It was a bit of an unplanned superhero MMORPG weekend, what with news from City of Titans, Ship of Heroes, and City of Heroes’ Paragon Chat, not to mention our own incredibly luckily timed deep-dive into the history of City of Heroes. Ship of Heroes, for example, previewed Meltdown, sort of the Tony Stark of the spaceship’s heroic lineup.
Heroic Games has more in store on a much more granular level too. Studio boss Casey McGeever put up a lengthy forum post on exactly what the staff has been working on in July.
“We are working mostly on six big areas of the game: 1. The characters, costumes, morph targets, and related character art. 2. The city, props, buildings, mission maps, and other environmental art. 3. The code that works with the Unreal Engine, and creates the game. 4. The powers, animations, FX, and SFX. 5. The mission and big battle systems. 6. Leveling and advancement. […] Some of these things are really big, like the upgrade to UE 4.18, and adding TrueSKY (which required a month or more of work to get it the way we want it), and coding a custom significance manager, which allows automatic changes to deliver a reasonable range of FPS in-game by downplaying some things (like distant movements or distant shadows), or many, many improvements around the frame rate goals we set in place two years ago.”
TrueSKY, by the way is the plugin that esentially creates the day/night cycle and look in the game, but it’s apparently been anything but plug-and-play. Heroic passed along a few screenshots of just what it can do for the lighting and ambiance inside the ship.
