My Suggestions - Sailwind

[TheOofertaffy]

Here I will list a few items, features, and bug that I believe would benefit the game if they were implemented/fixed. Keep in mind a few of these suggestions can be done with mods, but keep in mind the whole point of this thread is for suggestions to improve the base game. Also keep in mind these are my opinions, and don't reflect what the game objectively means. These are just what I think would benefit the game.

Sails:
Lug rig sail options - Pretty self explanatory I'd say.

Features:

AI Crew - You could hire 1-3 AI crew members to help manage things on the boat, and to alternate shifts. These crew members would obviously need beds, and food/water as well. As an example on the brig, where you would benefit from more people, you could have 1 trim the sails, while you steer the ship, and the other 2 crew members would fill in for the night shift while you and the other crew member that was helping during the day could sleep. Not sure how hard this would be to add, but I'd imagine it would benefit the game. Maybe these crew could vary in skill, and pay grade. If you wanted a very experienced sailor that knew the best sail configurations and was fast at setting them up, you may need to pay more, or if you wanted to opt for a cheaper option, they may be less experienced and less fast. This feature also could maybe allow for larger ships than currently in the game without getting overwhelming for players to manage.

I don't think AI Crew would have to be terribly complex. I think if done right, could be implemented as a fairly simple and easy to understand system, I can expand if anyone likes me to in the comments.

Hull Paint jobs - It would be nice if we could setup basic paint jobs for the ships in game.

Bilge Pumps/Buckets: Instead of the hull automatically draining of water, it would be nice if you had to bucket it out, or on certain ships, being able to pay for the shipyard to fit bilge pumps on the inside for a price so you can manually pump out water. I've heard from some of my friends that play this game as well say the developer (I haven't confirmed if this is true) had concerns that it would be too much like "Sea of Thieves or other games", but you have to remember that bucketing water isn't unique to SOT or other games, that's something that was done in real life, you can't put a stamp on something like that especially if it was done in real life.

Items:
Ballast Barrels/Boxes - Very heavy, and cheap barrels/boxes filled with stones/sand to weight down your ship. These barrels would be a fixed price at every port, costing the same everywhere, so the player cannot make money off of it. It's meant to be a thing you can take from a merchant, and return for the same price once you arrive at your next port.

Local Time/Stop Watch - A pocket watch that the player can use to see local time (note to keep challenge of the game, the player would manually have to tune this watch to the current local time manually using the scroll wheel to move the minute arm. This is to avoid longitude readings being too easy by the watch being automatically tuning to local time, instead the player has to tune it themselves using the scroll wheel)


Bug Fixes:

Falling through Aestrin docks: (Potentially others as well from what I hear, but I haven't been other places) I sometimes phase through the Fort Aestrin dock when getting off my ship.

Not Being Able To Open Crates: I really have no idea how to replicate this, but sometimes my game bugs out and I cannot open crates. When this happens I have to restart my game to fix it. It doesn't happen often enough for me to be able to pay attention to what causes it, if at all replicatable.

Cargo-Boat Phyiscs: I've found a very annoying, I wouldn't say but, but potentially an oversight? If you have cargo on ship #1, and you take ship #2 near said cargo on the ship #1, close enough where the 2 ships touch and the cargo is very close still, the cargo can/will phase through ship #1, and can phase into the hull of ship #2 and get stuck, and cause weird physics issues, and in my case caused my Dhow to sink.

Waking Up Out Of The Boat - There has been quite a few times where I wake up from sleep in the game outside my boat. I think the game needs a bit more fixes to make sure the player stays inside the boat when waking up. This happens quite frequently in the Sandbuq. I'd say on a 7-9 day ocean crossing, it happens at least 1 time during the crossing, sometimes up to 3 times.

Stability:

Performance Improvements - I have a decent rig (Basic Specs are R7 3700X, 4060ti, 32 GB Ram 3600Mhz), and even in gold rock city, or other larger ports, especially Dragon Cliffs, I experience under 30 FPS, with Dragon Cliffs being the worst. I would like to see performance improvements with this game if at all possible.

I may add more in the future. Thanks!

[konstantinoskountousias]

i have a trash pc with RX460 and 8gb ram and it works just fine... with most settings on low...

