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The Hero Institute, the Justice Corps, and the Diplomats The Hero Institute, the Justice Corps, and the Diplomats: When the first generation ships left Earth, each had a very small population of super-powered heroes aboard, mixed with a much larger population of typical humans.  As the ships traveled, the fraction of supers aboard each ship increased, due to exposure to the Unobtanium engines.  Opinions about super-powered humans were highly varied aboard the Justice.  Some thought that super-powered humans were the future of [...]

The Promethean Insurrection Prometheans “Who will stand up to them, if I don't?” – HR Cornish, explaining his dislike of heroes The faction now known as Prometheans was founded by Dr. HR Cornish. When humans on Earth were preparing to launch the first generation ships into space, many scientific teams jumped at the chance to revolutionize space travel. One stood far above the rest: the scientists led by Dr. Cornish. It was his team that discovered how to convert Unobtanium into a highly potent [...]

UE4 Technical Update. We’re pleased to announce that we have just completed an engine upgrade from Unreal Engine 4.13.2 to UE 4.14.3, which is the latest patch for the 4.14 version of the engine available.  Given that Epic currently has released 4.15, some of our supporters have asked us why we don’t keep up, and develop Ship of Heroes in the most current engine version? Each new version of the Unreal Engine contains powerful improvements.  But at Ship of Heroes, we like to deliberately [...]

Video of Sci-Fi Environment Each of the 20 ship modules in the Justice has layers: a layer above with an artificial sky, and multiple layers below where the crew work, and ship activities take place.  These lower levels are brightly-lit at the top, near the surface, and become darker and more dangerous the further a character descends. In this video we are revealing examples of the first layer directly below the surface of Apotheosis City.  We acquired most of the art assets [...]

Eyes on Development. In developing a game, often the little details make an enormous difference.  Today we want to show some of the options players will have for selecting eyes for their characters in Ship of Heroes.  After all, the eyes are the window to the soul. We start by using the most advanced eye model supported by Unreal 4.  This enables us to employ human eye textures that are actually based on real human eyes, with comparable levels of detail.  But we have [...]

Remembering the Torch. This video records a network test that some of the devs from Ship of Heroes conducted using a rented server on March 11th, 2017.  Optimizing network structure is an ongoing activity for most MMOs.  Here at SoH, we package our game at least once a week to make sure everything is working correctly, and we periodically test to see if we have network limitations or issues.  For this test, we created a Torch power in remembrance of the last [...]