Night of the Clones

This video shows over 100 copies of a highly-customized character running around in a previously-revealed Ship of Heroes game environment. This is a raid test conducted by Ship of Heroes as part of an ongoing program of optimizing and refining the game to ensure the best playing experience.

At this moment in time, we are not aware of any other MMORPG built on the UE4 engine that allows 100 characters to be in view of each other while maintaining a commercially viable frame-per-second (FPS) rate for gameplay. Here our devs are using a gaming desktop with an NVDIDIA GTX 980 as the main test computer to illustrate FPS levels. Other desktop and laptop computers also participate in the tests. The character running around is Sword Blossom, one of the signature heroes in Ship of Heroes. Three devs have characters that are standing in the middle on the mission environment (underneath Apotheosis City, in-game) on boxes so they can maximize the number of Sword Blossom clones that they can see.

The clones move in a predetermined pattern, both to test large-scale animation use, and to allow visual assessment of lag – one of the first signs of lag is that animations will skip. The devs are testing new techniques to allow large numbers of highly customized characters to be in the same instance or raid together. More analysis will be required to fully optimize this setup, but so far it is working well; no significant lag was encountered in the network test of up to 100 characters, and FPS remained above 30. Even during the stress test portions – 200-300 characters and 100 characters firing a particle-intensive power – FPS results were good.

Ship of Heroes is an MMORPG under development in the Unreal 4.16 engine, and is expected to begin Alpha tests at the end of 2017. Come visit our site at https://www.shipofheroes.com to learn more.