Hello Sailors!

We're proud to announce that patch B124 is now live for the main branch. And it's a big boy! For the whole summer, we were gathering your feedback and fixing all you reported. That’s why we call this the Summer Update.

This massive update comes with changes to almost every aspect of the game, including your targets and their escorts who'll now display much greater cohesion in their actions against you.

The full changelog can be found below:

Balance and AI:

• Warships now use a much better algorithm to more consistently aim depth charges at the u-boat.
• At least a half of warships present in convoy always get assigned to searching u-boats instead of getting assigned to that job randomly.
• Warships now share some information between themselves about the suspected location of enemy submarines.
• Warships have improved AI to be better at tracking down the u-boat if they don't know its current location.
• Mark VII depth charges used at the beginning of the war now have realistic maximum detonation depth (152.4 meters). Added Mark VII Heavy depth charges (215 meters) that slowly start to replace them starting with 1942. Added Upgraded Mark VII that enters service in 1943 with max detonation depth of 274 meters. We still need to confirm some of these numbers.
• F-class destroyers have their depth charges capacity doubled in 1942-1943.
• Majority of merchant ships now doesn't have radio equipment at the start of the war. It's installed later with passing years.
• Merchant ships without escort that have radio equipment send SOS and SSS messages when they spot a submarine or get hit by a torpedo.
• Torpedo detonations are audible and visible to nearby groups including the aircraft (up to 32 km). Smoke columns can also be detected if they get high enough (up to 80 km). NPCs report them by radio and consider this event in their further behavior.
• Warships send messages about detecting enemy submarines to their allies. These messages cannot be decoded by the player, but are trackable to the direction finder.
• Default crew at the conning tower is now a bit better at detecting incoming aircraft. Aircraft are also generally a bit easier to spot now.
• Depth charges now blind hydrophones and sonars much more intensively and in a more user-friendly way.
• Torpedoes deal noticeably more damage. Damage reports after torpedo hits were reworked a bit.
• Ship health bars were improved and display current flooding as well as projected flooding over time.
• Scoring a hit with torpedo provides instant discipline growth. Sinking a ship increases it even more. Explosions of depth charge close to the hull lower discipline.

Emergency and crew management changes:

• Officers can freely move and perform simple and emergency tasks in evacuated compartments.
• Evacuation works more reliably than before.
• It's now possible to manually place orders of carrying wounded crewmen to safety. Fixed multiple problems related to this action. Added icon for this action.
• It wasn't possible to evacuate Battery Room no. 2 (this problem may be carried in the game states).
• Most repair jobs are now more tolerant of water before rebreather is required.
• "Medic" automated officer role wasn't working after recent changes to the injury system. Medic and his helpers are now also actively carrying the wounded crew.
• Wounded and sick characters can now be treated only in beds. If beds become flooded, treatment will be canceled and they will ragdoll.
• Fixed cases of characters moving back and forth through the hatch during the evacuation of middle compartments.
• Move orders are now treated as a normal task that appears in the officer's action queue.
• It's no longer possible to load torpedoes when beds are occupied by the wounded crew.
• Officers are now usually carried to their own compartment if they become wounded. Regular sailors can also be carried there if there is no space in other compartments.
• It's no longer necessary to carry crewmen anywhere if they got injured in the bunk.
• Added FPP-only "stop evacuation" action on the hatches.

Graphics:

• Added night lights in ports and cities. Lighthouses are now functional.
• Fixed sharp spotlight rendering on water.
• Fix for lighting problems after visiting a character screen.
• Probable fix for terrain cracks, holes and intense slopes that were appearing at certain spots in the world.
• Visual improvements to the effect of water leaking out from the holes in the hull of the u-boat. It's now played even when small amounts of water accumulate in the hull. Added sound effect. This change may have a negative impact on performance.
• Added bubbles effect to the quick diving tank.
• y, terrain and other ships are no longer displayed when the camera is placed at the boundary of the ship's hull. It didn't look good and could be used to cheat when visibility was low.
• Probable fix for pink water during explosions at specific view angles.
• Shadows were missing in the periscope view.
• Grid intersections on the map are cleaner without visible overlapping. The grid has a constant pixel width. Larger grid cells now have exactly 10 km dimensions, smaller grid cells have 1 km dimensions.

