MW Stats

Modern Warships Stats or MW Stats for short is a tool that’s very useful for the players of the Modern Warships mobile game, released by Artstorm / Cube Software. It’s an action game focused on naval warfare, available on iOS and Android platforms.

Modern Warships Stats is a site that was originally created out of laziness because it was too much effort to open the game if I wanted to see the stats of a specific ship or weapon in the game. The web application can be used to browse all ships, weapons, and aircraft in the game and compare them with one another, a very useful feature missing from the game at the moment.

The site uses an API to get the exact same data used by the game which makes it very accurate and always up to date. A search feature powered by Algolia makes it quick to find your favorite ship, weapon, or aircraft in the game.

On the technical side, the project is built on Laravel and the blog section is powered by WordPress. The site uses the Vue.js framework for many interactions but it’s combined with server-side rendering to improve the web performance and SEO. The various parts of the service run in Docker containers, hosted in Google Cloud Run.

Since many assets in the game were fairly low resolution and heavily compressed, they did not look that great on high-resolution screens. Because of this, AI-powered image upscaling was used to improve the image quality of game assets on the site. This was accomplished with a program named Cupscale and the deep learning models that were used were RealSR DF2K-JPEG to hallucinate more details and GainRESV3 to remove aliasing present in the images.

One interesting challenge related to the localization was adding Arabic language support to the website. Because Arabic is an RTL language, some additional work needed to be done to ensure the site works both in the left-to-right direction and right-to-left direction.

The initial version of the project took around 100 hours of work to plan, design, and develop. After the launch, there have been a ton of new features, improvements, and bug fixes added to the site.

While initially focused on statistics, after the launch, the site was expanded to feature editorial content such as reviews and articles related to the game. Over time, the site has been translated into 8 different languages with the help of community members. With over 1 000 000 monthly page views, MW Stats has proven to be an invaluable resource for fans of the game.