Hero Engine: why?

[Odrahn]

no but giving them your dxdiag and reporting the bug nonetheless helps them figure out why it runs PERFECTLY ON SOME PCS and not on others....

 

 

use ur head man .... for the record i play on a dinosaur that mantains a steady 50+ fps on 95% of the game, the only place where it lags a lot is in ilum when there are more than thirthy people and ton of particle effects on screen, and thats my old cpu's fault

 

And my i7 Extreme Edition 3960X 3.3GHz Six-Core is at fault also? My wife's i7 930 2.80Ghz processor doesn't seem to suffer, but it runs a HD 5770 and I built my machine with 2x SLI Dual (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580x2 3GB Asus MARS II Edition (MARS II/2DIS/3GD5).

 

I think the majority of low fps experiences in heavily populated pvp areas and fleet could possibly be caused by GPU driver compatibilty issues. It may be the engine, but I'm not a much of a programmer. I did learn and use C+ and C++ to some extent in my business but have no practical experience coding gaming engines. I do have 16 years of experience building and testing computers and related hardware and software. This is why I believe many fps issues may be resolved through GPU driver support. Does Bioware work with GPU manufacturers to develop updated GPU drivers? I don't know. I'd like to know though. Which is why Bioware should utilize a more communicative approach with it's customers on these and other issues.

Edited March 2, 2012 by Odrahn

[Barracudastr]

The only criticisms I read about are here. I read somewhere the Hero engine won/nominated for awards by its peers. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.

 

Azzras,

 

Heres the thing.

 

Hero engine is based around it being streamlined for developers. It is marketed and has received awards because it is ground breaking in the sense devs can work on their game in real time online with other devs from anywhere in the world.

 

That is hero engines primary selling point. That is what makes it attractive to developers. It is fast at prototyping and getting games up and running.

 

Thats what it does best.

 

What it doesn't do best is performance and render quality.

 

For that you have the number one engine in the world, unreal engine 3. It is the the top of the line, it is refined and the results are unbeatable and its performance cant be matched.

 

It is how ever not as streamlined. Meaning people work on seperate things then upload a build nightly. It means slower production, but a higher quality production if you get what I mean.

 

Unreal engine has won the best engine award since 2004 for a reason. It is by far the best engine out there and they have the support of every major company out there. They also provide the best developer support. Where as bioware doesn't even work with hero engine devs anymore.

 

This is what the Tera devs had to say about U3:

 

“Unreal Engine 3 is an excellent engine that a large majority of our developers had experience of with through previous games,” said Sung-joong Lew, lead client programmer at Bluehole Studio. “The Unreal Engine provides essential features like rendering expression and performance, as well as a variety and productivity of development tools. In addition, the technology’s expandability is excellent. The engine’s strong point is that features implemented during the development of Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War 2 were automatically applied to Unreal Engine 3, allowing developers direct access to the latest technology.”

 

Shin-hyoung Im, technical art director on the game, said his team utilized UE3’s Kismet and Matinee to create the game’s opening cinematics. The engine’s good modularization helped the team add features needed for first-person shooting without difficulties. Im added that UE3’s well-formed development tools allowed the team to easily make additional resources.

 

There were early challenges in developing TERA back in 2007. Lew said his studio was concerned about the level of productivity for developers guaranteed by the game engine. But Unreal Engine 3 had well-organized development tools that allowed them to produce resources at the early stage of game development.

 

“We had to struggle with bugs at that stage on account of having used the engine at its immature development stage,” said Lew. “Also, it was hard to develop dynamically loading massive data with a vast terrain development tool for a MMORPG.”

 

Ultimately, the team was able to get the most out of UE3 technology, thanks in part to the past experience of key members of the team, as well as help through the Unreal Development Network and later Epic Korea.

 

Azzras if you want more technical details heres a site.

You seem like a smart person and I think you can read and determine what we are talking about here and why.

http://www.heroengine.com

http://www.UDK.com or http://www.unrealengine.com/features

[ShadsAU]

But, for what it's worth and as much as I'm aghast and disappointed by how much it feels to me like I'm playing WoW in space with lightsabers, running around and hitting things and so on feels pretty well done. I don't like what it's doing or how it's philosophically designed to do it, but it's doing it pretty well for all that.

