Having just installed the v1.2.2 patch, I'm pleased to see that a number of bugs that were rendering my game largely unplayable have been fixed - it has, at least, rekindled my desire to take to the seas again.
Sadly, though, I am quite surprised by some of the very basic bugs that appear to still be present.
I decided to take the Red Jet 4 on a trip from Southampton to the Isle of Wight on Free Roaming.
1) An observation first - despite turning up the weather to Hurricane and making the weather as bad as it could be, I was quite surprised by just how calm the sea was considering what I was expecting. I don't know whether this is a level of realism because the Solent area is quite sheltered by the Isle of Wight from the open ocean? If so, all is forgiven - if not, is this a known issue?
2) I had to interrupt the game mid-trip to check some e-mails, so saved the 'mission' and quit. When I went back into the game, I floored the throttle again but watched helplessly as the ship gradually slowed down and ground to a halt. The throttle was on maximum thrust - I could hear the engines roaring - but the ship didn't respond.
Frustrated, I had to restart my mission from scratch, so I did.
3) During the restarted mission, I switched to full map view to explore where I was heading in a bit more detail. To my horror, when I switched back, the entire ocean had vanished!! The ship was going along on what appeared to be nothing but a blank, grey sea with no texture to it at all.
4) I saved the mission, quit, rebooted and restarted ShipSim only to find that the problem described in 2) above happened again, so I couldn't continue any more. At this point, I'm afraid my patience ran out.
My system specs are an Intel i7 Quad-Core (overclocked to 3GHz), 8MB RAM, nVidia GeForce 295 and Windows Vista 64-bit.
I've always been a big fan of Ship Simulator but very regrettably I am finding more and more basic issues with Ship Simulator Extremes. If the makers have been unable to test it properly, would it perhaps be to everyone's benefit if more product testing could be carried out by members of the community prior to release? At least then, there is a level of expectation that very basic problems are likely to be encountered, rather than in the finished product, which seems to be upsetting a lot of people on this forum.
I think many of the criticisms of this sim are fair, but I find some quite rude and unhelpful, which is not my style. I still feel confident that ShipSim Extremes has the potential to outshine everything else.
Many thanks,
Alex
PS. 5) Finally, I'm afraid there even seems to be a bug on the forum - when you're typing your post and your writing gets to the end of the text box, the cursor and the text in view within the text box keeps jumping - not sure if this is a problem only experience in some browsers (I'm using Internet Explorer).
