Ship of Heroes is still zooming along toward a release this season, and ahead of what we assume will be a hard date announcement very soon, Heroic Games has released a fresh dev blog – this one on animations.

“In any MMO, one of the first decisions is how big to make the animation budget,” the studio explains. “This budget is not money, though there’s one of those, too – it’s measured in how much latency or lag the animations are allowed to cause. The bigger this ‘budget’ is, the easier it is to make animations look awesome. But when there are lots of moving characters on the screen, especially player-controlled heroes with unique animations, the budget gets divided up into very small pieces for each animation.”

The team says its overhaul of animations and FX was a “major project last many months,” as the studio wanted to address everything from player to NPC actions and idles in an effort to reduce lag and latency, ensure the game can be “playable without the latest costly hardware,” and craft every power so that “every power has something cool or interesting about it.”

So far as we know, Ship is still targeting Q2, so it’s got a few more weeks to go. The blog refers to a video that doesn’t seem to be in place as we type this, so here’s the VFX video from a few months back: