ChimaeraUK Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 I've yet to hear a good reason why people think the hero engine is so bad, yes there are some performance issues but i want a technical description of why the HE is the reason for this, from someone who knows and has worked with several game engines. All i ever hear is "HE is terrible because i have performance problems", that's not a reason, there are dozens of reasons that could cause performance loss, i want a detailed explanation that doesn't just list the problem and blindly say it's the engine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
owenthorn Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 well, lets see why is there a problem, I will let hero engine speak for me on this one LONDON – January 16, 2012 – On December 20, 2011 the highly anticipated game from Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA)/BioWare™, Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, was released to the wider public. Importantly, this also marks the first release of a major game built using the HeroEngine™, an integrated development platform for building online games. hmmm.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Marou_ Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 This game engine sucks horribly, and it's probably why the server population caps and WZ sizes are so low. Ilum is a slideshow with more than 20 people on screen. I've played asian f2p grind games that look about the same quality graphically and get perfectly acceptable framerates with more people than are even logged into my server/faction atm on screen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkCarnage Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 (edited) i think alot of poeple will blame the engine no mater what poeple point out or say. and above me about this teh first major game. there something alot of poeple should think over, if this was the first major game, in theroy it was good to go, however once put to real world use they finding a errors, but thanks to the tool of it core programming tehy ironing those out steadily. also BW rag doll were teh char acutals block,parries an attack likely a bigg hog then wow's default cookie cutty approuch. you know he block up while the attack from range and makes no real sence to what happening. i tried to reproduce some of these FPS drops, and most do not see to work on my ssytem. now i not been to irum yet, sitll finshing my class sotry and all that first. but i avg 90-120 fps on a evga gtx570 at it defults, a i7 at 3.07 and 6 gb of ram ona asus rampage 3 extreme board. i want to say over 1/2 of the problems are programing erros due to all the diffrent ahrdware/drivers it has to deal with and tehy wokring on fixing as soon as they can with each normal patching they do. Edited February 23, 2012 by DarkCarnage Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArmchairMagpie Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 (edited) 1. Right, cause you cannot make MMO without dedicated tool that has "prototyping" in title. Come on, let's be serious for a moment. MMOs were and are made constantly withouth Hero Engine prototyping tool. It's not an obstacle really. There are ways of solving stuff without using Hero. 2. FMOD, SpeedTree, ScaleForm Gfx or their equivalents are common standards supported by almost every single engine, so it's hardly an argument. 1.) I am serious! It was their reasoning that this prototype engine offering excellent team-collaborative authoring and development tools was a main selling point. You can find hints of these all over the net at serious game development sites. That's what mainly influenced their choice. Why would they commit such a choice? Obviously they planned to have their teams, all of their teams, participating whereever they were located while also centralizing their development base. Other games do it differently, prefer staggered development, or write their own tools to do the same what Bioware wanted. But what cheaper solution can you get than an already implemented one? It was a choice based on their development structure. 2.) Of course the Hero Engine was exclusive with these feature here. It was just the icing on the cake that at that time it offered these features but was also open for more. Not all engines offer the same, even today engines like to provide their own solutions (Unigine to name one example). Now, next time you are telling me to be serious read the whole thing. Understanding someone is not equal to supporting someone. Even so you could just be playing devil's advocate and I often like to. But I hoped my last sentence made it clear that I am distancing myself already. I too think they should have made a better choice and probably either written some engine of their own - which they are easily capable of - incl. their tools or adopted some else established engine. It was probably a decision based on costs and the fact that they wanted to have their hands free for content. We don't know whether they are in retrospect happy with their choice, it's possible that there has been quite alot pillow fighting in-house and behind the scenes, heck even the guy who made that statement about their initial choice, Gordon Walton, has long departed since then. It is also possible that they think we are going over board with our criticism and that they can "easily" address all of our issues. I'd think realistically they have no other choice to do the latter unless they absolutely hit an architectural brickwall. Edited February 23, 2012 by ArmchairMagpie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Olarid Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 Whether it's engines or optimization or a really fat hamster, needless to say, having to cap zone limits because more than 15 people causes lag, chat bubbles on the fence, because it causes lag, no combat log, I'm sure it causes lag, opening a window causes lag, quest objectives popping up causes lag, spamming a skill and getting the error message spam causes lag, horrible graphic options.... Something is definately fishy about it all and hopefully they have people smart enough to fix it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ditched Posted February 23, 2012 Share Posted February 23, 2012 How can you defend this engine? WZs are like a slideshow for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bloodstealer Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 i think alot of poeple will blame the engine no mater what poeple point out or say. and above me about this teh first major game. there something alot of poeple should think over, if this was the first major game, in theroy it was good to go, however once put to real world use they finding a errors, but thanks to the tool of it core programming tehy ironing those out steadily. also BW rag doll were teh char acutals block,parries an attack likely a bigg hog then