Smooth Sailing Ahead: Fixing Bugs & Fine-Tuning S.O.N.A.R. After Playtest
If running a submarine with an underqualified crew teaches you anything, it’s that if something can break, it usually will. Thanks to the relentless stress testing from our community during the recent playtest of S.O.N.A.R. Submarine Operators Not Actually Ready, we uncovered plenty of system hitches, physics anomalies, and quirky bugs lurking below the surface.
Our engineering team has been hard at work patching leaks and squashing bugs. Here is a breakdown of the key fixes rolling out to make your next deployment smoother, fairer, and far more stable.
1. Co-op Physics & Crew Interaction Improvements
Working together in tight corridors can get chaotic, but some crew behavior went a bit too far. We’ve tuned physics and interaction systems in SONAR to keep crewmates grounded, literally.
- No More Out-of-Bounds Glitches: Pushing a teammate who is backed against a wall will no longer clip them out of the map.
- Shove Cooldown: The shove action now has a built in cooldown. Spamming the button won’t reset the animation or let you endlessly bully fellow operators.
- Smart Interaction Reservations: Two players can no longer interact with the exact same slot at the same time. That means no more loading two torpedoes or jamming two filters into one slot simultaneously.
- Item Animations: Corrected single slot item placement animations so characters use the proper one-handed grip.
2. Performance, Handheld Optimization & DX11 Stability
Keeping performance rock solid across all hardware setups is a top priority for our dev team.
- Handheld Device Boosts: We’ve heavily optimized overall game performance, focusing specifically on handheld PCs like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally.
- DX12 Crash Fix: The game now defaults to DirectX 11. Forcing DirectX11 prevents frequent crashes during scene loading that previously affected DX12 users.
- Hit Spam Lag Fix: Taking rapid hits in quick succession no longer triggers massive frame rate drops.
- Voice Chat & Wall Colliders: Resolved multiple voice chat bugs and refined wall colliders to prevent players from interacting with objects through solid bulkheads.
3. UI, Station Graphics & Visual Cleanups
We’ve ironed out several visual inconsistencies and interface bugs across sub stations and menus.
- Periscope Occlusion: Objects can no longer be tagged through walls or terrain. If your periscope doesn’t have a direct line of sight, you can’t mark the target.
- Powerless Diagnostics: When the bridge loses power, diagnostic station buttons stop flashing and no longer glow like they have electricity.
- Menu & Translation Fixes: Corrected swapped icons for Mine 3 and Mine 4 in the lobby, fixed missing localization strings on Diagnostics and Weapons stations, and fixed loading screens from always displaying the first mission’s text.
- End of Mission Polish: Adjusted gamepad cursor offsets during the salute screen, fixed odd character eye movements, and corrected hat geometry clipping through character heads.
4. Balanced Achievements & Gameplay Fixes
Finally, we tweaked achievement requirements and fixed stealth connectivity bugs.
- Realistic Achievement Depths: Reduced the depth requirement for the Go Deep achievement from 2,000 to 1,300 meters, a depth your sub can reach without breaking reality.
- Fuse Achievement Fix: Replaced broken logic so the fuse repair achievement properly triggers even if only one fuse breaks.
- Player Visibility: Fixed a desync issue where extreme network slowdowns caused players to become invisible to the rest of the crew.
- Manual Animation Locks: Prevented the operational manual from opening during torpedo loading and other incompatible station actions.
Thank you again for helping us catch these issues during the playtest! Stay tuned for more updates as we prepare for the next dive. Remember to Wishlist S.O.N.A.R. Submarine Operators Not Actually Ready on Steam
