I did some testing and the turning speed/radius of your ship is dependent on how many FPS your video card is pushing. Slow computer = slow turning. Fast computer = fast turning. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is fundamentally broken. And not in a "this is an opinion which I will present as fact" kind of way but in an actual honest-to-god objectively broken way. I don’t know if its a bug or an unfortunate design decision but it really should change. Your ships turning speed and, by extension, combat difficulty should not heavily depend on the speed of your computer. On a fast computer its very easy to stay directly behind enemy ships at all times. On a really slow computer your ship turns like a whale. And not a svelte whale, a real big honking fat whale.
If you haven’t already, you should definitely email that information to sunlesssea@failbettergames.com . The devs don’t always see the forums, and it’s much easier to get followup information over email.
I only have the one computer, and so have no frame of reference to this, but it would be interesting to see if this is accurate, particularly when some of the footage I’ve seen of the game involves a number of ships moving very nimbly…
Agent: This fits with my experience; as I explore more of the Unterzee on my poor little laptop, I slow right down, and I seemed to be turning slower as well. I wasn’t sure if this was just seeming to turn slower because everything was running slower, but it sure didn’t feel like it.
That said, please, Vine is right, this is not the best place for bug reports! If you submit it to sunlesssea@failbettergames.com then a ticket will be opened automatically. (it sounds like you have more detail than this as well, which will help them). Otherwise, you’re relying on someone seeing this on the forums.
Yeah we analysed this a bit during Early Access. One of the reasons I’m desperately waiting on my student aid to come through is that I’m upgrading my computer and I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs on something better.
It performs beautifully on mine. I only realized this was a problem when I played a bit on my laptop and the high performance GPU didn’t kick in for some reason. My ship was pathetic. When I manually turned on the GPU it performed much better but still worse than on my desktop (which is running SLI GTX 780ti).
Stuttering indicates that their frame rate has fallen low, probably less than 20 or 25 FPS. They note that their ship will not turn well while stuttering occurs and it gets them killed. Fixing the turning speed locked to FPS issue would fix that part of the problem, though not obviously the stuttering itself.
Yeah, this wouldn’t be a severe issue if the game behaved normally but when it starts stuttering and crawling it becomes a game killing one. Normally the limiting factor on turn speed is the ship’s turn rate, but if you have the bug that makes FPS slow to a crawl, then the limiting factor is how quickly the game recieves your keypresses, and that means it can take you a full map square to turn twenty degrees of arc.
I never knew the combat worked in this game. I cannot really turn due to crap computer, this explains why I can turn sometimes and then suddenly cannot turn pass 10 degrees a square.
This is well known at this point and actually seems to have improved a little bit with the release update–it seemed to help on my computer anyway. It is a pretty serious problem though. I didn’t even know I was playing on super-hard-mode until I tried playing on my bf’s computer which is much nicer than mine.
Gave devs should never, ever tie anything in their game to either clock speed or FPS. We learned that at least 20 years ago, dunno why it still happens.
This reminds me of old Strike Commander, Wing Commander not-in-Space! The speed of AI calculations (and the reflexes of AI pilots) depended on the CPU, which is why a bunch of DOSBox emulation settings when running the game on modern PCs breaks the AI in a number of ways. Erratic behaviour and instant reaction to incoming missiles (lots of flare drops), making them next to useless.
Anyway, I hope Sunless Sea’s problem is the game’s and not Unity’s. That would prove considerably harder to rectify.
Unity has one event hook that runs at constant speed and one that triggers on each frame update. It seems that in this case the devs have simply used the wrong one (i.e. the latter). But maybe they have some good reason to do that - I don’t know.
[color=#3399CC]Hey folks! Thanks for all the feedback regarding this issue. The short (and positive) answer is that this was a problem, some of code was Time based some was not which meant that your Turn speed would vary depending on frame rate. However there is now a fix that will be released with the next update.[/color]