Hero Engine: why?

[CKNairb]

The U2 engine map sizes were something like 5000x5000 feet, which is not that big for an MMO. The unreal engine is really designed for FPSs and arena type games. Using it for very large open terrain (max size) with lots of detail can make it run like crap.

/

 

Like i said check it out because everything you have said is proven wrong. AION uses a newer unreal engine, and still proves you wrong, Lineage II is a F2P game that uses unreal engine 2.5 and it is Way bigger then 5000x5000. If so they managed the seams pretty well since you can run from 1 side of the continent to the other with no loading times taking every bit of an hour or more running

 

The only FRames and lag issue you will run ip aganst is when there are multiple hundreds of people in close quarters ( mainly in cities where people jave set up player shops )! But is way more people until lag then twice the people on 1 instance of fleet @ the pvp vendor

Edited July 11, 2012 by CKNairb

[cs_Kimmo]

Gamebryo, allthough they also make claims to have made "heavy modifications". Still, Rift has been, and currently are, suffering from much the same issues that TOR does, ability lag etc.

 

Well, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim did teach us that Gamebryo is a piece of **** even with Bethesda's modifications. Same problem with "Hero"Engine.

 

What amazes me is that with the overflow of great engines today BioWare decides to save some of their budget on the last thing that needs to be overlooked, the *********** engine.

[Baphomet_x]

Well, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim did teach us that Gamebryo is a piece of **** even with Bethesda's modifications. Same problem with "Hero"Engine.

 

What amazes me is that with the overflow of great engines today BioWare decides to save some of their budget on the last thing that needs to be overlooked, the *********** engine.

 

i question there wisdom on this as well...why couldnt they have used the same engine kotor used but upgraded the thing?

 

kotor didnt have any of these base mechanical problems..and could handle sometimes hundereds of npc moving around at once,like in taris (before it got vaporized)

[Denyus]

Uh necro?

[Baphomet_x]

Uh necro?

 

old not necro >.> look at the person that posted before me

[Denyus]

Actully it was about 2 months old ish and way past page 20 before it got bumped either way it's an old topic and nothing has changed on the visual part worth mentioning.

[DasHunta]

Frostbite 2.

 

 

Problem solved.

[Blackweb]

Well thinking logically I'd say... ToR probably didn't become the succes they hoped for hence sales are probably worse than they hoped. (not bad or a complete failure, but not as good as intentioned)

 

Hoping that they will overhaul the entire engine is just a lost cause... sadly. If they startted out choosing hero because of budget savings it's seriously doubtful they will spend the extreme extra cost/time/work to revamp the entire game into a new one, so... keep hope alive but don't expect it to ever happen for real.

[Sarfux]

This engine is actually quite nice. The more they optimize it the smoother it gets I like how it's becoming

[Blackweb]

This engine is actually quite nice. The more they optimize it the smoother it gets I like how it's becoming

 

Ye you wrote that a few times already my friend, but this thread isn't about praising tor it's about the ****** graphics engine it's using, it's not really a matter of opinion or something to be discussed. The reason people are posting here is because they want BW to do something about it, insanely large threads of this size don't appear out of the blue because the graphics engine is so awesome.

 

There's another thread praising tor which just appeared its almost 3 pages long I suggest you join the fray.

Edited July 14, 2012 by Blackweb

[Bloodstealer]

TBH from my perspective things are getting worse not better... the game cant even run an 8v8 Wz stable any more the FPS lag has gotten worse now that they have squeezed players onto the destination servers.. great idea but if the game cant handle the increased activity and effects properly then its still a gigantic fail... as for ever seeing the 100v100 this game was gunna be able to support.. I will be long gone before that ever happens (Illum is but a distant memory / nightmare).

 

Since the transfers and 1.3 FPS in fleet is ridiculous, Wz's last night I was seeing <5FPS most of the time, which just isnt playable.. if it was just me then I would check my PC for issues but I know my i7 3770 with Nvidia 550Ti's is more than enough to handle this game and the others in group all saying the same thing tells its own story.. its worse now than when it was at launch. Ability delay is creeping in, the open your crafting log or inveneotry delays are hitting again, crafting logs becoming distorted and overlapped, animation glitching... though I do like the one where my toon runs arouns after dismounting and looking like I am John Wayne stuck in stirrups... as soon as fleet or any other zone hits around 100+ the issues start to appear and its all downhill from there. So show mr these apparent improvements... cos having to run this game in low or very low settings and still getting single digit FPS spiking in many areas tells me its not being optimised very well yet!

