While it is certainly too early for Ship of Heroes to be posting its full system requirements, the team did discuss some of the graphics options that it has included to boost performance on older or less capable machines. These include reducing the resolution, turning shadows off, and using pull-down menus.
The forum post discussing this stressed that optimization is a work in progress and that improvements and changes are being made all of the time. The trickiest aspect is, obviously, to allow the client and server to handle multiple players in the same area simultaneously.
“Most dev teams really spend the last few months trying to optimize in a sudden rush before launch,” the team said.
“We’re working on these issues throughout development. This extra work kind of annoys our coders and artists, to be honest, but we think it is important to plan and implement our plan as we go, and not to rely on fixing under-performing systems and processes at the last minute. We will likely end up fixing things at the last minute anyway, but the year+ that we’ve been focused on optimization already gives us a better starting point than many MMOs.”