wow's default cookie cutty approuch. you know he block up while the attack from range and makes no real sence to what happening. i tried to reproduce some of these FPS drops, and most do not see to work on my ssytem. now i not been to irum yet, sitll finshing my class sotry and all that first. but i avg 90-120 fps on a evga gtx570 at it defults, a i7 at 3.07 and 6 gb of ram ona asus rampage 3 extreme board. i want to say over 1/2 of the problems are programing erros due to all the diffrent ahrdware/drivers it has to deal with and tehy wokring on fixing as soon as they can with each normal patching they do. I am soo hoping your not a BW employee trying to defend the game here... cos tbh it could explain some things..... anyone got a translator droid or maybe one of them cleaner droids from Huttbal... cos reading this really made my brain hurt. The Alpha and Beta testing was put out there for a reason.. to find alot of this stuff out live... and alot of things were reported etc.. but simply not acted on... lets face facts here any MMO on launch will have issues and bugs, I dont think anyone disagrees here, but such dramatic drops in performance throughout the game from one player to the next is seriously worrying if this game is ever going to compete in the genre.... bugs are one thing and I agree BW so far has put many of these issues to bed, but the performance issues are so widespread and significant that people simply either cant play or dont want to play it. Persoanlly as I have already posted I dont see such serious drops in performance / fps etc (YET) and my rig is only really considered just above benchmark for the game reuiremtns, but others with much more powerful setups are seeing these issues.. which suggests even to non-experts like myself that the core of the game is not very well optimized. You may however, if I decyphered your words correctly have a good point about the ability forn the engine to be optimized for the hardware/software variances .. ok I can understand that and hopefully BW will be busy working on getting it optimized... but when a game has had so much test time, and are surely fine tuned into the the tech market, they should of been hitting out fixes for alot of this months before release.... not that much has entered the market over the last 12 months that could possibly be causing such dramatic looses in performance across such a widespread playerbase.... to say its the low end spec machines that are suffering is just crazy talk.... so it come back in my mind to the HE engine not really perfoming in many areas of a busy game... busy at the momnent I add. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted February 24, 2012 Author Share Posted February 24, 2012 I've yet to hear a good reason why people think the hero engine is so bad, yes there are some performance issues but i want a technical description of why the HE is the reason for this, from someone who knows and has worked with several game engines. All i ever hear is "HE is terrible because i have performance problems", that's not a reason, there are dozens of reasons that could cause performance loss, i want a detailed explanation that doesn't just list the problem and blindly say it's the engine. Do you know why nobody can give a good explanation why it's bad? It's because...there isn't one! It's not a bad engine. That's the point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Evertal Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 To bring maybe some knowledge into this thread: First, lets just be clear that the definition of what is included/excluded in a game engine is very lose. The base is that it should be code that is reusable, setting independant and HW-independant but in some cases thats not even true. The engines that exist also usually focus on one or several categories like some are specialized on mobile platforms, some on 2D or 3D, some on FPS and some on MMO. All this should be considered before just saying "Why did they not use engine X" If you want a crash course then Wikipedia as always is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArmchairMagpie Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 (edited) Do you know why nobody can give a good explanation why it's bad? It's because...there isn't one! It's not a bad engine. That's the point. I will give you an example. I get better shadows in KOTOR1. In SW:TOR shadows are causing quite a load and look ugly, leave artifacts on the grounds in the manner of footsteps, it can't handle shadows based on cloth-based objects very well and tends to leave trails. Also remember the old bug in Hoth leaving you a completely black sky and horizon? Gave you an insight into what actually is real landscape and which one is horizon. The far view system in this game is horrible by modern standards. You can see it on the example of how the engine adds objects, suddenly they appear in front of you, very immersion-breaking in case of NPCs. Grass-rendering is also the worst thing I have ever seen, instead of seamless foliage rendering we get foliage which pops and grows right in front of you. I call that immersion-killing. In addition it can't handle adding variable world objects adding to the sound stream very well, which could be a bug, but could also be a limit of their most likely ancient FMOD implementation. In addition I wouldn't call it HeroEngine per se, it's the SW:TOR engine, the modern HeroEngine is undoubtedly far more advanced than what we got right here today. Edited February 24, 2012 by ArmchairMagpie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vfrost Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 Go get +10 datacron. Very good engine, i can say it every time when im type /stuck in chat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kmontyw Posted February 24, 2012 Share Posted February 24, 2012 (edited) In response to the OP, having an opinion does not make it right or good. This fallacy that everyone's opinion is equal is really quite silly. Anyway... My experience with game engines is as a long time game player (and developer). When all is said and done, the best test of an engine is how it feels. That's a subjective thing, but not entirely. id made great engines - none better actually. They felt great, and played beautifully while delivering the latest tech on a massive range of different hardware configurations. Unreal3 has been mentioned, and while it's a good engine, I wouldn't call it great. I've worked with it as a developer and it's pretty clunky at times, and performance-wise leaves a lot to be desired. There is so much legacy code in it now that it can get very ugly very fast if you try to do anything unusual with it. Having said that, the SWTOR engine is fine when it's working. The problem I see with it is that when things go wrong, they go very wrong and are impossible to fix as a user. I had to purchase a new HDD (SSD actually) to put Windows on