Performance:

• Major performance and quality improvements to spray effect coming from the breaking waves.
• Performance improvements to hull wetting effect and fish emitter.
• Camera view distance is being adjusted during foggy weather not to render scene parts that are fully covered by the fog. This change noticeably increases FPS during storms.
• Ship interior is more aggressively culled when the camera looks inside the ship through the external hatch to increase FPS on the conning tower.
• Major optimizations to Unity's shadow atlasing code (10x faster - from 2 ms per frame to 0.2 ms per frame).
• Probable fix for binoculars/periscope performance drop. There is a problem in the graphics engine that occasionally causes performance drop after any appearance of blend shape animations like talking, blinking or squinting the eye to look through the periscope lens. We gated this kind of animations behind aggressive LOD system to minimize occurrences of this problem. Characters will also stop to blink starting with this update until this problem gets fixed in the future engine versions. While it is a definitely confirmed thing, it could also not be the main cause of performance drop after using periscopes on affected systems - further testing is needed. It was causing numerous thread locks in the engine code, and it could also be a reason behind some of the reported crashes.
• Interior scenes are much more occlusion culled for better performance, but the section view no longer uses occlusion culling. Gains from it were negligible, and using it there was limiting potential precision for other views.
• Section view uses custom culling to avoid rendering of unnecessary geometry at the sides.
• Other performance improvements.
• Screen space reflections effect optimizations targeted mostly at high-resolution screens.

User interface:

• Added detailed hints about station state that appear after hovering it with a mouse pointer. These hints contain various practical information that was often inaccessible before this update.
• New activator icons for the most often used equipment.
• Some of the activators like maps and galley could be hovered only by their icon, while their models weren't triggering any action.
• Activator names are no longer displayed in the scene until they become hovered or ALT is pressed.
• Ballast and fuel tanks now can be hovered after pressing ALT to check their state (with the exception of ballast tanks no. 1 and 5 that can always be hovered, they are comfortably far from the playing area).
• Torpedo warming icon now contains a launcher index.
• Light bulbs now have dedicated icons.
• Added dedicated icon for NPC ship investigation action.

Fixes:

