The CCT Beta Begins
Want to see your new outfit on someone doing more than just standing around? You’re in luck; the CCT now has action poses like this one.
We’ve decided to make all the travel powers available for the CCT Beta. Go ahead and fly or superspeed run through the city, chat with your friends, or look for the broken stuff we missed – and we’re sure there must be some. Find the entrance to the Beta Club; explore the hospital and the auction house. Enjoy yourself. But most of all, make some cool characters!
Alternatively, you can go for a more distinguished look.
By now if you qualified, you should have completed most of the downloading and extracting of the Ship of Heroes CCT Beta materials. We sent out the download emails early to allow people with slow internet time to install the game in advance. For anyone who missed it, the instructions for downloading are here:
1. To be safe, uninstall any previous versions of Ship of Heroes. If you do not, the installer tries to update the old version, and it can get stuck in a loop.
2. Go here to download.
3. Run the installer.
Once the game is installed, you need to create a Beta account to log in to Ship of Heroes. This requires that you receive a registration key, which is tied to your PayPal donation level. If you haven’t received a key and think you should have, check your email spam folders, and check your donation level on our website here to confirm that you’re qualified for this Beta.
If the FHS Justice had flying motorcycle gangs, you just know this guy would be in one.
Once You’re in the Beta:
We’re providing a list of commands to try out in the Beta; type them into the chat once you’ve made a character and entered the city. If you discover that you need another command, please let us know in the forums. We’ll be doing our best to keep up with requests in real time, but some things may need to be added or fixed after the Beta. All of your insights and help will make the launch of Ship of Heroes even more successful.
Group Commands:
/invite or /inv – Invite to your group
/leave or /leavegroup – Leave your group
/kick – Kicks a player from your group
/uninvite – Removes your invite to a player
Emotes (these all take an optional target name, eg /wave Consultant)
/wave
/clap
/cheer
/crowdcheer – (YMCA)
/bow
/salute
/twist
/laydown
/sit
/frown
/smile
/neutral – Resets smile/frown morph
/emote (Example: /emote sights the Arches –– which would show: Consultant sights the Arches, for a character named Consultant)
Chat Commands
/tell or /t – Sends a tell
/send or /s – Same as above
/m or msg – Seems to be same as above.
/party or /p or /group – Group chat.
/global or /g – Global chat
/say or /s – Say something only people nearby can hear
/yell or /y – Extended range say.
/reply or /r – Reply
Note: /yell will send a message to everyone in the area. By contrast, /say will only be heard by nearby players.
Other Commands
/target or /tar – Targets the player named
/invertmouse – Invert mouse
/follow – Follows a player
/stick – Similar to follow but sticks in melee range
Superspeed FX
Lightning is the default superspeed FX. For the CCT Test, we’ve temporarily enabled a special dev tool for players to change between different Superspeed particles by pressing the Numpad 2 key. Press P to open the powers menu and drag Superspeed onto the power bar at the bottom of the screen, then click it to toggle Superspeed on.
Note: You can toggle walking by holding down the period key while moving.
Adjusting Settings
To access System Settings in-game, press the Escape key and select the System button from the pop-up menu.
- Audio can be turned down from the game settings windows. You can select the audio volume across various channels like Music and Sound, as well as the Master Volume. Video options are accessed through the same settings.
- Vertical sync can be enabled in the main menu via the settings button, in the System Settings in-game. This can help if your computer is not automatically synced and therefore tends to run hot.
If you find that you are having frame rate problems, you can adjust this through the Graphics panel on the System Settings. There are two ways in which you can optimize performance.
- The first is automated using the Significance Manager. To do that, slide the Target Frame Rate to a higher number than 10. If your frame rate falls below this number, it will automatically lower your settings. So for example, if you set this to 50, and your frame rate is below 50, it will start dropping texture quality, shadows, etc.
- The second is to adjust the screen resolution, which is one of the main causes of poor performance. Many users may want to tweak to their own preferences. To do this you can click on the Manual tab in the Graphics Settings and adjust the settings to your liking.
With our advanced facial morphs and eyes, it’s very important to be able to see the face up close like this.
We’ve created a new section of the SoH forums for comments about the CCT Beta. It would be cool if people reported their computer hardware, game graphics settings – the default is ultra – and FPS in the forums so future players can relate hardware to performance in a real–world situation.
Note all the new options. Save and load are at the top, reset and undo are in the lower left, and the randomizers are in the lower right, below the manual RGB value changers.
For most of the Beta, we will limit the number of players in one instance of Apotheosis City to around 50, with a hard cap of 75. If more players show up, another instance of the city will automatically spawn for them. But we do plan to hold a “Crush the Server” test sometime during the Beta to see if we can get more players into the city at once, and to try to track what happens to FPS when we do this. There is simply no substitute for real-world testing with dozens or hundreds players.
Enjoy! The Beta will continue until noon on November 8th.
The default face is neutral, but you can make expressions ranging from delighted to furious.
Facial hair is colored independently from head hair. For real humans, they usually don’t match without hair dye, but you’re also free to make them the same.
Technical Notes
1. We already have a short list of things we want to add that didn’t make it in in time for the CCT, including mouseover tooltips and a height meter to show how tall your character is in inches/feet/centimeters/meters. Expect to hear about these features sometime in the next few months.
2. If you are having a problem, submitting a contact form here is the best option. However, please keep in mind that we’re a small team; it may take a while for us to respond.
3. All of the pictures in this newsletter were created by a family member of a dev, who had never used any character generator in any game previously. We wanted to see if non-devs could make nice-looking characters. The answer is an emphatic yes.
4. We’re using a standard commercial server setup for this Beta. This will allow us to test the appropriate level of server capacity for launch.
And remember, we’re your team. Many of us are volunteers, and we want to make this event succeed! Let us know what you think about the CCT on the forums!