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Why did Bioware choose the hero engine?


Mookiethejookie

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I can imagine that Bioware did not select the Hero engine without proper analysis beforehand.

 

So any discussions on these forum regarding the selection of the hero engine is most likely uninformed speculations without any facts.

 

Most likely they made a good pick based on what they needed. Why build something when you can buy it from someone who is better at creating it. Bioware's core business is not engines - it's great story and cool gameplay.

 

Most likely the engine used is now heavily customized for SWTOR and optimizwed for the game.

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I completely understand your first point and I agree, but I still think the graphics optimization for this game was very poorly done, and it could have been so much better.

 

I agree that it should have been a "fully-realized online world," and not some HEAVY themepark based world. A lot more sandbox elements should have been incorporated from the beginning and they weren't.

 

I guess EA didn't feel the need to fund the more "technical" side of graphic optimizations, which resulted in very sparse graphics options to choose from and poor optimization.

 

EA had nothing to do with any of it.

 

First off EA lets a studio generally hang itself on its own merit. BW and other studios put together budget plans and profit speculations and submit them to EA and then EA gives them large blocks of investment cash and the studio does what it needs to do with it. EA doesn't normally stick its nose into other studios business until they begin to fail.

 

As for the engine and all of those decisions? They were made long before BW became part of the EA family. BW was purchases BECAUSE it already had the licensing and was building a Star Wars MMO, not because they came to EA to get money to make an idea a reality.

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When SWTOR began its development, they wanted to get the product to market as fast as possible. They had four choices; 1. buy and adapt/use a purpose-built third-party MMO Game Development Framework, 2. buy and heavily adapt/transform a purpose-built third party FPS Game Development Framework into an MMO Game Development Framework, 3. adapt one of their own FPS/RPG Game Development Frameworks into an MMO Game Development Framework, or, 4. build their own Game Development Framework from the ground up. They made a perfectly valid business decision to go with option 1. Unfortunately, option 1 did not come with features that we, today, consider "modern MMO features", and BioWare Austin chose not to plan for those features to be put into the product in time for launch... SIX YEARS later.

 

Couldn't have said it better. Development delay, miss calculation and money saving are the reasons.

 

As for the unreal engine part of other uneducated posters:

Lineage2 - UE2.5 Since 2003.

TERA Online U3 Since 2010 in KR. These games may have content issues or other issues, but graphic wise they work as you would expect. Showing hundreds of players at once. Unlikewhat rift promised and failed to deliver.

 

As for people gerneral coming up with we can't have crysis. Yes we can't. We get Crysis 2 with crytek3. Archeage Online 2012.;)

 

Aion isn't a shining beacon. They did what Bioware did here. First they used the overaged Crytek1 (Farcry) engine. Promised Crysis graphics in early alpha and beta videos. (Enabled HDR, HO...with the patched farcry engine) and failed to deliver Aion even with the latest direly needed Large address aware flag and 64Bit client for 64x systems. Since the original Farcry used engine version has severe issues with 64xBit OS systems. Resulting in random crashes during sieges. And thus for an mass pvp game gamebraking non functional pvp battles for most 64x players who tuned in high graphics.

 

It took them over 1.5 Years to get where the beta videos have been partially. Remember how people cheered over the "Vision" 2.0 video. Still a lot of things (among them physics) are still missing.

 

Basically they cheeped out at NCSoft and took the overaged crytek engine version and completely missed the timeline.

 

I'm really curious how this plays out in the long run. Will it be another Aion (Graphic wise)?

Maybe BW really can make a difference for once.

Edited by -sasori
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This would appear to be why they used the Hero Engine:

 

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

 

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

 

He didn’t care."

 

LOL , game over swtor

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Any that didn't crash and burn instantly? ;)

 

Vary fue developers used the unreal engine, Those that did use it to full extent used outdated version of it. such as lineage2 got the source rights UE1 after EPIC games pretty much abandoned it for UE2. EPICGAMEs does not offer full source licenseing to there current gen engine. This pretty much limits its use to small development projects.

