuilt adaptive buoyancy supports boats, rigid bodies, characters, and kinematic objects through one automatic configuration path
- Shape-aware flotation, automatic mass and damping, live voxel rebuilding, and frame-rate-independent substepping improve stability across differently sized bodies
- Swimming is fully independent from buoyancy and computes its own capsule immersion for reliable shore entry and exit
- Deterministic CPU wave mirroring reproduces the rendered spectral and breaking surface for gameplay and dedicated servers without a GPU
- Server-authoritative replicated movement prevents client physics from fighting buoyancy and navigation forces
- Water Contact support provides collision-free editor surface snapping and consistent runtime water-entry state
- Buoyancy, swimming, raft, beach ball, ship, and character examples were retuned through multiplayer and packaged-game playtesting
Underwater, Glass & Interaction
- Surface, underwater, caustics, and glass effects now consume the same live wave cascades and synchronized water time
- Nested underwater volumes use innermost-water-body priority for stable post-process selection
- Glass and Dome FX now receive live wave render targets through a native actor with automatic nearest-water resolution
- TrueFlowFX interaction, beach foam, the parent water material, and material instances now share one consistent response contract
- Shared masking logic keeps underwater, glass, shoreline, and interaction effects aligned across materials
- Fixed underwater-property crashes when optional landscape data is unavailable and prevented audio overlap volumes from interfering with Niagara world collision
Game-Ready Release & Unreal Engine 5.8
- Oceanology NextGen 1.9.0 is the game-ready release for open-world, multiplayer, and dedicated-server projects on Unreal Engine 5.8
- Full Unreal Engine 5.8 API, shader, material, Niagara, and Win64 build compatibility update
- Standalone Fab BuildPlugin validation now succeeds for Editor, Development, and Shipping targets with zero warnings and zero errors
- Removed project-only tooling and undeclared plugin dependencies from the commercial package
- Declared Enhanced Input explicitly and removed an external dependency for shared time and CPU shader helpers
- Fixed source-build IWYU issues, non-unity compilation errors, stale asset-path overrides, and mannequin Control Rig cooking failures
- Water materials, foam assets, marine content, demonstration maps, and validation scenes updated for the 1.9.0 release