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Ship Simulator 2008

The Views Aren't Much Better

Visuals are supplied by a basic (by contemporary standards) graphics engine. As noted, environments are recognizable, but cruising close to shore reveals many poorly textured cut-and-paste buildings and structures. Over a dozen different vessels are modeled, but all are scantly detailed and textured in mostly flat colors (even the logos are low-resolution). From docks to cranes to vegetation on shorelines, only basic modeling was done, starkly reducing the realism.

Water effects are similarly uninspired. Waves are the same repeated parabolic pattern, and unconvincing sprite effects represent splashes and spray. The engine provides for basic water reflections and refractions, but the surface isn't translucent (I tried different GPU vendors' cards and drivers to rule out third-party issues). Compare the water to the detailed and realistic water in Silent Hunter IV and you're left wanting for more.

Select from pre-defined weather settings or create and save your own

Rarely is the open ocean a pleasant experience

Simple multitexturing is done to simulate various surface conditions, and the only precipitation – rain – doesn't leave droplets or otherwise obscure vision. A ship's wake strictly a 2D affair of trailed textures, and even lights are represented by intersecting several flat glowing textures (a la torches in the first Unreal). The sun and moon provide only single-color global illumination without any dynamic shading. And the skybox itself isn't convincing, with layered textures simulating cloud cover and starlight. In all, the visuals offer only a rudimentary approximation of the real world.

Twin Outboards or Inboard Diesel?

VSTEP provide only a set of "Minimum" requirements, which are fine for running the software with detail settings at Low. But you're reading a YouGamers review, and surely you're not willing to put up with flat textures at a resolution of 800x600. Since the graphics engine doesn't provide antialiasing or anisotropic filtering internally, you'll almost surely want to force these through your graphics driver. As a bare minimum, you'll want an  AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or an  Intel Pentium 4 640 processor, if only to avoid a CPU bottleneck. With 1 GB of system memory, a 128 MB  NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT or  ATI Radeon X800 can push the engine at a steady 30 FPS at a resolution of 1280x1024 (this, with 8xAF and 2xAA enabled and graphics settings on Medium).

A screenshot with the YouGamers' minimum system. Note the lack of AA and minimal draw distance

The YouGamers' recommended system provides for AA and AF and allows for more detailed water rendering

For the "as-good-as-it-gets-with-this-engine" experience, moving to a more capable GPU will allow you to up the AA to 4x and the AF to 8x, with all graphics settings maxed out (be sure to move the draw distance and LOD sliders to the far right under the Advanced Settings tab). Either a 256 MB  NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT or  ATI Radeon X1650 will do the trick, and let you play at resolutions of 1600x1200 (or higher, depending on your tolerance for occasional framerate hiccups). Make sure the CPU is feeding the GPU enough data, though; at least an  AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or an  Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 should be sufficient. Even though VSTEP specify 2GB of system memory when running under Windows Vista, I saw no slowdown with 1GB – their suggestion for Windows XP machines.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Missons and ControlsPage 3: Technical IssuesPage 4: Graphics and Hardware RequirementsPage 5: Summaries and Scores

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