 

This is a very good post. This poster is the pure definition of the casual gamer BW needs to capture. yet he's not entirely satisfied.

 

He probably won't be ever, either. BW have been very obscure in their efforts to fix this abysmal game engine. They are actually advertising the fact theres a new, lowest ever, shader detail level.

 

Honestly, i dont think I could live with myself if i released a game in the last decade that looks like swtor does on the new low settings.

[areto]

There are three basic parts to an MMO.

 

back-end: The servers and all that junk.

 

middle-ware: The tools the developers use to make the thing.

 

front-end: The client.

 

Basically it seems that the back-end for hero is actually pretty good, and something which isn't part of the unreal engine at all. (should mention, it's really really really good for smaller games companies as they'll even host the thing for you and only take like half of your profits.)

 

The middle-ware is also pretty good and has some tools which are useful for MMOs specifically, ue3s development kit also has useful tools but they aren't as specific as heroes.

 

And the front-end seems to be terrible with hero, bad shaders, yucky use of memory, weird use of cores and all that. This is where unreal really excels. But it's a bit unfair to blame this on hero, as bioware makes most of these choices.

 

The unfortunate part of all this is that the players only see the front-end bit, and they blame the whole product.

 

All in all hero is designed to be fast and easy, and it is.

Edited March 2, 2012 by areto

[ShadsAU]

This is a very good post. This poster is the pure definition of the casual gamer BW needs to capture. yet he's not entirely satisfied.

 

He probably won't be ever, either. BW have been very obscure in their efforts to fix this abysmal game engine. They are actually advertising the fact theres a new, lowest ever, shader detail level.

 

Honestly, i dont think I could live with myself if i released a game in the last decade that looks like swtor does on the new low settings.

 

I'm going to quote myself here because god damn, who the hell releases a game designed for low end computers, then gets it so wrong they have to add a new low setting (after already removing previous settings because they got that so wrong too).

 

Cmon who can defend that sort of behavior??

[Barracudastr]

There are three basic parts to an MMO.

 

back-end: The servers and all that junk.

 

middle-ware: The tools the developers use to make the thing.

 

front-end: The client.

 

Basically it seems that the back-end for hero is actually pretty good, and something which isn't part of the unreal engine at all.

 

The middle-ware is also pretty good and has some tools which are useful for MMOs specifically, ue3s development kit also has useful tools but they aren't as specific as heroes.

 

And the front-end seems to be terrible with hero, bad shaders, yucky use of memory, weird use of cores and all that. This is where unreal really excels. But it's a bit unfair to blame this on hero, as bioware makes most of these choices.

 

The unfortunate part of all this is that the players only see the front-end bit, and they blame the whole product.

 

All in all hero is designed to be fast and easy, and it is.

 

Thats exactly it.

 

Rapid prototyping and online development are hero engines strong points they actually are innovative in that area.

 

Its the rest of it that is very very poor.

 

I mean they dont even talk about rendering or anything like that in their marketing.

 

Its all about the backend for them which is fine.

[ShadsAU]

Thats exactly it.

 

Rapid prototyping and online development are hero engines strong points they actually are innovative in that area.

 

Its the rest of it that is very very poor.

 

I mean they dont even talk about rendering or anything like that in their marketing.

 

Its all about the backend for them which is fine.

 

We can host the 100 customers you manage to keep! (thats the new approach of hero)

[Barracudastr]

I'm going to quote myself here because gosh darn, who the hell releases a game designed for low end computers, then gets it so wrong they have to add a new low setting (after already removing previous settings because they got that so wrong too).

 

Cmon who can defend that sort of behavior??

 

And I dont think people defending this game are understanding that.

 

All these issues are a direct result from the engine just being bad at client side.

 

Its amazing for developers making content, easy, fast, online collaboration but beyond that not so much.

 

Now I have to dig up that interview with gabe and neil where he specifically stated they wanted hero engine for swtor because of its ability to be online and rapid prototype.

Edited March 2, 2012 by Barracudastr

[DarthKhaos]

You're blindly defending a game. Name another game that uses Hero Engine, that has the same dev time and money invested like this game.

Just trying to keep the conversation on track. Beside if you don't know why couldn't you just say you don't know?

 

 

Well, a big one is multi threading(there is none). Another reason is the programming language and script (rather then using a well supported free one like LUA or python, they made one up themselves).