[Tyranux]

TBH from my perspective things are getting worse not better... the game cant even run an 8v8 Wz stable any more the FPS lag has gotten worse now that they have squeezed players onto the destination servers.. great idea but if the game cant handle the increased activity and effects properly then its still a gigantic fail... as for ever seeing the 100v100 this game was gunna be able to support.. I will be long gone before that ever happens (Illum is but a distant memory / nightmare).

 

Since the transfers and 1.3 FPS in fleet is ridiculous, Wz's last night I was seeing <5FPS most of the time, which just isnt playable.. if it was just me then I would check my PC for issues but I know my i7 3770 with Nvidia 550Ti's is more than enough to handle this game and the others in group all saying the same thing tells its own story.. its worse now than when it was at launch. Ability delay is creeping in, the open your crafting log or inveneotry delays are hitting again, crafting logs becoming distorted and overlapped, animation glitching... though I do like the one where my toon runs arouns after dismounting and looking like I am John Wayne stuck in stirrups... as soon as fleet or any other zone hits around 100+ the issues start to appear and its all downhill from there. So show mr these apparent improvements... cos having to run this game in low or very low settings and still getting single digit FPS spiking in many areas tells me its not being optimised very well yet!

 

You know its funny because I get like 50-60 FPS on fleet and thats with over 200 people. Gets so busy we got multiple fleets usually. Radeon HD 6950 so nothing too special either.

[Bloodstealer]

And thats been the point of every thread I have read on the games performance.. its across every level of PC setup, not any specific good, bad, old, new rig... your fine, many others are not and its gotten worse lately ... back to early launch state - imo.

My old HP laptop with a cruddy dual core processor, 32bit vista and an on board ATI 8600M GPU runs this game with as good if not better FPS in some areas... and yes the instancing on fleet does help a little if your lucky to be switched into a low pop instance.. but as I said previous, if it was just me then I would question my own rig but when its all 8 in the same Wz or all members of a group or 2 or 3 other mates in group in different zones.. then that tells me there is something wrong.... running around with half decent FPS until the Wz hots up and seeing framerates plummet like a lead ballon is poor, real poor!

I too can get 50-60 FPS but the spiking thats persistent in this game kills the fun for me now... to see your framerate suddenly drop from say 60FPS to single digit and then have to wait for the animations etc to catch up only to find some sage lighning just burned my a** kinda dilutes the desire to even wanna log in.

 

Of course the "send DX diags", re load a fresh install of SWTOR etc etc is all great... but how many times can one re-install this game before it gets to be a serious pain.. no imo there is some serious issues with the game and not much is being done about it... except an occasional band aid that often leads to something else being broken...

[Kourage]

I'm wondering if they had built their own engine, if that's even possible, if perhaps they'd have people who would understand it better and be able to improve it and expand upon it easier.

[Sobur]

Isn't Tera kind of a joke? Also, you can't really comment due to it not being released.

 

And w.t.f is blade and soul?

 

 

Online games whose combat is a hell of alot smoother from companies that don't have the funds of bioware and ea. That's *** they are.

[cipero]

It's no secret the hero engine is garbage. Why they chose this? Who knows..they'll never tell us so it doesn't matter. The fact is they are stuck with it, changing the engine would take a complete overhaul and would almost certainly be an enitrely brand new game. Same thing ArenaNet did, they stopped working on the gw1 engine because it lacked what they wanted to do and started on what they are coming out with in gw2.

 

This engine is cheap. That's the bottom line. Dev's can use it for 99 bucks a year plus a certain percentage of game sales.

