Hero Engine: why?

[Mannic]

From some quick Googling, the makers of the HeroEngine never actually put out a game using their own engine. The company actually folded and then were acquired by Idea Fabrik in 2010 (this is well into star wars development). Considering the turmoil an acquisition typically is, Bioware is probably using a very old version of the HeroEngine which is probably barely supported. Now it makes sense why there's no high resolution textures, antialiasing, DX10/11 support, or any other remotely modern graphics feature.

 

I think this is the thing that bugs me most.

 

Why Bioware would consider it a good idea to be the guinea pig for an engine that had never actually been put through its paces is beyond me. Seems like they could have gone with Unreal Engine 3 which is at least a tried and tested engine, and had more success than they've had with the Hero engine. Hell, they probably could have done almost as well with Unreal 2 engine which has been around since 2002.

 

I'm betting the Hero Engine was an example of a huge corporation mysteriously and inexplicably going cheap on an early development decision. Unreal Engine 3 is quite expenxive, and likely much more expensive than the relatively unpopular Hero engine. In the final analysis, though, I'm going to wager that Hero engine will end up costing them more in time and resources to get it working correctly than if they had just dropped the green on a real, tested and well-supported engine.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Mannic

[Arkerus]

I think this is the thing that bugs me most.

 

Why Bioware would consider it a good idea to be the guinea pig for an engine that had never actually been put through its paces is beyond me. Seems like they could have gone with Unreal Engine 3 which is at least a tried and tested engine, and had more success as they've had with the Hero engine. Hell, they probably could have done almost as well with Unreal 2 engine which has been around since 2002.

 

The unreal engine?

 

You don't know what you are talking about.

 

The hero engine was specifically designed for designing, creating and building MMOs. The unreal engine, while flexible, was not.

[captainmerkin]

It's already starting to get a little less suck I think.

 

Not as many people Q_Quitting every day, and the latest news about the PvP additions and tweaks for combat that people have been wanting have alleviated most people's fear... for the time being, that is.

 

Nice to see another eclipse player here

[Tokeee]

You can't send 1 thread to multiple cores.

 

Thus, multicore = multithreading

 

however,

 

multithreading != multicore

 

 

You are wrong - care to discuss CPU architecture in a new thread? Love to.

 

Multicore does not demand multithreading, as you can send 1 thread to 1 core continuously and disregard additional functionality. Thus, Multicore != Multithreading.

 

You are wrong, and are not taking the discussion within the context of this application. I can pontificate all day on different scenarios and variations of those scenarios which constantly prove me right and you wrong, but at the end of the day the current context is what matters, where I am right.

 

You're out of your league ace. Back to the kiddie pool for you.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Tokeee

[Mannic]

The unreal engine?

 

You don't know what you are talking about.

 

The hero engine was specifically designed for designing, creating and building MMOs. The unreal engine, while flexible, was not.

 

TERA is being designed on Unreal 3 engine.

 

Engines like Unreal Engine, CryEngine, and Gamebryo can all be modified to design MMO's. Rift used Gamebryo to engineer one of the smoothest, most feature-rich and complete MMO's ever. Aion was designed on Cryengine which had never been used for an MMO before. And many MMO's have been designed on Unreal engine.

 

So are you really sure you want to throw around the "you don't know what your talking about" accusation?

 

I'm pretty sure even Bioware would admit now that HeroEngine was a mistake, but by the time they figured out how much it would have to be modified to fit their needs they were already deep in development and committed to it.

 

And please don't bother arguing that Bioware would have to spend too much time modifying those other engines. By all accounts from Bioware themselves the Hero Engine they're running now barely resembles the original because they've modified it so much.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Mannic

[bbbmmmlll]

Lots of people raising the point that the engine is customized and is no longer really the HeroEngine. Customizing an engine is a lot like remodeling a house. It's easy to change flooring, light fixtures, etc... more work and money to remodel a bathroom or kitchen, pretty expensive to add additions and downright painful to add a basement or a second floor. The more fundamental the change the more cost, time and disruptive the change becomes. If you buy a one bedroom bungalow and end up remodeling it to get a 6 bedroom ultra modern house you have to ask yourself if it would have been better to build it from scratch or buy something closer to what you really wanted.