 

And aside from that, you don't need to know HOW a car runs to know that Ford makes a good car. But some new car on the market from a maker you never heard of is going to be a chance.

 

So everyone drives a ford around with no problems, you buy this really expensive car that nobody ever heard of and it keeps breaking down. That is the hero engine.

Man you started off strong, then you went off with something pointless like a car analogy. BTW what's the name of the scripting language used?

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

 

I played Tera and it was smooth with 100 people on my screen in cities. Gorgeous too.

 

But to be fair, I heard Mortal Online (also the U3 engine) is worse than SWTOR in large group settings.

 

So no doubt the developer of the games have an effect on the outcome. But being that the Hero Engine is untested on anything other then SWTOR, and the criticisms I have heard on the engine itself, I would like to think a company like Bioware is capable of producing good code unlike an indie developer of the likes that made Mortal Online.

I looked at the list. A lot of FPS few MMOs hardly anything I have even heard of. UE3 was used in APB Reloaded. Ever played it with a lot of people? ~shiver~

 

Bottom line from the dawn of MMOs once a LOT of players get into a localized area frames start dropping. I'm not saying the engine is perfect, not saying the code can't be optimized but fixes take time. Even now WoW still drops frames in larger battles after 7-8 years of payed development. People here are complaining about 2 months.

Edited March 2, 2012 by DarthKhaos

[Azumio]

Point 2 & 3 don't match. I'm curious how can you say you're cheep yet buy a 6month sub?

Also how can you say you think they can fix the game and in the next breadth say the issues you have is stuff they can't fix.

And finally what does the issues you mentioned have to do with the engine?

 

I'm confused.

 

Cheap in the sense that, if I buy something, I'll find a use for it. In this case, I bought this game and a 6 Month subscription, so despite not meeting my standards, I'll continue to play until the hours I paid for are gone.

 

The issues I have are:

 

 

Server Distribution: (To many servers with to many divides leads to a dense population, which is not a good look for an MMORPG). When I see 4-5 people on Hoth, it doesn't leave me with a good taste.

 

Dead Worlds: The Planets themselves feel dead and pasted on. There's no real need to explore. No real eye-dropping sights. No real landmarks. Nothing that takes your breath away and you just stop to look at it. Horrible, horrible background paintings that just don't do it for me. At all. Very little wild-life or critters. No interactive objects outside quest items and lore. No feeling of a living, breathing world. Takes you right out of the game, and leaves me not caring one iota about the world my characters are in.

 

Childish Story: There isn't any real feeling inspired by it. Feels like it was written for 10-13 year olds. It doesn't draw me in, add on-to that it's fractured and fragmented, and it doesn't feel cohesive.

 

Loading Screens: Oh. My. God. It takes me like 5 minutes (No joke) to login. It takes me about 10 minutes to load a planet. The amount of **** you have to go through to get to a planet is mind-numbingly ridiculous. I don't have a great computer, but I've played games with far better graphics, on very higher settings with no slow-down.

 

Crafting: Useless much? Not immersive at all. It's like an iPhone App. Like the rest of the game, it's lifeless and feels tacked on. Super simplified and not well thought-out.

 

No Group Content Finder: Sitting on Fleet for hours upon hours because I wish to run Maelstrom at level 35? Unbelievable. Way to take me right out of the game.

 

That's just off the top of my head. Some of these are fixable (Crafting, Group Content finder) most however, are not.

 

 

Who knows where the problems because of the Engine start, and where they stop.

[Foxcolt]

Just trying to keep the conversation on track. Beside if you don't know why couldn't you just say you don't know?

 

 

 

Man you started off strong, then you went off with something pointless like a car analogy. BTW what's the name of the scripting language used?

 

Heroscript

 

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Script

 

Also..fords suck :\

Edited March 2, 2012 by Foxcolt

[DarthKhaos]

Wish they mentioned what they based the script off of. Edited March 2, 2012 by DarthKhaos

[Barracudastr]

Bottom line from the dawn of MMOs once a LOT of players get into a localized area frames start dropping. I'm not saying the engine is perfect, not saying the code can't be optimized but fixes take time. Even now WoW still drops frames in larger battles after 7-8 years of payed development. People here are complaining about 2 months.

