Hero Engine: why?

[ChicksDigHarleys]

Other than the massive lag on Ilum

 

Isn't that enough?

 

When *the* endgame planet is a lagfest, that's not a problem?

[areto]

I believe in this exact thread I was told by someone that unreal engine is not suitable for MMOs, but guess what that person was wrong. I played TERA online closed beta last weekend and I was blown away by performance of unreal engine and how sweet everything looked. I thought those were the high res graphics for TERA until few days ago when they announced that they will be patching in the high-res textures. Now the game is going to look more awesome. Other than the graphics, engine, and combat, TERA is a piece of crap. Had no clue what the story was about.

 

It also has a political system which seems pretty cool, and remember the beta was only up to level 22. I happened to only make it to level 14 and once you get off the newb island it really opens out. It's going to have less plot because 1) it's korean and 2) no-one reads quest text.

 

I too was blown away by the graphics, those textures looked pretty high-res to me! I think people will be pretty happy with Tera because no-one really thinks it's going to be a keeper (I hope.)

 

Swtor really is a lot more charming overall but the system, be it hero engines fault or not, is truly terrible. One thing I will say for them is that they have pretty okay net-code. Much better than wows for example.

[Progue]

Quite a few complaints about lack of multi-threading support in the Hero Engine:

 

How would this help the game at all?

 

Lots of complaints about lag on Ilum:

 

Have you tried turning off shadows? They haven't quite optimized this part of the graphics settings yet. I turned it off and it was like night and day. You don't have to keep it off all the time, just when you're playing in high-lag environments.

 

Many claims of "buggy piece of crap, and it won't get better because of the engine:"

 

One game will not work the same on every system. Could it be that the bugs are the exception and not the rule? I've seen very few myself, and none of them killed the gameplay for me. Besides, I haven't seen a bug yet that I couldn't fix with a simple close and relaunch. Most of this thread just seems like QQ over the fact the game wasn't technically flawless right out of the gate. It's best launch I've seen, and I've played a lot of betas and launches.

[lordhaizen]

This is why BW will never i said NEVER fix fps

 

Warhammer team + Hero engine = free game soon

[Mogitu]

I don't need to know everything about game engines to know, that something with lower res textures and models should run at least as smooth as any other game with similar graphics and similar design. I played a lot of MMOs before, took part in 150 vs 150 battles in Lineage 2, in massive zerg fights in Aion, did raids and PvP in WoW and nothing, I mean nothing compares to the crap here. I had 80fps fighting at the gates of Aden, I could actually see the animations in gargantual zergfights in Abyss, but somehow I have 2fps all the time in 40vs40 fights on Ilum. That's how I know this engine sucks old socks. I don't have to be an engine developer to say that much.

 

Regards,

Kalantris

 

one thing is for sure, you never played aion..

[Descends]

Quite a few complaints about lack of multi-threading support in the Hero Engine:

 

How would this help the game at all?

 

Lots of complaints about lag on Ilum:

 

Have you tried turning off shadows? They haven't quite optimized this part of the graphics settings yet. I turned it off and it was like night and day. You don't have to keep it off all the time, just when you're playing in high-lag environments.

 

Many claims of "buggy piece of crap, and it won't get better because of the engine:"

 

One game will not work the same on every system. Could it be that the bugs are the exception and not the rule? I've seen very few myself, and none of them killed the gameplay for me. Besides, I haven't seen a bug yet that I couldn't fix with a simple close and relaunch. Most of this thread just seems like QQ over the fact the game wasn't technically flawless right out of the gate. It's best launch I've seen, and I've played a lot of betas and launches.

 

 

multithreading would help dramatically...particularly in high traffic areas.

 

furthermore the textures in this game are wretchedly poor for this day and age..and the ability animations drab and plain.... particle effects...nearly nonexistent...and shadows lowres..poorly rendered...combined with tons of clipping errors and the like...and it still doesnt run very well on my 7970....

 

the engine isnt very good...its strange they went with it, I agree with that.

 

no QQ's just wish they would upgrade it.

[Clemsonalum]

This is why BW will never i said NEVER fix fps

 

Warhammer team + Hero engine = free game soon

 

Got any other predictions for me?

 

Lottery? Next years Superbowl? World Series?

 

Also nice use of the word soon which doesnt say a gd thing.

[Xzenorath]

Whether you admit it or not, the game engine is not very well optimized. 2-3 mins loading screens, you don't have a problem with that? Or your fps dropping to like 30 at some places and coming back up when you stop moving, in other words fps spikes and this happens in areas where there are 0 players. You are a die-hard fanboy who doesn't want to admit into the game's real condition. Dream on

 

lmao 2-3 minutes loading screens? What are you running the game on, a box of Mac N Cheese? My game loads within 15 seconds, every time.