• Ships now slow down a bit before turning to better follow their route. It helps a bit to navigate in ports.
• Salvage replacement parts action wasn't correctly stopped in case of encountering problems in the process.
• Officers assigned to duty through management screen started with a single health point.
• Portraits of newly added officers appear on the leftmost position instead of taking the place of a skipper.
• Isles-class trawlers weren't treated as military ships and they didn't behave fully correctly.
• Gibraltar is now a bit less densely populated.
• Russian localization fixes.
• Diver's portrait was blank after returning back to the ship. The root cause could occasionally cause other graphical glitches too.
• Diver could become permanently stuck, if something wouldn't allow him to get to the place from which he jumps like placing an order to submerge.
• Characters could in very specific conditions not react to any move orders until they were deselected and selected back again.
• Unloading a torpedo from a launcher into the torpedo storages above the pressure hull could cause invisible wall problem.
• Fixes to pathfinding problems.
• Large calibre ammo wasn't resupplied at some ports, if all units were bought out in a single day (this problem is carried on in the game states).
• Salvaging scrap to replacement parts wasn't working well with manual item delivery setting.
• Remaining battery running time in the tooltip could be displayed as a negative number, if player installed improved batteries on the u-boat.
• It was possible in extremely rare cases for a port to be permanently removed from the game after unspawning.
• Characters could become stuck at their stations.
• Welder mask is no longer rendered on the portraits.
• Torpedo explosions exert less force on hit ships to make situations where other torpedoes from the series slip under the ship less likely.
• Exterior hatch could be displayed open despite being closed.
• U-boats were sometimes ignoring skirmishes with the aircraft and would continue to hunt ships.
• Fix for u-boats getting stuck in land areas after time skipping in ports.
• OG and ON convoys were crossing land at some point on their path.
• Fixes to encounters between NPC groups on the map.
• Fix for a problem where officer's helper would appear on the portrait in the targeting UI instead of the officer.
• Newly added officers appear on the leftmost position also in the TAB menu.
• Officer limit on board was preserved from the previous session after restarting sandbox.
• Completed assignment summary was sometimes displaying incorrect objectives.
• Fix for one looped error that could have some effect on the performance, if certain steps were followed.
• Headquarter task progress notification on the right could appear completely white.
• Fix to propellers rotation direction.
• Officer that returned from an external mission to u-boat's stern could get stuck there and not be able to move, if he appeared at a certain spot.
• Ship group AI was sometimes becoming locked up when ships belonging to it approached land too close.
• Line of sight checking code had mistake that could sometimes make enemy units disappear from the sight without reason near lands.
• MTB physics should be now much less "jumpy" on a high time compression.
• Enemy units should no longer get beached in normal gameplay situations.
• Radio transmissions notification and a number below radioman portrait could display a wrong number of available transmissions nearby.
• Added a bunch of ship names for Flower-class corvettes and MTBs.
• Size of an enemy group detected by a direction finder is now unknown.
• Cut off power in a compartment was stopping water propagation in it.
• Fix for "Death Decrease" notifications.
• Minor fixes to automatically reported errors in the code. They didn't had any gameplay side effects, but could contribute to certain graphical glitches.
• UI that is normally visible when camera orbits NPC unit could get stuck on the screen, if certain steps were performed.
• Lost radio transmission notification is now informing which transmission was lost.
• Another fix for a problem that could lead to an infinite loading of a game state.
• It wasn't possible to spot AA guns in a port after reloading a game state in that port.
• Periscope sight range was very low after reloading a game state where it was extended until its elevation was adjusted at least a bit.
• Hydrophone ship targetting performance is now lower.
• Headquarters task progress notification was blank, if associated task was already completed in a loaded game state.
• Small performance improvements.
• Torpedo mechanic was sometimes trying to warm up torpedoes that were ordered to be unloaded. That was causing some problems.
• It's no longer possible to change selection after opening torpedo launchers UI to prevent mistakes.
• Item's stack limit could become doubled after reloading a game state.
• Headquarters were transmitting some of their messages in a very short timeframe, often not giving player enough time to receive them in case of bad weather etc.
• Fix for entering and leaving group areas in an infinite loop (it's an unrelated issue to the infinite loading of area).
• Damaged propellers could still make sounds as if they were working.
• Fixed placement for docked NPC ships. They were often placed too deep, far from their normal waterlines.
• U-boat from the lost ship mission could sometimes move around on the map before being met by the player.
• Improved game startup time.
• Cursor was disappearing for a while during transition from the menu to a loading screen.
• Torpedo launchers UI is now automatically closed, if target becomes invalid to avoid firing torpedoes in an unexpected direction.
• Fire button in torpedo launchers UI is blocked, if fire solution data becomes insufficient.
• It wasn't possible to get a reward for the assignment, if player would reload a game state in the destination port before taking the reward.