 

Please note that there are over 24 mmo's on that list though.

 

FPS just are more popular and easier to make.

 

There however has been no shortage of mmo's made using Unreal tech.

 

Now whether those games were any good or not is a different story but the engine is more then capable of doing it.

 

Even cryengine is being used for mmo's, starting with Aion. A game that could support MASSIVE numbers of people on your screen at once im not talking like 100 vs 100 I have been in fortress battles where there was a good 300+ people from each faction fighting npcs and each other.

 

And it was done on a engine that has very little mmo experience if any before aion.... infact aion was originally built on CE1.

 

HE is so new and so focused on that streamlined backend that it has no client side improvements at all really.

 

So where bioware is at is having to code their own. Which is not a good place to be at it. When you think about how many years and how much dev time has been put into the rendering technologies of unreal engine on top of them having to constantly update the game and fix bugs...... its a pretty daunting task I am sure. Which is why we aren't seeing progress on it but rather the removal of graphical options.

 

Technologically they just aren't there. And the engine is so far off from what HE is currently that trying to make their code compatible with hero's new code is a larger task then just writing their own code from scratch for their modified engine.

 

Either way it translates into rough gameplay for us and frustration.

[DarthKhaos]

24 on the list covering Unreal 1, 2 & 3. 4 for UE3. Also most in that list people never heard of.

The other thing is you can only test so much before launch. Come on let's be honest we've had a pretty smooth launch. Now some of the issues has been brought up before but do we really know how long it will take to fix? Think about it. When you have an issue you need to identify it, know what's causing it, why it's happening all before you start figuring out how to fix it.

Edited March 2, 2012 by DarthKhaos

[Azzras]

24 on the list covering Unreal 1, 2 & 3. 4 for UE3. Also most in that list people never heard of.

The other thing is you can only test so much before launch. Come on let's be honest we've had a pretty smooth launch. Now some of the issues has been brought up before but do we really know how long it will take to fix? Think about it. When you have an issue you need to identify it, know what's causing it, why it's happening all before you start figuring out how to fix it.

 

You do speak the truth.

 

This has been the smoothest MMO launch I've ever been a part of.

[Icebaron]

You do speak the truth.

 

This has been the smoothest MMO launch I've ever been a part of.

 

I'll tell you this much, if the game had launched with the U3 engine and we had the same problems with Ilum as we do now, there would not be a dozen threads bashing the Unreal engine in general chat.

 

Alot of people feel the engine itself plays a large role in the problems with gameplay.

[Azzras]

I'll tell you this much, if the game had launched with the U3 engine and we had the same problems with Ilum as we do now, there would not be a dozen threads bashing the Unreal engine in general chat.

 

Alot of people feel the engine itself plays a large role in the problems with gameplay.

 

Yes there would.

 

DCUO proved that.

[Barracudastr]

Yes there would.

 

DCUO proved that.

 

Sometimes you just gotta say, the devs suck.

 

Because sometimes its not the engine sometimes the engine has all the tools it has everything you need. But the devs cant do it right.

 

Tera again is a good example of that. Uses Unreal engine... first day of beta we tested it too everyone that got into beta all flooded the same area to stress test. Talking hundreds on screen full res graphics.

 

No crashes no stuttering no fps drops, pvp was very responsive as well.

 

Bad devs make bad games

 

Bad engines also make bad games.

 

But its true hero engine lacks the tools which is why people are mad

[Icebaron]

Yes there would.

 

DCUO proved that.

 

Just went to the forums at http://forums.station.sony.com/dcuopc/forums/show.m?forum_id=61

 

and I am not seeing the engine complaints.

 

Did do a search for unreal, found a few thread talking about updates and what not. One guy said that forced AA on the unreal engine kinda sucked. Only guy said there was some limit for day night cycles the way Unreal is used in DCUO.

 

But no, nowhere near the hate we have here for the Hero engine.

[renegadeimp]

I'll tell you this much, if the game had launched with the U3 engine and we had the same problems with Ilum as we do now, there would not be a dozen threads bashing the Unreal engine in general chat.

 

Alot of people feel the engine itself plays a large role in the problems with gameplay.

 

Nope there wouldnt be. Because most of the people here wouldnt be able to run the game due to the pretty heavy requirements of the U3 engine.