[TheOofertaffy]

Originally posted by konstantinoskountousias:

i have a trash pc with RX460 and 8gb ram and it works just fine... with most settings on low...

You cannot change graphics settings to "Low" in this game. You can only toggle a few options that overall don't really affect the game's performance, at least for me. So I don't know how you are getting better performance than me, given graphics are set and cannot be changed (Again apart from the 4 or so options you can toggle)

[gregoriskat]

Originally posted by TheOofertaffy:

Here I will list a few items, features, and bug that I believe would benefit the game if they were implemented/fixed. Keep in mind a few of these suggestions can be done with mods, but keep in mind the whole point of this thread is for suggestions to improve the base game. Also keep in mind these are my opinions, and don't reflect what the game objectively means. These are just what I think would benefit the game.

Sails:
Lug rig sail options - Pretty self explanatory I'd say.

Features:

AI Crew - You could hire 1-3 AI crew members to help manage things on the boat, and to alternate shifts. These crew members would obviously need beds, and food/water as well. As an example on the brig, where you would benefit from more people, you could have 1 trim the sails, while you steer the ship, and the other 2 crew members would fill in for the night shift while you and the other crew member that was helping during the day could sleep. Not sure how hard this would be to add, but I'd imagine it would benefit the game. Maybe these crew could vary in skill, and pay grade. If you wanted a very experienced sailor that knew the best sail configurations and was fast at setting them up, you may need to pay more, or if you wanted to opt for a cheaper option, they may be less experienced and less fast. This feature also could maybe allow for larger ships than currently in the game without getting overwhelming for players to manage.

I don't think AI Crew would have to be terribly complex. I think if done right, could be implemented as a fairly simple and easy to understand system, I can expand if anyone likes me to in the comments.

Hull Paint jobs - It would be nice if we could setup basic paint jobs for the ships in game.

Bilge Pumps/Buckets: Instead of the hull automatically draining of water, it would be nice if you had to bucket it out, or on certain ships, being able to pay for the shipyard to fit bilge pumps on the inside for a price so you can manually pump out water. I've heard from some of my friends that play this game as well say the developer (I haven't confirmed if this is true) had concerns that it would be too much like "Sea of Thieves or other games", but you have to remember that bucketing water isn't unique to SOT or other games, that's something that was done in real life, you can't put a stamp on something like that especially if it was done in real life.

Items:
Ballast Barrels/Boxes - Very heavy, and cheap barrels/boxes filled with stones/sand to weight down your ship. These barrels would be a fixed price at every port, costing the same everywhere, so the player cannot make money off of it. It's meant to be a thing you can take from a merchant, and return for the same price once you arrive at your next port.

Local Time/Stop Watch - A pocket watch that the player can use to see local time (note to keep challenge of the game, the player would manually have to tune this watch to the current local time manually using the scroll wheel to move the minute arm. This is to avoid longitude readings being too easy by the watch being automatically tuning to local time, instead the player has to tune it themselves using the scroll wheel)


Bug Fixes:

Falling through Aestrin docks: (Potentially others as well from what I hear, but I haven't been other places) I sometimes phase through the Fort Aestrin dock when getting off my ship.

Not Being Able To Open Crates: I really have no idea how to replicate this, but sometimes my game bugs out and I cannot open crates. When this happens I have to restart my game to fix it. It doesn't happen often enough for me to be able to pay attention to what causes it, if at all replicatable.

Cargo-Boat Phyiscs: I've found a very annoying, I wouldn't say but, but potentially an oversight? If you have cargo on ship #1, and you take ship #2 near said cargo on the ship #1, close enough where the 2 ships touch and the cargo is very close still, the cargo can/will phase through ship #1, and can phase into the hull of ship #2 and get stuck, and cause weird physics issues, and in my case caused my Dhow to sink.

Waking Up Out Of The Boat - There has been quite a few times where I wake up from sleep in the game outside my boat. I think the game needs a bit more fixes to make sure the player stays inside the boat when waking up. This happens quite frequently in the Sandbuq. I'd say on a 7-9 day ocean crossing, it happens at least 1 time during the crossing, sometimes up to 3 times.

Stability:

Performance Improvements - I have a decent rig (Basic Specs are R7 3700X, 4060ti, 32 GB Ram 3600Mhz), and even in gold rock city, or other larger ports, especially Dragon Cliffs, I experience under 30 FPS, with Dragon Cliffs being the worst. I would like to see performance improvements with this game if at all possible.