 

FPS struggling in certain places is to be expected, either because there's a lot of people or there's alot going on with shadows/shaders/etc. For exemple, when dropping down to the pit where Bonecrusher is, for some reason the shadows turn my 110FPS beast into a 25FPS crawler. Turn off shadows and it jumps right back to 110FPS, that's not an issue with the engine per say, it's just horrid coding and they'll optimize it when they get a chance to do so.

 

Sure, the game has hiccups and some slow downs on FPS, but if you're running the game on a horrid CPU... you're bound to expect less than awesome FPS.

 

I'm also aware unlike a lot of people that the game has been out for barely 2 months and all of this will be optimized and get better as time goes by. They can only do so much in so little time. If you can't be patient enough or your game is simply too slow to be playable... upgrade your cpu or come back later.

 

The engine, while not utterly amazing isn't absolute **** like a lot of you are making it out to be. 90% of the time my game runs way beyond 60FPS and it's not even out for multi-thread yet.

[Progue]

multithreading would help dramatically...particularly in high traffic areas.

 

Okay, but how? From my understanding, multithreading only yields performance increases by taking advantage of resources that lay idle while another thread is processeing. So it really only matters for applications with lots of raw, looping computations. I don't think video games, if they do have those kind of processes, have enough of them for multithreading to be a huge performance boost. In any case, it wouldn't be enough to fix glaring performance problems.

 

Maybe the posters were confusing multithreading with multi-core support?

 

furthermore the textures in this game are wretchedly poor for this day and age..and the ability animations drab and plain.... particle effects...nearly nonexistent...and shadows lowres..poorly rendered...combined with tons of clipping errors and the like...and it still doesnt run very well on my 7970....

 

The graphics are significantly better than the industry leader (WoW). In any case they are as high quality (and low quality) as they need to be for the purposes of an MMO. If you were expecting Arkham Asylum in space, you were setting yourself up for disappointment.

 

the engine isnt very good...its strange they went with it, I agree with that.

 

no QQ's just wish they would upgrade it.

 

Even if I grant you that everything you claim is wrong with the game is true, how do you attribute all of those flaws to the game engine?

[Azzras]

Yes, and with a game of this or any MMO, NEEDS to be done IN HOUSE. Hero engine is a piece of antiquated garbage. Why didn't they use Unreal engine or Gamebryo?

 

Wasn't the Unreal engine designed for single player games...not MMOs?

 

Also, didn't the Hero Engine win some fairly prestigious awards?

 

I could be wrong.

[Descends]

Okay, but how? From my understanding, multithreading only yields performance increases by taking advantage of resources that lay idle while another thread is processeing. So it really only matters for applications with lots of raw, looping computations. I don't think video games, if they do have those kind of processes, have enough of them for multithreading to be a huge performance boost. In any case, it wouldn't be enough to fix glaring performance problems.

 

Maybe the posters were confusing multithreading with multi-core support?

 

 

 

The graphics are significantly better than the industry leader (WoW). In any case they are as high quality (and low quality) as they need to be for the purposes of an MMO. If you were expecting Arkham Asylum in space, you were setting yourself up for disappointment.

 

 

 

Even if I grant you that everything you claim is wrong with the game is true, how do you attribute all of those flaws to the game engine?

 

multithreading helps alot with situations like 100 people running around in illum. though that never happens on my server anyway D:

 

 

Wow is a decade old and looks horrible..but people are attached to it..and it has other things that make it stand out...

 

im not expecting it to look great...but it would be nice

 

when you have a highend card like a 7970 and have to turn shadows off in karaggas palace to hit 60fps...something is wrong with your engine...stack on the fact that its ugly..there isnt a lot going on in the areas...and the beginning areas of the game (ones they have worked on longer) tend to run much much more smoothly, with more things to render than other places... and you might say the engine isnt being very friendly for the devs or for the users.

 

7970 runs arkham asylum better than this game... who do you think is being setup for disappointment?

[areto]

Wasn't the Unreal engine designed for single player games...not MMOs?

 

Also, didn't the Hero Engine win some fairly prestigious awards?

 

I could be wrong.