[renegadeimp]

Just went to the forums at http://forums.station.sony.com/dcuopc/forums/show.m?forum_id=61

 

and I am not seeing the engine complaints.

 

Did do a search for unreal, found a few thread talking about updates and what not. One guy said that forced AA on the unreal engine kinda sucked. Only guy said there was some limit for day night cycles the way Unreal is used in DCUO.

 

But no, nowhere near the hate we have here for the Hero engine.

 

Thats because 99% of the people who are complaining about it have no knowledge of what they are complaining about and are simply repeating other players opinions.

[VonAlex]

Hmm I am just curious as what is possible to change over time IF BW would do that on the sideline while the game runs and they fix various problems and release varoius stuff..

 

Do they have to put in a whole new engine? or is it possible to update it and change it slowly over time to make the graphics go up and the performance go up as well?

[Icebaron]

Nope there wouldnt be. Because most of the people here wouldnt be able to run the game due to the pretty heavy requirements of the U3 engine.

 

taken from http://tera.enmasse.com/game-guide/faq

TERA will be playable on any gaming computer assembled in the last four years.

 

The recommended system requirements:

• OS: Windows XP, VISTA or 7 (Latest Service Pack)

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ or Intel Core2 Duo E6750 2.66G

• RAM: 2 GB or greater

• GPU: AMD Radeon HD 3870 or Geforce 8800GT

• HDD: 30 GB of hard drive space

• DirectX: DirectX 9.0c

• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Drive

• Internet Connection

 

taken from http://www.swtor.com/info/faq#171060

What are the system requirements for the game?

 

Processor:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz or better

Operating System:

Windows XP Service Pack 3 or later

RAM:

Windows XP: 1.5GB RAM

Windows Vista and Windows 7: 2GB RAM

Note: PCs using a built-in graphical chipset are recommended to have 2GB of RAM.

Star Wars: The Old Republic requires a video card that has a minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM as well as support for Shader 3.0 or better. Examples include:

ATI X1800 or better

nVidia 7800 or better

Intel 4100 Integrated Graphics or better

DVD-ROM drive – 8x speed or better (required for installation from physical editions only) Internet connection required to play.

 

Just so everyone can see what you are talking about. As shown, the differences are NOT that great, how many people playing SWTOR today are sitting below Tera's minimum requirements?

I'd say less then 1% of people currently subscribing.

[areto]

taken from http://tera.enmasse.com/game-guide/faq

 

 

taken from http://www.swtor.com/info/faq#171060

 

 

Just so everyone can see what you are talking about. As shown, the differences are NOT that great, how many people playing SWTOR today are sitting below Tera's minimum requirements?

I'd say less then 1% of people currently subscribing.

 

to be fair those are the recommended requirements for tera and the minimum requirements for TOR.

 

these are the minimums for tera:

 

CPU 1 Intel Pentium 4 3.2G

CPU 2 AMD Athlon64 3200+

RAM 2G

Graphic Card 1 Geforce 7600GT

Graphic Card 2 Radeon X1600XT

Hard Disk Space 25.0G

Edited March 2, 2012 by areto

[Barracudastr]

Hmm I am just curious as what is possible to change over time IF BW would do that on the sideline while the game runs and they fix various problems and release varoius stuff..

 

Do they have to put in a whole new engine? or is it possible to update it and change it slowly over time to make the graphics go up and the performance go up as well?

 

It doesn't work quite like that.

 

It would take more time and be harder to try and make unreal tech compatible with the current game.

 

it would be faster and easier to start from scratch on the side and release it as a major update.

 

Some games have done this in the past.

 

Aion is one of them.

 

They started with cry engine 1 but on the side they were creating a new version with 64bit and features from cryengine 2 that enabled things like dynamic weather dynamic lighting/shadowing etc etc. When it was ready they released it with a major content update.

 

That is what bioware would have to do.

 

The bulk of the time a game is in developement isn't just all coding, its asset creation/ story creation/ and all those things comibined.

 

If they were to switch engines they would just have to worry about the coding aspect of it as all the major things like assets/story etc etc are already complete.

 

Now im making it sound simpler then it really is, it would take a good 1-2 years of full time dev to port swtor over to something like Unreal and alot of support from unreal developers.

 

But it is doable if they really wanted to.