Ahoy, Seafarers!
First of all: Thank you so much for setting sail with us – it's been an absolute pleasure to see so many of you hop on board and join the crew! ⚓
It's been a day since the launch of Seafarer: The Ship Sim and we've received plenty of feedback in the meantime. Our team has spent a lot of time already going through all the threads, comments, and messages, collecting and evaluating everything you've mentioned.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us – and please continue to do so, it helps a lot! 🙏
While it's too early to talk about additional content and features we'd love to introduce based on your feedback (next to everything that's planned as part of our Early Access roadmap), one topic in particular stood out across reviews and forums: performance & stability.
A noticeable amount of the community has reported an unsatisfying performance, especially on higher-end systems, sometimes even going hand-in-hand with decreased graphical quality. From the bottom of our hearts, we’re sincerely sorry should you have experienced any kind of issue that does neither meet your nor our expectations and apologize for all inconveniences this might have caused, especially if you’ve been eagerly anticipating the release.
Be assured that we're taking all of this seriously and are investigating as much as possible about the root causes.
First of all, how can you help us?
If you encounter any sort of unexpected performance, be it in terms of framerate or graphical quality, please report the issue to us via the In-Game Bug Reporter. Be sure to include your hardware details in the respective comment section. You can reach the In-Game Bug Reporter by pressing F4.
Please be aware that you need to accept the Privacy Policy first to use the Bug Reporter. If you haven't, you can do so by going to Options > Gameplay > Legal Acknowledgement.
Alternatively, you can post your hardware details and a detailed description of your performance into the comment section of this blogpost! We're collecting all of the data to evaluate potential bottlenecks.
If you encounter a crash, please send us the crashlogs with the Crash Reporter provided by Unreal! These reports go straight to the tech team who can then resolve the issues in the most efficient way.
Here's what we're working on already
The team has already started their work on a hotfix that is planned to be launched in Open Beta by next week at the latest. This hotfix will contain several improvements and adjustments related to performance, including:
Implementation of NVIDIA DLSS
Shaders will be created at launch of the game, not during active gameplay: This will ensure that they're properly loaded in instead of being created in the background which harms performance
Adjustments to default graphical settings for new players: FSR + Frame Generation + Upsampling set to 66%. This should significantly increase the performance for the majority of the players.
Adjustments to System Evaluation Benchmark: Players will be asked to run detection for default settings again, so the most appropriate graphics settings can be applied with ease.
Addition of Statistics Overlay: This will show detailed information about hardware utilization by the game to identify bottlenecks, which helps us to deliver an even more optimized update in the near future.
Potentially also re-enabling the option to activate hardware raytracing
This is just what's planned as short-term solution to improve performance for most players. We're also working on several mid-term and long-term adjustments – more details on that will be announced as soon as possible.
What can you do to improve your performance in the meantime?
Based on your reports, our team has investigated several solutions to improve performance. We are aware that these do not replace any sort of adjustments from our side, but they can help your time on deck while we're working on long-term improvements :)
Make sure your graphics drivers are up-to-date
Try to switch upscale options (TAA, FSR) off and on again to observe if it makes any difference
Check if the auto-detection has not applied the appropriate settings for your system
Deactivate VSync
Turn off and turn on Anti-Aliasing again
Turn down Global Illumination (this one seems to cause a huge performance decrease at the moment)
If you have any questions or further feedback, please do not hesitate to ask the team in the comment section. We're very happy to help!
You can also join the conversation across our socials and on Discord.
🌐 www.seafarergame.com
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💬 Discord
Once again: Thank you so, so much for all the feedback and all the input. We honestly couldn't be more grateful for all the passion and love you have shown 💙
Your Seafarer Team 🚣