[2022] What is an update you would LOVE to see added?

Hi! We don't usually talk much on Reddit to keep ourselves from being spread too thin across the internet, but since performance issues are a bit of a hot potato lately, I wanted to write back about this.

For one thing, we already employ multithreading in some parts of the game and have done so for a couple of years. Adding more might be helpful in some ways, but it's not a magic bullet that would improve performance across the board (in any game). Barotrauma has so many moving parts that affect performance, one-shot solutions sadly don't exist, and the task is more complex: we need to find the performance-hurting parts of the game and optimise them each individually. This is work that we do continuously, and it seems that with the Rising Tide update, there were some setbacks in the department.

We're sadly not confident that we've uncovered all the causes of those setbacks yet. That is why we are not promising a thorough fix to the recent performance issues in the next update... but we have made and tested a number of changes that appear to help, at least in our internal tests so far. Work on this front will continue even after the update, with more player feedback.

We'll write a bit more on Steam about the performance problems situation next week, but the key points will be roughly what I just wrote here. Now I just wrote them without much help from those colleagues who actually write the code – I just write messages ;)

And while I'm here, to comment on the poll topics with what we're actually going to do in the next couple of updates: There will be a new abyss monster in the next update (to be introduced a bit later) in addition to the modding refactor and colony overhaul, and the update after the next is planned to have various quality of life improvements. More about those later.

Wish everyone a good weekend!