 

hero:

 

Awards

 

Finalist for "Best Engine" from Game Developer magazine.[7]

 

 

unreal engine:

 

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2011

Top Industry Driven Tech of the Year

 

NCTA – 2011

Best Engine

 

Develop – 2011

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2010

Best Engine

 

Develop – 2010

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2009

Best Engine

 

Develop – 2009

Best Tools Provider

 

Develop – 2008

Top Industry Driven Technology of the Year

 

NCTA – 2008

Hall of Fame

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2008

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2007

Best Technology

 

Game Developer Choice Awards – 2007

Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play

 

AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards – 2007

Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering

 

AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards – 2007

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2006

Best Graphics (Technical)

 

GameSpot – 2006

Best Graphics:Reader’s Choice (Technical)

 

GameSpot – 2006

Best Graphics

 

Spike TV Video Game Awards – 2006

Best Graphics

 

TeamXbox – 2006

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2005

Best Graphics Technology (Xbox 360), Technological Excellence

 

IGN – 2005

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2004

 

 

 

so ...no.

Edited February 16, 2012 by areto

[Izini]

I love the way the engine looks and there is a multi-thread release coming soon.

 

However, I'm not going to stop playing just because of some issues. I really, really like this game and its been a long time since I had this much "fun" in an MMO.

 

I am confident in Bioware. I don't have the same faith in other companies...

 

werd, this is the most fun I've had in any mmo.

[wifeaggro]

multithreading helps alot with situations like 100 people running around in illum. though that never happens on my server anyway D:

 

 

Wow is a decade old and looks horrible..but people are attached to it..and it has other things that make it stand out...

 

im not expecting it to look great...but it would be nice

 

when you have a highend card like a 7970 and have to turn shadows off in karaggas palace to hit 60fps...something is wrong with your engine...stack on the fact that its ugly..there isnt a lot going on in the areas...and the beginning areas of the game (ones they have worked on longer) tend to run much much more smoothly, with more things to render than other places... and you might say the engine isnt being very friendly for the devs or for the users.

 

7970 runs arkham asylum better than this game... who do you think is being setup for disappointment?

 

There is something wrong with the engine. it was very apparent in Beta they turned on high res textures for 4 hours and imediately brought them down and removed them.

 

Then vehemently defended the posistion that they were never there and medium was actually the high option. It's amazing to me people defend this posistion. It is 2012 not 2004. I can log onto a game made in 2008 that has DX10 high res textures multiple options for AA , AF ,different shader options , more graphic options then a single player and is briallantly visual. you can play that game with 64 people pvping in a destructible enviroment and i can maintain 60 FPS.

 

yet i log onto SWTOR and get 20 FPS on the fleet at primetime. i am absloutely disappointed in the perfomance of the game. and for all you boot licker fanbois, no its not my system.

990X intel OC'd 4.2

590gtx 3 gig gforce

8 gigs 1333 mhz

Win 7 x64 unltimate

 

there is something wrong with the engine it cant render high res textures with out a severe performance issues. it visually is below standards . Lotro, rift ,AOC, Aion all the new releases in the last 5 years use high resolution textures with out perfomance issue its mindblowing . and none of them rely on instancing and zone splitting like TOR does.

[Azzras]

hero:

 

Awards

 

Finalist for "Best Engine" from Game Developer magazine.[7]

 

 

unreal engine:

 

Best Engine

 

Game Developer Magazine Front Line Awards – 2011

Top Industry Driven Tech of the Year

 

*snip*

 

so ...no.

 

So the unreal engine is best engine for SINGLE PLAYER GAMES AND CONSOLES?

[miliways]

multithreading helps alot with situations like 100 people running around in illum. though that never happens on my server anyway D:

 

 

Wow is a decade old and looks horrible..but people are attached to it..and it has other things that make it stand out...

 

im not expecting it to look great...but it would be nice

 

when you have a highend card like a 7970 and have to turn shadows off in karaggas palace to hit 60fps...something is wrong with your engine...stack on the fact that its ugly..there isnt a lot going on in the areas...and the beginning areas of the game (ones they have worked on longer) tend to run much much more smoothly, with more things to render than other places... and you might say the engine isnt being very friendly for the devs or for the users.

 

7970 runs arkham asylum better than this game... who do you think is being setup for disappointment?

 

So much wrong in this post. Your problem is you're highly ignorant of computer architecture, so you've got misconceptions left and right. And you're ignorant of your own misconceptions, so instead you just get frustrated. Trust me, there's more to it.

 

Multi-threading might not actually help, even in situations like 100 people running around on Ilum. Thats what he was trying to tell you. You have multiple cores on your processor, sure, but you have a limited CPU Cache that all cores have to share, and that cache bus is a bottleneck for data transfer with RAM. Even if the program was running on multiple threads on multiple cores, it might not really speed up performance in ANY noticeable way, you'd have core 1 run for awhile, and then it would be forced to wait on a cache miss while core 2 is doing something with the cache until it is free to pull from RAM.

