November 2018 Newsletter - FPS Success in Ship of Heroes

Heroic Games have released a newsletter in which they go into great detail about the work they are doing to ensure players have a great experience when playing. One of the challenges in MMO's is keeping response times and the graphical quality high enough to please players as more and more resources have to be displayed in real time. The developers of Ship of Heroes are taking this issue very seriously and have taken the unusual step, for a game this early in development, of telling us what they're doing to increase FPS (frames per second) and the results they are achieving. There's a lot of technical detail in the newsletter, far too much to go through here, you can read all about it on the official website.

Of particular note is that they have achieved an FPS gain from 20 to 64 by modifying the character models and developing their CROM 4 system for map optimisation, they have done this with no loss of quality - a very important consideration in an MMO.


Here's are a couple of interesting, and quite important, quotes from the newsletter:

We are currently planning 50-man invasions with 50-70 enemies as a typical maximum.  If these FPS numbers hold up, we may be able to go even higher.

Based on these tests, we think it is reasonable to assume that we can conduct a login test with 50-100 unique heroes, and that we can conduct a raid test with at least 50 heroes and 70 Nagdellians, with the expectation of success.

An FPS test with 103 heroes and 103 Nagdellians under the Arch.  FPS is 31.6. 

Sharp eyed viewers will have noticed that there are some new, hitherto unseen, costumes on show in this image. There has evidently been some exciting stuff going on that has not yet been revealed to us :) We're keeping our eyes peeled for more...

Here's the link to the associated forum post if you'd like to join in the discussion on this latest newsletter.


And, finally, here are some more interesting quotes:

Some of the FPS results are kind of startling.  Screengrabs showing over 200 characters, in motion and using FX, in close proximity are highly unusual for MMOs at any stage of development.  While this is testing, and not gameplay, the shots are still very compelling.  This is a good sign for the MMO industry, which has been running into a rough patch lately.


It seems likely, based on this data that SoH will be able to exceed the numbers of players that City Of Heroes could sustain on raids and invasions.  This spiritual successor to the beloved superhero MMO is looking good.