The developers over at Still Alive Studios have been hard at work on improving Bus Simulator 18 since its recent release back in June. A new update has recently been released which brings a lot of improvements to the table, such as AI improvements and various bug fixes. But,  what’s one of the most important changes in this update is that some of the game’s performance issues have been sorted out, specifically, the memory usage has been optimized and the loading times have been reduced. The game also uses fewer resources from the GPU. Many players have reported framerate issues, so these are some welcome changes.

Many other changes were made, so check out the full patch list below:

  • Numerous textures were optimized to reduce memory usage and loading times.
  • Cashier buttons can now be controlled with steering wheel buttons, but you need to take care to avoid double assignment.
  • Passenger pathfinding while boarding the bus has been improved.
  • If even with the improved pathfinding passengers clip into the stopped bus, starting to drive no longer generates a penalty.
  • If the player has Logitech drivers installed and they allow it in the settings, the pedal axis separation setting is automatically set to CombinePedals=false.
  • Added input rebinding widgets for IncreaseRetarderStrength and DecreaseRetarderStrength in the normal controls and steering wheel section.
  • Optimized pedestrian spawning/despawning logic to improve performance.
  • Tweaked update rate of audio volumes to improve performance.
  • Fixed issue that clients can no longer join a multiplayer company if too many buses have customization on them.
  • A bug in the traffic AI has been fixed, which caused NPC cars that did not have priority over the player to sometimes cut in right in front of the player.
  • NPC cars are now more reluctant to waive their priority to prevent situations where traffic no longer follows right-of-way rules because everyone is letting everyone else pass.
  • The player positions are now shown on the minimap.
  • Gamma settings are now remembered correctly.
  • Drive statistics now list all players that participated in a co-op mission.
  • When using Quick Start, the bus is placed much closer to the first bus stop if the stop is on a long road.
  • Reduced lag spike that occurred when loading a sublevel that contains parked cars.
  • Fixed lag spike caused by trains reaching the end of the tracks.
  • NPC character movement has been optimized to reduce the performance impact of having lots of passengers in the bus.
  • Movement of NPC cars has been optimized in a similar way to reduce their performance impact.
  • The map has been optimized to reduce GPU load.