With the implementation of the new pathfinding system, a fresh hurdle came to light. My objective was to design an AI that could not only pursue the player, but also sail alongside them. Relying solely on chasing the player led to restrictions on the player's sailing strategy, as it necessitated creating opportunities for the AI to attack. Additionally, the AI's ability to make tactical decisions was compromised. Enabling the AI to sail alongside the player, however, would enable it to fully engage in the thrilling ship versus ship combat that players indulge in.

The enemy ships needed to avoid crashing into each other or any obstacles. It was relatively easy to make the ships sail perfectly without collisions, but this caused some unrealistic behavior. I still wanted the AI to be able to collide with objects, but try to avoid doing so. Allowing the AI to collide with each other would create gameplay options where the player could make them crash into each other. However, the AI are already quite skilled at avoiding collisions while still trying to engage the player. For example, in this scenario, multiple AI try to attack the player while the player remains stationary in the center.

An interesting challenge I encountered on this project was creating visual effects (VFX) for the ocean and sand. Prior to this project, I had limited experience with VFX, but I am pleased with the results I achieved and gained valuable knowledge about the VFX pipeline. The main difficulty I faced, especially with the ocean, was performance. Ensuring that the quality of the effect was good while maintaining acceptable performance was a challenging task. However, throughout the process, I learned a great deal about Unreal VFX.
Initially, I created a small effect that only reacted to the player's ship. However, this approach was not realistic since other ships would not have any impact on the ocean. To address this, I attempted to make each ship have its own actor that manipulated the water's surface. At first, enlarging the singular effect on the player's ship caused performance issues, and the different attributes of the effect scaled differently with size. Consequently, I thought that having a separate VFX for each ship might be the solution. However, this approach resulted in poor performance and bugs arising from the systems interfering or disabling each other. Ultimately, I concluded that using a single, larger system and optimizing it for performance would be the best approach.

The sand effect was easier to work on. The main difficulty was making sure that only certain actors could leave imprints in the sand. Having too few actors made it look unrealistic near structures, but having too many slowed down the game too much.