 

There are core parts of every game engine that are incredibly painful to change. I don't know what BW changed, but if you look at the HeroGame forums and comments about another game that used the engine you see a common theme around FPS and memory issues. Take shadow performance as a very specific issue. Based on this and the fact that you license an engine so you don't have to work on the core (you want to add to the engine and not rewrite what you paid for) I think there are fundamental parts of the HeroEngine that are still mainly intact. That said, bugs will get fixed and it will get improved over time.

[youwillburn]

Vanish was NOT broken on vanilla. I think BC broke it some how.

[discosoc]

TERA is being designed on Unreal 3 engine.

 

Engines like Unreal Engine, CryEngine, and Gamebryo can all be modified to design MMO's. Rift used Gamebryo to engineer one of the smoothest, most feature-rich and complete MMO's ever. Aion was designed on Cryengine which had never been used for an MMO before. And many MMO's have been designed on Unreal engine.

 

So are you really sure you want to throw around the "you don't know what your talking about" accusation?

 

I'm pretty sure even Bioware would admit now that HeroEngine was a mistake, but by the time they figured out how much it would have to be modified to fit their needs they were already deep in development and committed to it.

 

And please don't bother arguing that Bioware would have to spend too much time modifying those other engines. By all accounts from Bioware themselves the Hero Engine they're running now barely resembles the original because they've modified it so much.

 

Can you actually explain the technical differences between any two game engines? Without doing google searches? Hell, even with google searches? Or maybe rendering engines vs game engines?

 

The thing is, it doesn't matter what engine Bioware chose, people would be complaining about it. They didn't develop this game without any sort of project management, and I really doubt they randomly chose the Hero engine out of ignorance.

[Tool_of_Society]

I think this is the thing that bugs me most.

 

Why Bioware would consider it a good idea to be the guinea pig for an engine that had never actually been put through its paces is beyond me. Seems like they could have gone with Unreal Engine 3 which is at least a tried and tested engine, and had more success than they've had with the Hero engine. Hell, they probably could have done almost as well with Unreal 2 engine which has been around since 2002.

 

I'm betting the Hero Engine was an example of a huge corporation mysteriously and inexplicably going cheap on an early development decision. Unreal Engine 3 is quite expenxive, and likely much more expensive than the relatively unpopular Hero engine. In the final analysis, though, I'm going to wager that Hero engine will end up costing them more in time and resources to get it working correctly than if they had just dropped the green on a real, tested and well-supported engine.

haha Lineage 2 is running a modified unreal engine 2.0 that is commonly referred to as 2.5 and it's quite frankly a terrible game engine with serious inefficiencies. Just head over to their forums and you'll see plenty of posts as to why the unreal 2.0 engine is TERRIBLE for a modern MMO. Your belief that unreal 2.0 would be almost as good proves you really have very little in the way of a clue when it comes to game engines.. Edited January 5, 2012 by Tool_of_Society

[SpeeDeh]

Multicore does not demand multithreading, as you can send 1 thread to 1 core continuously and disregard additional functionality.

 

Thank you for proving my point. One core running one thread is NOT multicore. Think before you post. To use multiple cores, you MUST have multiple threads. Read what we both wrote.

[Terko_Koslah]

I'm sure if it's the engine BW will start coding their own.

[SpeeDeh]

haha Lineage 2 is running a modified unreal engine 2.0 that is commonly referred to as 2.5 and it's quite frankly a terrible game engine with serious inefficiencies. Just head over to their forums and you'll see plenty of posts as to why the unreal 2.0 engine is TERRIBLE for a modern MMO. Your belief that unreal 2.0 would be almost as good proves you really have very little in the way of a clue when it comes to game engines..

 

I played Lineage 2 for years and had no issues with the game engine whatsoever. They were also one of the first games to update and support HDR rendering with full bloom etc. It was a beautiful game at release and was able to handle 2000 players on a single battle field at once (Aden castle's first siege). It also stood the test of time for many years before newer MMO's were able to moderately surpass it GFX wise (then again, I am biased towards that style of art so...)

[demoncrat]

If you're going to be a smart alek please have some clue about that which you speak.

 

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/search?q=stealth%20broken&f=post

 

That's 2010. I'm telling you at launch it was not broken.

[Lmaonade]

bump for best thread

[Thorun]

i didnt get through all posts but isnt the hero engine much easier to use for the devs? im not a programmer so im asking. Also isnt this engine just a single thread?

