Heroes update - what are we up to... | Battlefield Heroes - Free to Play, Cartoon Shooter
Heroes update - what are we up to...
Hello Heroes!
James Salt here again, Senior Producer on Heroes.
It’s a week since we moved into our new project phase, where we are focusing on working with the games backend systems. Yep, I deliberately avoided saying “polishing the backend” again. For a brief look at what this backend does, take a look at last week's blog.
So, what have we been doing?
Well, I don’t know about you, but for me, slow loading web pages are really irritating. If a page takes more than a few seconds to load, I’m already getting bored and thinking of a new site to go to.
Those of you who were in the beta might remember that the leaderboards were really slow to load, especially if you wanted to quickly jump between the different leaderboards. Fail.
Jeff Minard is like our Swiss Army Knife of Web Development. He has been working on creating some really fast loading leaderboards. So now you will be able to quickly flick through them, with no waiting time at all. The great thing with this faster loading method he’s using, is it can be used for lots of other things we are working on too. So overall the real Heroes website will feel nice and responsive. (Remember you are reading this on our temporary site, while we work on the real thing).
Jeff is like a Swiss Army Knife because he’s capable of doing so many things. As well as working with the Leaderboard problem, he’s also been tinkering with some other things I think you’d like to hear about:
You don’t see much use of 3D on websites, which is a shame. At DICE we like to try and do things that haven’t been tried before. Such as free games like Heroes or the mass destruction in Battlefield: Bad Company. An unofficial motto amongst the people here is “How hard can it be?”. Well, Jeff has been finding out with an experiment to bring 3D to the Hero creation page on the website. If all goes well, we’ll put the test Hero up here for you all to see.
Finally, he’s also working on bringing Forums to this site. So you have a place to talk about whatever you want. I’ve talked to Goodman about keeping them informal, so basically there will be just ‘Heroes stuff’ and ‘Non-Heroes stuff’ areas. You can just go ahead and make your own threads as you want. Expect forums to appear very soon.
That’s all I have for this week. I’m going to head off now and see how Jeff is getting on with the Forums.