Sailaway II has been around since 2019 and many sailors have used it to explore the oceans and to learn sailing or improve their skills. Most of them even have got accustomed to the its peculiarities and its imperfections.
But everything comes to an end someday and Sailaway II is no exception.
Luckily there is a successor in the form of Sailaway III. A new game with an improved interface, better visuals and much more realism.
There is a discounted price for sailors who recently purchased Sailaway II available. More info on pricing can be found here...
The interface of Sailaway II was unlike most games. The camera movement, the key strokes, accessing functions and windows through menus and buttons. But most sailors got used to it.
Sailaway III has a different interface and it again requires some time getting used to. But this time there is more documentation to help you find your way and there are plenty of other sailors who are willing to help out.
The code-base of Sailaway III is enormous and is many times larger that its predecessor. The servers have to deal with a massive single world that is populated by all sailors both offline and online. It holds a full scale model of the entire earth and provides heightmaps on demand. It provides weather data, ocean currents and tides. It computes an accurate celestial sky at any location. It incorporates the World Magnetic Model. It has to compute the aerodynamics of the sails, the hydrodynamics of the hull, the forces on the foils, the forces of the waves, all in real time. Only very few games have this level of complexity.
And when a program is more complex, the chance on early bugs or other problems increases with it. There is no easy way through this unless maybe with an unlimited budget. Luckily, many sailors stepped in. They helped with testing, giving feedback, creating the most beautiful boats, organizing things and enhancing ports. The support has been overwhelming and has been a great motivation. Today (march 2025) version 1.17 of Sailaway III proves to be pretty stable and the sailing world is empowered by dozens of fantastic boats.
With the arrival of Sailaway III, updates for Sailaway II have stopped. This means that Sailaway II will keep running on your computer for as long as it does. But if there are updates in Windows, in Direct3D or in hardware drivers that cause an incompatibility or a malfunction, there will be no update to fix this. In some cases the result might even be that Sailaway II will not execute anymore.
Email support is still available for questions regarding Sailaway II functions, but there will be no fixes for malfunctions, crashes, etc.
To run Sailaway II, the program makes contact with the Sailaway servers. These servers will stay operational until August 31, 2025. If it turns out that there are still a significant nr of sailors active in Sailaway II, this date may be postponed to 2026.
A significant amount of time and effort has gone into developing the successor Sailaway III. The lack of income during those 4,5 years of full time development has been funded by depleting private reserves and reducing the cost of living as much as possible. Keeping Sailaway II alive forever does not give credit to this effort.
Since the last quarter of 2024, more and more reports of crashes during start up have been reported. Some people are confronted by it, most are not. I have been unable to determine the cause of this, but it seems likely that it has something to do with a Windows update or a Direct3D update. Sailaway II uses an old version of the Unity game engine dating back to 2019. Replacing this with a new version in the hope that it will solve the issue would take many weeks of development and testing. Time that would be better spend on improving Sailaway III.
Sailaway does not have a subscription price model. This means that the ongoing cost are paid by a constant flow of sales of new licenses. But the sales of Sailaway II have stopped, which means that there is no income to finance the Sailaway II servers anymore. The current servers have been paid for in advance until August 2025.
There is a fair discount model available for people who bought Sailaway II recently. More info...
Many of us tend to be reluctant when it comes to changes. We like to stick to what we know is good enough. And sometimes we need a little nudge forward. Times change and eventually we have to take a bold leap to go with the flow. Often this leap turns out better than we anticipated.