 

Matt Firor from TESO had this to say about it: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/25/why-the-elder-scrolls-online-isn-39-t-using-heroengine.aspx

 

"We started ZeniMax Online from scratch, with no employees and no technology. We had to build everything ourselves. It takes a long time to write game engines, especially MMO engines, which are inherently more complicated than typical single-player ones. So, we decided to license the HeroEngine to give us a headstart. It was a useful tool for us to use to prototype areas and game design concepts, and it provided us the ability to get art into the game that was visible, so we could work on the game’s art style. Our plan is for ESO to be a world class MMO, with the most advanced social features found in any MMO to date – so while we were prototyping the game on HeroEngine, we were simultaneously developing our own client, server, and messaging layer that were specifically designed with ESO in mind. Think of HeroEngine as a whiteboard for us – a great tool to get some ideas in the game and start looking at them while the production engine was in development. "

[Razot]

The guy who was instrumental in choosing the hero engine for this game.. left 11 months before it came out. (and that was to go to a social game company.. quite the change dont ya think, considering he coulda had all the credit for a triple A mmo (in theory))

 

Anyone remember what this game looked like back then? Remember those bland looking characters? that wasn't artwork not done.. that was the best they could come up with without killing the FPS. (name any other game that 12 months before release had unfinished artwork as bad as swtor did in their trailers). In the end they had to split it into high-def for cutscenes, and low def for everything else (except the faces.. they backed themselves into a corner with that one).

 

So what happened about a year ago? Rift launched around the same time, and looking infinitely better then SWTOR did back then. I'll have to check my facts, but im pretty sure ther was a blog about swtor in the past year where they had to revisit all the sets because the art department hadnt gotten it right (so who told the art department the wrong stuff to begin with? hmmm i wonder). I can't help but wonder if that was anything to do with the way Rift looked, and honestly Rift still looks way better environmentally. Shadows that dont look like they belong in minecraft? amazing!

 

I'm honestly not surprised that the Gordon skipped town to a casual game company after what he did to swtor (oh did i mention he was at SWG too??)

 

Neil Harris, president of HeroEngine, went on the defensive recently with regards to this game and its reception. One fact stands out quite a lot: BW split off developing this engine more then 2 years ago; they stopped getting updates from HeroEngine themselves.

 

If you had faith in the 3rd party providing the engine to you.. wouldn't you want to keep getting the latest code? BW will claim they customised this engine so much then couldn't easily update it any more. I'd love to know what was customised so much they couldnt manage those updates any more (eg even the space fights are a *core* component of HeroEngine). Either BW lost all faith in the engine, or (and this seems more likely) they thought they could do better themselves.

 

This being the same company who didnt even think on to include a /roll option in a game with master looting. Yer.. wonder who made those decisions....

 

One last point. Graphics don't make the game, theres no doubt about that: They add to the experience. But then why are so many people so vocal about the engine? because once you get past the quest lines, and look into the actual MP part of this game.. its decidedly lacking. This is a single player game, trying very hard to be MP, that we're paying a monthly fee to play and we dont even get proper graphics fidelity to distract us from that fact.

 

SWTOR is a game where the design documents, and the engine, were locked down about 5 years ago. If this game had launched back then, it would easily be top of the charts right now (the missing features now, wouldnt have been an issue 5 years ago). As it stands, it just smacks of being stuck in the past.

 

I dunno those GIANT lightsaber hilts rocked!

[Kourage]

Bad Choice

[Arkerus]

Bad Choice

 

Do you know the decision criteria and associated weights?

[CKNairb]

I thinking Gordon used the Hero Engine and the idea behind SWTOR to get on at bioware. Then jumped ship before it shipped to not get backlash

 

Gordon sold SWTOR and Hero Engine as a Low Cost high turnaround time pitch, got hired, milked it for what he could, the left mid development as Bioware/EA was catching on

 

Like Bill Roper

[SNCommand]

It's no secret the hero engine is garbage. Why they chose this? Who knows..they'll never tell us so it doesn't matter. The fact is they are stuck with it, changing the engine would take a complete overhaul and would almost certainly be an enitrely brand new game. Same thing ArenaNet did, they stopped working on the gw1 engine because it lacked what they wanted to do and started on what they are coming out with in gw2.

 

This engine is cheap. That's the bottom line. Dev's can use it for 99 bucks a year plus a certain percentage of game sales.

