Now we’ve accomplished a significant upgrade to 4.24, which will help in several areas, so we’re getting a lot done. Of course, there’s always more to do.

• Beautiful skies, both for day and for night – our Truesky plugin is not available in newer engine versions, so we need to recreate the day/night cycle we had in an earlier version of SoH without it. We are working hard on this right now, and while it is not done, it is going well.
• We’ve solved the memory leak we found during the CCT Beta using 4.24 features.
• 4.24 lets us make a significant costume and character art workflow improvement. This will help us to be faster in turning out new costumes.
• We’re replacing Popcorn FX since it also did not follow us to 4.24, and we’re generally improving FX using the Epic Niagara system.
• We’ve been adding features and improvements to the CCT since the Beta, in response to the requests of over 500 participants. Thank you all for the feedback! And we’re especially proud to say that everything in the CCT works as planned. Every morph, and every piece of clothing or armor.
• While it is not a function of the engine upgrade, we’ve made huge progress with animations. Our team of animators has been working steadily all through 2019 and is continuing in 2020. We have the animations in place, mostly polished, for 18 full powersets.

Updating our engine is a big deal, but it’s not the only thing we’ve been doing since the start of the new year. We’ve taken the time to review comments from our CCT Beta event and added two new headpieces for the female body type, a variety of alien-shaped ears, and a feline-styled eye mask, among other items.

The CCT has a new hairstyle now, for all those who felt there wasn’t enough variety available before.

We’ve added several new interior map instances so that no hero is stuck clearing out the same six warehouses when Prometheans come a-calling.

In addition, we’ve incorporated several new pieces of music to Ship of Heroes, including one piece to serve as the background music for the upcoming City Hall instance interior.

What’s Next

As mentioned in previous newsletters, we plan on having an Invasion Beta event some time in Q2. In the meantime, we plan on having several more updates showing off new costumes, the interior of City Hall, and possibly some upgraded power sets. At some point we are also going to discuss crafting in SoH, which is being developed right now. If you like what you see, please consider supporting us. Your donations are the fuel for creating Ship of Heroes.