 

Thanks

[kineticdamage]

I'm not sure what you think the ability delay stuff has to do with the GCD or animations?

 

I wasn't talking about ability delay, but the OP's quote "engine that can't even process commands before animations finish".

 

If this is technically precise, that would mean what I think it should mean : the engine cannot force another action if the current one is not finished. Which would explain why everything is revolving around animations, and not the inverse (which imo should be the case).

 

But I don't know if the OP was that technical, or was just using bad words to explain a completely different case (aka. the ability delay you're mentionning).

That's why I put a lot of "IFs".

[Tool_of_Society]

I played Lineage 2 for years and had no issues with the game engine whatsoever. They were also one of the first games to update and support HDR rendering with full bloom etc. It was a beautiful game at release and was able to handle 2000 players on a single battle field at once (Aden castle's first siege). It also stood the test of time for many years before newer MMO's were able to moderately surpass it GFX wise (then again, I am biased towards that style of art so...)

You're lying or you've never been to a siege. The game engine renders EVERYTHING around the character because it doesn't have support for not rending objects that cannot be seen. So when you spawn in a castle during a siege you're instantly lagged hard because the game engine is rendering all the people outside the walls. Same thing happens when you run over an underground dungeon which is also partly why you can hear others fighting under you. That's frankly the biggest problem but there's a crapton of other issues. Just do a quick google search with the keywords "lineage 2 engine problems" and you'll get hundreds of posts explaining how bad the game engine really is. Your post is a classic example of denial of reality.

 

I first started playing Lineage 2 in closed beta and while it at the time the game was quite impressive it's been overshadowed for many years both graphically and in performance (especially performance). Personally I'd like to see NCsoft update to at least the unreal 3.0 engine so that most of the inefficiencies are fixed while giving them more options as developers. There's a lot of issues with a complete engine update so realistically we can only hope that they might get around to adding a few modern game engine optimizations..

Edited January 6, 2012 by Tool_of_Society

[Vexas]

Rift. Gamebryo. Terrible.

 

 

 

To be fair I find TOR graphically very pretty and easy on the eyes, but there seem to be some serious problems with the actual combat part of the engine.

 

Could have used more polish though, whether that's EA's fault or not I don't know. I'm assuming they didn't anticipate all these 'ability delay'/'combat sucks' threads or they surely would have done something about it, but I seem to remember something about beta... beta forums... oh well, it's too late now.

[Tool_of_Society]

Rift. Gamebryo. Terrible.

 

 

 

To be fair I find TOR graphically very pretty and easy on the eyes, but there seem to be some serious problems with the actual combat part of the engine.

 

Could have used more polish though, whether that's EA's fault or not I don't know. I'm assuming they didn't anticipate all these 'ability delay'/'combat sucks' threads or they surely would have done something about it, but I seem to remember something about beta... beta forums... oh well, it's too late now.

I played rift since closed beta and I found it to be quite nice graphically and it's performance was excellent. There's like a segment of the population that enjoys raging on game engines and there's a segment of that population of haters dedicated to gamebryo. Rift's engine is quite heavily modified too so I'm not even sure how relevant that is. Edited January 6, 2012 by Tool_of_Society

[Akitoscorpio]

Are you people just reaching for reasons to complain now? Really it's come down to this?

[iain_b]

That's 2010. I'm telling you at launch it was not broken.

 

Actually that's 2010 and 2011 and it was broken on and off for years in-between.

 

But that's your argument, falling onto some flawed criteria that you introduced into the argument? I said that stealth has been broken for ages and you snarkily reply, "I don't know what game you were playing?"

 

Then you go on to qualify your statement with "at launch".

 

Tell me. What is worse, a gaming mechanic that is crucial to a specific class being broken when the game launches. Or it being broken 5 years later?

 

I can't wait to see what kind of nonsense you cook up in reply.

[AlpsStranger]

I have to agree. The underlying engine does appear to be a steaming pile of ****.

[zerobounds]

Wombats.

 

...I swear.....

[MrTijger]

Wombats.

 

...I swear.....

 

Its always the Wombats. Always.

[Hammelj]

If it was the engine then, why did it work great in beta? Why did it work awesome at launch? Why have I been getting 50-60 FPS up until the most recent update?