• Memory usage and stutter optimizations.
• Small calibre AP ammo is now correctly resupplied since the beginning of the game.
• It's no longer possible to aim guns during a pause.
• Section view camera could become permanently zoomed out from the ship.
• Physics performance optimizations. Distant minor objects are being disabled from the simulation.
• Engineer could sometimes get stuck at the diesel engines after ship submerged. He could also don't move to the electric engines, if he had no selected role.
• Contacts list items could intersect with each other.
• Targeted ships had noticeably larger hitbox than their icons. They could occlude other ships.
• Periscope could affect ship visibility deep under water, if certain steps were followed.
• It's no longer possible to play cards with the crew after u-boat dives below periscope depth.
• Beds in the bow torpedo room were often staying visible when they should be hidden in the section view.
• Underwater effect could sometimes be seen without reason in Battery Room no. 2 at the closest zoom of the section view.
• Improvements and fixes to the way how instant resource changes are presented at the resources bar.
• Radioman had duplicated hydrophone listening action.
• Mission objective marker wasn't clickable for map course plotting in ally help mission.
• Officer could get stuck on the bow or stern of the target ship while travelling on a dinghy.
• Game states saved during depth charge attacks weren't loading.
• Characters evacuating from the compartment now take the wounded with them, if there are still free beds somewhere.
• Rescuing and wounded character have now better matching poses while they wait for their turn near the hatches.
• Diseases spread much more slowly. This change doesn't affect hunger-induced conditions.
• Hunger phases are progressing much more slowly.
• Crew could celebrate sinking of their allies.
• After player sinks any German ship crew no longer gets discipline rewards for sinking any ships.
• Use of data collected by an officer to fire torpedo at a stationary target was resulting in torpedoes being fired in a random direction.
• Food variety in the kitchen increases food consumption (not linearly).
• Added icon for evacuation action.
• Characters that became injured at least once in their lifetimes were stopping to be reliably aware in which compartment they are currently in. That could cause unexpected behaviour. Their physics performance impact was also becoming unnecessary high.
• Animations of picking up and placing a wounded character on the bed were simplified to avoid occlusion with geometry in cramped spaces. Synchronization between the characters was improved.
• Particle effects are not played on distant ships to increase performance.
• Small performance improvements that eliminate some types of occasional stutter.
• Fix for occasional "clicks" happening without actually clicking.
• Ammunition storages can now be opened without having a selected character.
• Pressurized air is now much less likely to escape from the tanks and compartments through holes in the lower parts of the ship. It helps the ship to stay buoyant in a rough weather.
• Character destination marker wasn't visible in the view that orbits ship or if the destination was in port.
• It's now possible to issue "go to" orders from the section view and orbiting view at ports.
• Crew energy levels are restored after crew returns from a vacation.
• Map camera no longer follows u-boat after zooming it out to a world scale. This movement was sometimes making it hard to plot a course.
• Routes set to a mission marker were sometimes staying outdated and would not follow target group.
• Some devices on board were still functional after batteries became depleted or power distribution boards would be damaged.
• Stationary targets from ignored or failed missions are cleaned up from the map.
• Side missions are now much more rare during a free roam.
• Navigator is less likely to stay at the station, if there is other work to do and he already determined ship's position well enough.
• Allied u-boats could pass their observations to the player. That could produce unwanted contacts when player's ship was submerged.
• Medic role was stopping to work correctly after reloading a game state.
• Medic was automatically helping only the wounded crew and ignored ill characters.
• Evacuation wasn't affecting officers after reloading a game state.
• After power distribution board becomes damaged, all switch icons are hidden for a cleaner view.
• Lost on the sea notification was displaying a different icon during an initial blinking animation.
• Different icon was displayed after hovering a notification that warns the player about a dangerous depth.
• Wheel menu with actions was often closing itself, if it was opened in FPP on the open sea and ship was moving.
• Camera is better at determining when it enters u-boat's hull to avoid displaying empty geometry in a free camera mode.
• Underwater audio effect wasn't being enabled under water in compartments.
• Bugged highlight could be displayed at (0, 0) world coordinates.
• Valves above the hatch between Control Room and Battery Room no. 2 were gone for at least a few versions.
• Characters were sometimes taking one step ahead before starting an animation (like torpedo unloading) making that animation unaligned with other objects that participate in that animation.
• Hull breach damage decals were often incorrectly rendering on top of the leak particles.
• Warning on torpedo launchers was sometimes suggesting that loading torpedoes with rebreather on is possible.
• From now on, if character dies, is removed from duty or starts to bail water, his belongings are moved to the ship storage instead of being lost.
• Characters that were being rescued were loading incorrectly from a saved game state.
• Characters that fight with each other now have better aligned animations.
• Some lights could remain active in compartments with cut off electricity after reloading a game state.