I may add more in the future. Thanks!

crewing in this game is something that should never be done and is only for lazy people,as for the graphics,I have them all max and my 4060 card is cold (40 degrees celsius) and I never had a delay,in other games with sea it goes 63-64 degrees.

[TheOofertaffy]

Originally posted by gregoriskat:

crewing in this game is something that should never be done and is only for lazy people,as for the graphics,I have them all max and my 4060 card is cold (40 degrees celsius) and I never had a delay,in other games with sea it goes 63-64 degrees.

Then you may as well call all the real life crews of sail ships back in the day lazy using that logic. It's a real life thing to have a crew on a boat and isn't considered lazy at all. I don't know where in the world you came up with that logic. It's like saying I'm going to take this galleon into port on my lonesome because I'm not a lazy person. Well then you will be running around like a bat out of hell trying to fumble with lines, and crash or overshoot the dock. It's management, not laziness.

With the graphics, I see you guys keep saying you have your graphics "Maxed" out, but I still fail to see the options to lower/raise graphics settings. As far as I can see the graphics aren't changeable apart from the couple of of tick boxes (Ie: Ambient Occlusion, lantern shadows, etc)

[jamespfp]

Full Disclosure, I sank quite a few hours into the previous update on what I will frankly admit is a Po' Tay Toe in terms of gaming PCs go. The most significant gain in FPS I've managed to eek out to date was to drop the display resolution manually before launching it in fullscreen. And it's still nearly unplayable anywhere near the cities or Fire Fish Lagoon due to combinations of visual effects on top of geometries which are not optimised for speed given distance (or else, the telescopes won't work...) and by this I mean, they're way too detailed and scaled down, before getting rendered at a distance that isn't configurable.

Consequently, to get the most out of the best possible FPS it's also best to disable the Sleep, Water and Food requirements when out at sea. Suddenly, there's no 1000 mile distance which can't be crossed in 7-8 days. #Shrug

[Freck]

My thinking is that the next year should be spent only on optimising the game, refactoring the code - fixing all the bugs and completely overhauling the controls (Q and E aren't even used... let alone the numbers for inventory selection etc). I suspect (IMHO) that any change being made to this game breaks something else, or other codes needs to be significantly modified to accommodate the change - you can see this with how bugs come up in an area that's unchanged and was stable before an update or addition in another part of the game.

This means at some point it's going to collapse in on itself or grind to a halt - that any change creates more work to get it integrated into the existing code than just coding up the new feature or the change itself - the code is becoming exponentially complicated to maintain.

If it continues on its current course, this game is going to sink in a storm of bad code, I don't think I'll be playing it again if I just see more features being added and a significant effort isn't carried out to correct core issues with this game and for me personally if the controls aren't overhauled - it's ridiculous now with new mechanics being added but only having T and F to interact... it just doesn't make sense when every other game uses the same keys for similar operations and make available; tab, q, e , numbers, g, r, v, c, x ,z...

[Thundercracker]

Originally posted by Freck:

My thinking is that the next year should be spent only on optimising the game, refactoring the code

and break all that as new things are implemented?

no, that's bad software design workflow.

you implement /everything/ first. then you optimize.

because if you do as you suggest, you're going to break /everything/ when you start implementing again.

[Autolycos]

We should also be able to collect rainwater and use empty cargo boxes as firewood, don't you think?

[Sordid]

Originally posted by Autolycos:

use empty cargo boxes as firewood

Furniture too. Add an axe that we can buy, then using the axe on boxes or furniture chops them up into firewood (just like using a knife on food produces slices).

[Wingnut]

I would also like to see a compass platform right infront of the wheel as an upgrade in the shipyard.

[Numenorean]

Probably adding a single piece of wood where you can hammer the map and compass right in front of your face, as you use the helm would be very appreciated :) Considering most boats have a spot for a compass or the sextant right on the pylon of the helm

[alwhite]

A better load and save screen -having to exit the game to load a saved game is so wrong

+1 on the resolution settings with a hope to be able to use the game in windowed mode ( have tried to get windowed setting in steam game setting but not worked for me)
Also some islands have wells on them would be nice if we could fill water barrel from them