 

This is why, even though processors have 6+ cores these days, most video games are either single-threaded, or at best benefit from 2 cores. There is no advantage to 4-6 cores for gaming because the CPU is no longer the bottleneck.

 

You can't compare an FPS or a third-person shooter to an MMORPG. You simply cannot.

 

Try comparing an RTS to an FPS. Even games like Half-Life 2, which are getting pretty darn old now, have higher poly models, better shading and anti-aliasing, than BRAND NEW RTS games coming out today. Why? Because RTS game developers are lazy and ****?

No. Because in an RTS, the differences in gameplay create differences in performance. You have to have tons more units on the screen at one time, and you have to be able to see a large portion of the battlefield at one time, all from above. You can't perform as much back-face culling and view frustum culling.

 

MMORPGs simply cannot look as good as an FPS, there are more players, the environments are a factor of 10-100 times larger than a small little FPS level, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

 

You're just so ignorant and yet convinced you know everything.

 

I have a B.S. in Computer Science. How about you?

 

I don't think you have any knowledge of what you're talking about at all. I think you're just another loudmouth American who is too busy to stop and consider "maybe there is more to this situation than I think" and instead you just get loud and belligerent demanding the impossible.

[miliways]

There is something wrong with the engine. it was very apparent in Beta they turned on high res textures for 4 hours and imediately brought them down and removed them.

 

Then vehemently defended the posistion that they were never there and medium was actually the high option. It's amazing to me people defend this posistion. It is 2012 not 2004. I can log onto a game made in 2008 that has DX10 high res textures multiple options for AA , AF ,different shader options , more graphic options then a single player and is briallantly visual. you can play that game with 64 people pvping in a destructible enviroment and i can maintain 60 FPS.

 

yet i log onto SWTOR and get 20 FPS on the fleet at primetime. i am absloutely disappointed in the perfomance of the game. and for all you boot licker fanbois, no its not my system.

990X intel OC'd 4.2

590gtx 3 gig gforce

8 gigs 1333 mhz

Win 7 x64 unltimate

 

there is something wrong with the engine it cant render high res textures with out a severe performance issues. it visually is below standards . Lotro, rift ,AOC, Aion all the new releases in the last 5 years use high resolution textures with out perfomance issue its mindblowing . and none of them rely on instancing and zone splitting like TOR does.

 

You know what, you're right. Bioware and all their engineers and all their millions of dollars in game development, they're freaking morons.

 

You're clearly much more intelligent. You should go WRITE YOUR OWN MMORPG engine, since apparently its SO EASY.

 

I'd love to play your MMORPG with FPS graphics. I'm looking forward to it.

 

There better not be a single bug, or I'm going to ***** nonstop!

[Descends]

There is something wrong with the engine. it was very apparent in Beta they turned on high res textures for 4 hours and imediately brought them down and removed them.

 

Then vehemently defended the posistion that they were never there and medium was actually the high option. It's amazing to me people defend this posistion. It is 2012 not 2004. I can log onto a game made in 2008 that has DX10 high res textures multiple options for AA , AF ,different shader options , more graphic options then a single player and is briallantly visual. you can play that game with 64 people pvping in a destructible enviroment and i can maintain 60 FPS.

 

yet i log onto SWTOR and get 20 FPS on the fleet at primetime. i am absloutely disappointed in the perfomance of the game. and for all you boot licker fanbois, no its not my system.

990X intel OC'd 4.2

590gtx 3 gig gforce

8 gigs 1333 mhz

Win 7 x64 unltimate

 

there is something wrong with the engine it cant render high res textures with out a severe performance issues. it visually is below standards . Lotro, rift ,AOC, Aion all the new releases in the last 5 years use high resolution textures with out perfomance issue its mindblowing . and none of them rely on instancing and zone splitting like TOR does.

 

ironically i can run every other game on the market better than this one..and this one looks worse than everything else released within the past 4 years.

[Kayaata]

Wow... we sure have alot of professional programmers here. You really are programmers yes? Because otherwise theres no way you can tell what can and cant be done with this engine.

 

From the year i studied programming i learned that everything is possible and theres always a way to make your code more eficient. Maybe its the engine, or maybe its just a design choice they chose to rectify? We cant really tell until bioware tells us.

 

Yeah and your post can be believed why? because you tell us lol I think not people are angry, dont like it dont freakin read the thread.

[areto]

So the unreal engine is best engine for SINGLE PLAYER GAMES AND CONSOLES?

 

It's the best engine period, if it is indeed the best engine. It's been used extensively for just about every genre you could think of:

 

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

 

 

I'm not some lover of unreal, there is just no doubt that it's one of the greats whereas hero engine apparently isn't.

