‘Your boat name’ ran aground!

[Partan]

New to sailaway and I’m enjoying it, but what is with the water depth!? My boats are running aground all over the place. The coastal waters are treacherous; seems to be no resemblance to actual charted water depths.

Are there any plans to fix this? The world editor is not a solution to this problem, in my opinion.

[AoD_lexandro]

Check your draft, if you have a large cruiser your going to run aground in shallows as the keel will have no depth to run in.

[Partan]

I understand that, but the issue is that water depth is not accurate to the real world. Waters which are perfectly navigable in the real world, are not nescessarily so in Sailaway.

[Graubart]

The water depths are interpolated from worldwide bathymetry datasets which have a rather coarse resolution. AFAIK, the free marine worldwide bathy datasets (e.g. GEBCO 2019) have at best a resolution of 15 arc seconds, or roughly 450 m at the equator and comprise several gigabyte of data. The data is calculated from satellite-based gravimetric measurements and the accuracy is not the best. In coastal areas, many countries further restrict the resolution of publically available bathymetric data, since they see it as classified data.

Any data which is used for nautical charts is measured much more accurate (using multibeam echosounder with a resolution of down to a few cm (!!!). This data is commercial and extremely expensive to buy and use, not achieveable for a game.

If you wanted to double the resolution of a bathymetric datasets of e.g. 2 GB, the size would quadruple, e.g. raise from 2 GB to 8 GB, which is way too large for the average home PC. Of course, high resolution is only needed in coastal and estuarine waters, but this data is often classified for military reasons.

Therefore, unless people provide manually improved sections of coastline bathymetry (through the Sailaway Editor), this situation will not improve.

[ST2 Racing]

The great lakes were fine, perfectly navigable until this sailaway editor came out. now the lakes are all 7'. really sucks now. used to be able to set up the local races but no more. I know i could get into the editor program but I don't have the time , just wish they would have left if alone..

[AngelOfDeath]

its not just the coastal waters or the great lakes
i have had it happen in the middle of the atlantic where a submerged submarine wound not run a ground

[ian.coyle2]

Still a problem. Running aground while approaching Port Stanley. Seems to happen around most smaller destinations. Quite disappointing when you've sailed the whole bloody Atlantic!

[captain handsome]

Yes, was trying to sail Georgian Bay (Great Lakes) today, but the whole thing is 7ft deep now...
When I first bought the game Georgian Bay was fine. This is a bummer!

[roywinalex]

To date, I have not found a port I can sail into, without running aground at any state of the tide!
Even Liverpool, my home port with a 9m range runs me aground at high water before I get into the Mersey!!!