its own drive so that I could use totally default install settings just to get the game to run (I dual boot OSX and Windows). The nightmare I had before that consumed countless gigabytes of download and my "free" month of play. Once going, the engine seems fine to me, if a little "unsmooth" at times. I can tell from playing the game it's not a great engine, but it does the job. It's jerky at times, lags strangely at others, and I run with shadows off because they put such a drain on the framerate - a sure sign of clunky code. However I'm happy it's running finally, and, I just hope and pray nothing else goes wrong, because if you read the support forums, you are pretty much SOL if it does. And that, too, is a sign of less than optimally designed code. Edited February 24, 2012 by kmontyw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thanatosxrs Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 UE3 and CE2 both came out after they started making this game. Even those are already considered "old". UE4 is in the works already. Welcome to technology. If it's released, it's outdated. This is not correct the HeroEngine was made in 2005 its much older the UE3 and CE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eavn Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 In response to the OP, having an opinion does not make it right or good. This fallacy that everyone's opinion is equal is really quite silly. Anyway... My experience with game engines is as a long time game player (and developer). When all is said and done, the best test of an engine is how it feels. That's a subjective thing, but not entirely. id made great engines - none better actually. They felt great, and played beautifully while delivering the latest tech on a massive range of different hardware configurations. Unreal3 has been mentioned, and while it's a good engine, I wouldn't call it great. I've worked with it as a developer and it's pretty clunky at times, and performance-wise leaves a lot to be desired. There is so much legacy code in it now that it can get very ugly very fast if you try to do anything unusual with it. Having said that, the SWTOR engine is fine when it's working. The problem I see with it is that when things go wrong, they go very wrong and are impossible to fix as a user. I had to purchase a new HDD (SSD actually) to put Windows on its own drive so that I could use totally default install settings just to get the game to run (I dual boot OSX and Windows). The nightmare I had before that consumed countless gigabytes of download and my "free" month of play. Once going, the engine seems fine to me, if a little "unsmooth" at times. I can tell from playing the game it's not a great engine, but it does the job. It's jerky at times, lags strangely at others, and I run with shadows off because they put such a drain on the framerate - a sure sign of clunky code. However I'm happy it's running finally, and, I just hope and pray nothing else goes wrong, because if you read the support forums, you are pretty much SOL if it does. And that, too, is a sign of less than optimally designed code. no, the engine is crap, gtx 770, i5 4670, 16 gb ram and cant get over 30 fps in wzs on any setting, and nvidia settings or using any 3rd party program. the engine is messed up, plain and simple. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlrikFassbauer Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 My impression is that the engine has a severe problem with particles, but apart from that it looks fine for me. Low FPS in war zones could be a sign of an overcomplicated server-client network system, underlying, but nobody ever considers that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drudenfusz Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 This is not correct the HeroEngine was made in 2005 its much older the UE3 and CE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine Was it worth the necro? I mean nobody cared for over a year to post anything in this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DKNS Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 Was it worth the necro? I mean nobody cared for over a year to post anything in this thread. Was it worth it to point out it's a necro? I hadn't seen this thread before and was going through it and nowhere it felt like a year old thread until you came along. A couple of people also posted in the bumped thread before yours actually. I never get why people have to point out necro threads. If it's not interesting it will die off again. If it's good, it will start the discussion again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drudenfusz Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 Was it worth it to point out it's a necro? I hadn't seen this thread before and was going through it and nowhere it felt like a year old thread until you came along. A couple of people also posted in the bumped thread before yours actually. I never get why people have to point out necro threads. If it's not interesting it will die off again. If it's good, it will start the discussion again. Don't get me wrong, I am not against thread necros (I do them on times meself), but he didn'T brought something new to the topic but only corrected someone on a detail that seems not that important. So, I wonder why he did necro the thread, it is just curiousity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmjarec Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 Guys if anyone could spot a troll its me this is clearly one stop wasting your time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ImpactHound Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 Go get +10 datacron. Very good engine, i can say it every time when im type /stuck in chat. This was the most interesting post in the thread! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drake_Hound Posted September 25, 2013 Share Posted September 25, 2013 LoL little kids having mental and anger issues , mummy not giving you enough love sorry ok I shouldn't say kids but eh suppose grown up with a crusade , cause there were wrong and still are wrong. but it makes me laugh . that no matter what , there is no solution for this issue , the engine ok , sadly SWTOR was a alpha engine tweaked modified tweaked jurryrigged , adapted and customised , that the manual has been lost a long time ago . So what you see is not a hero engine , but a custom rig , held together by whatever means . And most people don't even know how things work , while other mmo engines sometimes face the same issue . I think this one documentation are such mess , nobody knows what is fixed what isn't . So customers anybody with a top quality engineering degree , that can scratch build engine No ? Then sadly nothing we can do , the cost to refurbish and rebuild this engine is huge Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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