 

You can really sum it up with one simple jerky sentence fragment "2012: still using dx9."

 

But the game is fun and lots of people like it, you can still like the game and admit that they made a mistake or two can't you?

Edited February 16, 2012 by areto

[wifeaggro]

You know what, you're right. Bioware and all their engineers and all their millions of dollars in game development, they're freaking morons.

 

You're clearly much more intelligent. You should go WRITE YOUR OWN MMORPG engine, since apparently its SO EASY.

 

I'd love to play your MMORPG with FPS graphics. I'm looking forward to it.

 

There better not be a single bug, or I'm going to ***** nonstop!

 

Unfortuantely i do not have the skill to do it nor the backing or even the slightest clue of what to do with a computer other then play games, check email look up stuff on the internet, and post on forums.

 

But stacked up to other MMO's as far as perfomance and visuals neither did BW austin. so what is your point. That is i do not know how to do it i should not be unsatisifed as a customer because i cant fix their game for them? the games i referenced are not FPS games they are MMO's that were released from 2008 to 2011. no one said they should have FPS graphics just high res textures. lol man your defensive.

Edited February 16, 2012 by wifeaggro

[ArmchairMagpie]

multithreading helps alot with situations like 100 people running around in illum. though that never happens on my server anyway D:

 

Multi-threading is a technique and not a readily functional and available feature. There are many ways how to overuse it and even more ways to screw up things up with it while not achieving anything worthwhile.

 

You still would have to account for the number of processing units available and the fact that data cannot be cached by the CPU indefinitely.

[Dyraele]

ironically i can run every other game on the market better than this one..and this one looks worse than everything else released within the past 4 years.

 

Interesting, because I can't. SWTOR runs MUCH better than Lineage II. I can hardly move at all in that game at times. I never have a problem with SWTOR since I turned down all the graphics. It doesn't look as good but I care more about gameplay anyway.

 

Even in GW there are times when the FPS drops to as low as 2 for a second or more. It is not often and seems to only be on town transitions, but it happens.

 

BTW, the Hero Engine has made a lot of improvements, including performace ones, lately. I wonder if BioWare will incorporate the changes into their engine sometime soon.

[MillionsKNives]

[...] NEEDS to be done IN HOUSE. [...] Why didn't they use Unreal engine or Gamebryo?

 

/facepalm

 

Also Gamebryo is horrible to work with. I hated every minute of working with it. Though it didn't help that all of our custom code was done by students who couldn't code for sh*t.

 

Unreal is an easy engine to use, but it wasn't really built with MMOs in mind. That's not to say it can't be done (see APB and Tera)

 

[...]

BTW I like Unreal Engine but Batman Archam City uses Unreal and it's had it's share of bugs.

 

That's because bugs most of the time have nothing to do with the engine.

 

see explanation in second paragraph:

Everyone is aware that the engine was licensed in its earliest days, and they haven't received newer code for it right? They licensed it because they liked the tools it had, not because it was a complete and fully featured engine. In fact most of it was unfinished, which means that BioWare did most of the work on the engine for the game.

 

You're all aware as well that the engine on which a game runs is more of a groundwork for rendering, animation systems, API calls, etc. than for actual game logic right? You're not just conflating all of the source code into one thing and calling it the Hero Engine? No? Good, glad we got that cleared away. Now we can have pertinent discussions.

 

source: http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/

[Descends]

Interesting, because I can't. SWTOR runs MUCH better than Lineage II. I can hardly move at all in that game at times. I never have a problem with SWTOR since I turned down all the graphics. It doesn't look as good but I care more about gameplay anyway.

 

Even in GW there are times when the FPS drops to as low as 2 for a second or more. It is not often and seems to only be on town transitions, but it happens.

 

BTW, the Hero Engine has made a lot of improvements, including performace ones, lately. I wonder if BioWare will incorporate the changes into their engine sometime soon.

 

perhaps this is true with low settings on lowend hardware...but on good hardware the opposite is true..which is why they cant implement high res textures because the curve sucks.

 

if you struggle to run guild wars..you must be playing on very poor hardware indeed.

 

my specs

 

4.5ghz i5

7970

8gb 1600mhz

raid 0 hitachi (doesnt improve load speed in this game for some reason)

 

games that run worse than this one at max settings?

 

0.

 

since most people dont have nice hardware it may make sense to accomodate the lowend of the spectrum...but if you have trouble running guild wars..you must be the absolute lowest end on the market..so as much as im the 1% highend, youd be the 1% lowend i would guess. not meaning any disrespect just putting it in perspective.