Creating a Telemetry System for Subnautica

We want Subnautica to be a great fun game, that plays well and performs well. But how do we know if the game is meeting our objectives? For a small developer, knowing how a game is behaving out in the wild can be a big challenge. For example, we can’t test performance on the full gamut of possible hardware configurations that Subnautica will be run on.

To address this problem, I spent some time today tinkering with a ‘telemetry’ system for Subnautica. It’s just a prototype, but right now it collects a sample of framerate and player position every two seconds. This data is then anonymised (by crypto-hashing player Steam IDs) and once we’re ready, will be sent to the Subnautica web backend.

Using this position and performance data, we can work out where in the world performance tends to be poor, see trends in performance over time, and identify combinations of hardware that are causing Subnautica to run like a rusty 19th century locomotive. And of course, like all our feedback data, we will me these telemetry data publicly available.