 

Matt Firor from TESO had this to say about it: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/25/why-the-elder-scrolls-online-isn-39-t-using-heroengine.aspx

 

"We started ZeniMax Online from scratch, with no employees and no technology. We had to build everything ourselves. It takes a long time to write game engines, especially MMO engines, which are inherently more complicated than typical single-player ones. So, we decided to license the HeroEngine to give us a headstart. It was a useful tool for us to use to prototype areas and game design concepts, and it provided us the ability to get art into the game that was visible, so we could work on the game’s art style. Our plan is for ESO to be a world class MMO, with the most advanced social features found in any MMO to date – so while we were prototyping the game on HeroEngine, we were simultaneously developing our own client, server, and messaging layer that were specifically designed with ESO in mind. Think of HeroEngine as a whiteboard for us – a great tool to get some ideas in the game and start looking at them while the production engine was in development. "

Huh? That's just what Bioware did as well, they licensed the HeroEngine, started working with it as a framework, and then started developing unto that, adding new features, stabilizing it and reworking it to suit their needs.

 

Both the ESO engine and SWTOR engine is based upon the HeroEngine, but developed over several years into their own unique engines to fit with what they want to accomplish.

 

Nothing is different between how Bioware and Zenimax Online built their custom versions of the HeroEngine, and then claiming one is using it and the other isn't is ludicrous.

[Nippon]

Blizzard didn't build a new custom game engine from scratch for World of Warcraft.

 

They reused the existing Warcraft engine and heavily modified it.

 

___

 

The other thing I don't get is the constant mixing of two mutually exclusive ideas, as if they are rational to be shoved together.

 

1) BioWare used a third party engine, and the engine is flawed and cannot be repaired.

 

2) BioWare has had to heavily modify the engine and by some estimates has modified 50% or more of the engine to suit their needs for the game.

 

Folks, if they have the skills to modify the engine to that extent, they have the ability to fix most of its issues, whatever they might be. If it's a core memory issue, they have the ability to rewrite the code so that they can optimize it and change how it operates.

 

You cannot simultaneously say that they have thoroughly modified the engine, but that the engine is frozen and cannot be repaired. If they can modify it to the extent they did, and they have the licensing permission to do so, then they can fix whatever needs to be fixed.

 

But it will... take... time...

 

What he said....

 

End of the day the Engine is the Engine, It can be tuned, it can be fixed and it will happen in TIME...

 

My father is a Mechanic, and im telling you now, you dont just throw a Turbo on a 1.3 Engine and expect it to work. It has to be tuned, upgraded, sometimes even the airflow has to be adjusted, and that is all done with testing and fine tuning and testing........

 

The computer industry is no different. And anyone who has changed a Graphic card knows this, you dont just get what you like and throw it in any machine and hey presto its awesome. Sometimes your motherboard slows its performance, your cooling isnt enough etc etc etc.

 

The Engine can be fixed, but it wont happen overnight. And the RECENT combat lags are apparent they are making changes, and with changes comes problems, now they need to iron that issue out and surely another will pop up, its an ongoing job that isnt going to be fixed in 5 mins.

[Lt_Latency]

You can't just modify engines to do anything.

 

Some times it takes more work to fix an old engine then build a new one.

 

It's the reason they keep making new engines for games.

[Kourage]

Do you know the decision criteria and associated weights?

Yes. They were lazy and in a rush so they hurried up and picked something that didn't fit their needs.

[Ensquire]

What he said....

 

End of the day the Engine is the Engine, It can be tuned, it can be fixed and it will happen in TIME...

 

My father is a Mechanic, and im telling you now, you dont just throw a Turbo on a 1.3 Engine and expect it to work. It has to be tuned, upgraded, sometimes even the airflow has to be adjusted, and that is all done with testing and fine tuning and testing........

 

The computer industry is no different. And anyone who has changed a Graphic card knows this, you dont just get what you like and throw it in any machine and hey presto its awesome. Sometimes your motherboard slows its performance, your cooling isnt enough etc etc etc.

 

The Engine can be fixed, but it wont happen overnight. And the RECENT combat lags are apparent they are making changes, and with changes comes problems, now they need to iron that issue out and surely another will pop up, its an ongoing job that isnt going to be fixed in 5 mins.

 

You went into detail about time, however this games been in development since 2006, thats six years... six years to tune this game and make it right... Kind of crazy that this graphically speaking is the best EA and BW (two powerhouses in the industry) could come up with in six years

Edited July 25, 2012 by Ensquire