 

Without full source code access you dont have a large degree of control over the engine. This is why most current gen unreal based "MMO" games are just a VR chatroom with a matchmaker system attached, limited to roughly 32 players in a single match by default.

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“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

 

He didn’t care."

 

LOL , game over swtor

 

Nah that part wouldnt of been so bad.... If he didnt say "these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry." right befor it.

 

Saying you wanna rush something with unoptimized tools and no documentation is flat out stupid. No engineer in there right mind would of agreed to that.

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Hero engine or not the fact of the matter is the first game a software developper does on an engine is usually crap ... This is another reason why wow is so great because it has been built on the fundation of warcraft 3 engine.

 

When your team has been working on something for the past 10 year it's always easier than going out to "best buy" and buy yourself a developeer kit and go to town trial and errors way.

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On hero engines website there's an interesting post about a representative talking with a bioware lead about how the engine isn't ready. The Bioware leads replies that it doesn't matter, as they'll work out the 'kinks'.

 

lol

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On hero engines website there's an interesting post about a representative talking with a bioware lead about how the engine isn't ready. The Bioware leads replies that it doesn't matter, as they'll work out the 'kinks'.

 

lol

 

Sure they will

 

5 Months down the road..maybe I'll resub when it's fixed..waiting on GW2 for now.

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HeroEngine’s Live Update and World Push technologies allow developers to push any game content including scripts, assets, data definitions, data files, and area data between live, running worlds without having to bring them down or take them offline.

 

So why the downtime! :p

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HeroEngine’s Live Update and World Push technologies allow developers to push any game content including scripts, assets, data definitions, data files, and area data between live, running worlds without having to bring them down or take them offline.

 

So why the downtime! :p

 

Some bugs are just too big to kill with a fly swatter..sometimes you need to call in the exterminator.

 

But just like real life..they never get them all.

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HeroEngine’s Live Update and World Push technologies allow developers to push any game content including scripts, assets, data definitions, data files, and area data between live, running worlds without having to bring them down or take them offline.

 

So why the downtime! :p

 

As i said they haven't developped it so before they master it they don't play around with it .

 

If they had went with the engine they used for mass effect or the dragon age series they game would be in a much better shape simply because building on top of something you played with for years is always easier than starting a new project you did not build yourself.

 

It's the same as someone starting a toon at lvl 50 vs a lvl 1-50 in pvp ... most of the time the person who leveled his character will have a much better understanding of all his skill and ability ... What he can do and can't do.

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I can imagine that Bioware did not select the Hero engine without proper analysis beforehand.

 

So any discussions on these forum regarding the selection of the hero engine is most likely uninformed speculations without any facts.

 

Most likely they made a good pick based on what they needed. Why build something when you can buy it from someone who is better at creating it. Bioware's core business is not engines - it's great story and cool gameplay.

 

Most likely the engine used is now heavily customized for SWTOR and optimizwed for the game.

 

No, they bought the engine when it wasn't even close to complete. It had almost no features, had no security built in, and had almost no documentation. They also have not taken any updates from the creator of the engine for over three years. This is from the mouth of the heroengine creator himself. He even tried to talk them out of buying it, but when they insisted on waving huge checks in his face, he said okay.

 

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

 

He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

 

I don’t have much contact with their engineers any more (the last code drop they took from us was about 3 years ago) so I can’t really speak to how much of our rendering technology is left in SW:TOR but I honestly don’t think there would be much.

 

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

 

First quote is from article, second quote is from Heroengine dev in comment section of article.

Edited by Zorvan
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No, they bought the engine when it wasn't even close to complete. It had almost no features, had no security built in, and had almost no documentation. They also have not taken any updates from the creator of the engine for over three years. This is from the mouth of the heroengine creator himself. He even tried to talk them out of buying it, but when they insisted on waving huge checks in his face, he said okay.

 

Where are your sources on this? If this would be in fact true. Ill cancel my sub right now.

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