• Crew members working at stations could sometimes be invisible after loading a saved game state until they were given any order.
• Sailors assigned to an officer could occasionally leave their stations and go to bed, even though they were still figuring as they would be working.
• Crash fix related to newspaper pooling.
• Added wrench model to engineer's hand during matching repair animations.
• Right-clicking on an activator that doesn't have any actions available no longer does anything.
• Crew members could start to behave oddly, if galley became flooded.
• Bleeding countdown was overlapping with character's health points.
• Wounded crew is now carried to moderately flooded compartments, if there are no dry ones available. They are also carried between compartments, if there are safer places available.
• Sick crew wasn't carried out from flooded compartments (only wounded were carried).
• If timing was very precise, characters would sometimes try to carry to safety their crewmates that just got cured.
• Fix for crashes to desktop after buying large quantities of small calibre ammunition.
• Target is now synchronized between manual periscope/UZO mode and the order for the officer.
• Officer now doesn't move the periscope for 10 seconds after player leaves the manual mode.
• Officer correctly aims the periscope at the target that he is currently tracking.
• Right mouse clicks on ships seen through the periscope were plotting course to them. It's no longer the case.
• Automated fire solution isn't improved in the background anymore, while player uses periscope manually.
• Fix to a problem that could make random character models become missing.
• Collection of fixes to automatically reported errors in the code.
• Time compression could stop working, if player submerged while being bombed by an aircraft.
• Characters that are hidden for any reason now cannot be hovered.
• It wasn't possible to enter open sea after loading some game states.
• Freighter names are now written on port and starboard.
• Ship name and crew weren't visible through periscope on a ship unless player approached very close.
• Ships that were quickly sunk with their crews on board could continue to transmit radio messages.
• Portrait copies could become stuck near the "idle" task in the action queue.
• 43U gun on Turm IV was sometimes not repairable by the engineers. This issue may be carried on from the previous saves.
• "Ghost" character no longer appears after hovering manned 43U flak gun.
• Crew enters u-boat faster by ladders.
• Heart attacks are less lethal. Added notification that informs player what happened.
• User measurements on map use 10 meter precision instead of 50 meters.
• Both u-boat turning radius and turning time should now match values from Type VIIC manual.
• Navigation factors were adjusted in a way that ensures that there is no risk of getting lost in the time that navigator needs to rest after he fixes ship position in 100%.
• Player ship could sometimes stop following any routes after reloading a game state.
• Added warning about 416.02 and 416.15 NVidia drivers to the main menu, if player has NVidia card.
• Fixes to issues with 43U flak gun not being aimed correctly by the crew.
• Added simple animation for 43U flak gun user.
• Small stability fixes.
• Depth preset buttons weren't working correctly after skipper died.
• Latest community translations.
• Time skipping sometimes didn't work properly in ports after loading a game state that was saved on a previous version of the game and during off duty time.
• Targeting UI wasn't fully functional after reloading a game state.
• It's no longer possible to set aircraft as a target for the periscope operator by right clicking it on the map.
• Various improvements to cracked hull physics. Added sound effect for hull cracking.
• Generic freighter deck contents could disappear after its hull has cracked.
• Some work slots could keep being marked as being flooded after air inside compartment stopped to be toxic.
• Automated repairs were stopping to work, if player had Turm IV installed.
• Observation periscope was not repairable.
• Green mission markers weren't always fully consistent with the current observation data and they could spoil target's position.
• Player's ship radar detectability wasn't affected by fog and rain due to a mistake in the code.
• 5th engine gear was sometimes reverting back to 4th.
• Minor fixes to animations used by the crew at the diesel engines.
• Target group could disappear from the map view during certain missions, leaving only an objective marker.
• Camera could freeze after zooming it at the character occupying a station, if certain steps were followed.
• User interface was gone, if device manual mode was left in a certain way.
• Accessory items were restocked in ports in a way that could make certain item types to be consistently unavailable.
• Two accessory item slots at ports were left unused and weren't restocked.
• Diving suits are now correctly produced by Reich and restocked at ports. They are no longer a part of the standard loadout after starting a sandbox.
• Latest community translations.
• Large calibre ammunition would sometimes stop to be restocked at ports.
• Guns could become unuseable, if certain steps were followed that involved loading game states in a specific order.
• Camera's near and far clip plane could be wrong, if game states with different view modes were loaded in a specific order.
• Character assigned to the attack periscope was becoming automatically assigned to UZO after u-boat submerged below periscope depth. He couldn't get there and was then doing nothing.
• Fix to food disappearing from the kitchen after following certain steps.
• Previously wounded crew couldn't be healed after reloading a game state.
• Character's personal perks could be reset after re-adding him to the crew.

Thank you for sending us bug reports and posting your suggestions. That truly helps us to improve the game.

Yours,
Deep Water Studio