Planetside 2 Optimizations Continue, Explosive Animation Improvements Incoming

SOE has been steadily drip feeding fans news surrounding efforts to optimize their futuristic MMOFPS Planetside 2. Today's latest explosive video in SOE's 'Operation: Make Faster Game' series, sheds some light on how the FPS's animation system works and what's being done not only to improve its performance, but increase the quality as well.

Being that Planetside 2' battlefield encompasses hundreds of square miles, there is no need to see every muscle twitch soldiers make from 400m away. What's important is knowing what direction they are headed and whether they are crouching or standing. By removing unnecessary animations at great distances, SOE has managed to reduce how much the animation system uses the CPU by 50%. That isn't to say your new PS2 experience will be one filled with inferior animations, quite the contrary. SOE will also be adding new animations including leaning, which doesn't sound like much, but goes a long way towards improving players' ability to predict an enemy's movement.

Planetside 2' explosions are also receiving some efficiency improvements which reduce the number of explosive pixels that fill your screen when a Vanguard happens to roll over a few dozen landmines. The reduction however, has minimal effect on the actual "wow" factor of the explosion, and results in a fairly substantial performance increase.

SOE had already set a tentative date to ship the first round of optimizations on October 23rd, but with the date now behind us and no new release announcement, it's apparent SOE feels they need more time.