karnyboy Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 I've heard alot of talk, most of it very defensively protecting it, that the Hero Engine was a bad choice etc. etc., http://www.heroengine.com/2012/04/heroengine-highlight-reel/ Looking back, if I would have seen this video before my pre-order I don't think I would have purchased the game and would have quite probably skipped SWTOR altogether - not to say I didn't have some fun & enjoy several aspects of the game, but do you think it was bad an idea as I do to use this "Hero Engine"? I mean really, "Everything you need to make an online game" !? 300 million and you 'buy' an engine?... ... THAT engine!? I don't mean for this to come off as rude or condescending, but ugh I wish I had seen this a year ago . Well additionally, they should have created a 64bit client as well from the get go, since most PC gamers are actualyl gamers first, then it makes sense that most of us already have a 64bit Windows....that alone would have saved them a lot of hassle. Game companies need to start getting in the 64bit parade and tell these people that have 32bit to start progressing their tech and move on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustTed Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Well additionally, they should have created a 64bit client as well from the get go, since most PC gamers are actualyl gamers first, then it makes sense that most of us already have a 64bit Windows....that alone would have saved them a lot of hassle. Game companies need to start getting in the 64bit parade and tell these people that have 32bit to start progressing their tech and move on. A bunch of business men just laughed you out of the conference room. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xorcist Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 How much does the lighting and shading come to play in an engine? Because I feel that they are quite weak in TOR when compared to other recent MMO's. The water looks like a sheet of ice or frozen on worlds such as Taris for example. The environment looks cool from an artistic point of view but weak, and not believable. I wish Tython looked like this so much that it hurts... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv5862eaGPM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedipwnsauce Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Well, Oblivion and Skyrim are not EXACTLY releases like TOR, but in my opinion, Gamebryo is the single, most sh*tty engine ever used in a AAA-title. But HeroEngine gets a silver medal. Actually Rift handles mass world pvp way better than Swtor does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spellegren Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 The engine is so far down the problem list that it isn't even worth mentioning at this point. The number of players that leave over, or even care about, the graphics engine is so minute as to be inconsequential. They aren't going to change the graphics engine and if it is so game breaking then you should really just leave and avoid future games that use it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valperion Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 I'd say Cry3 was released too late for SWTOR and wasnt available for it. U3 would be okay though. The advantage of Hero Engine is fast & efficient prototyping. Which in the end should lead to very fast content creation. Future will tell if BW can do this when they fixed the current issues. The problem is: (from 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. “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.”" BW bought an unfinished engine and decided they could do a better job of finishing & optimizing it than the original devs. Thanks for posting that source...just wow... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karnyboy Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 A bunch of business men just laughed you out of the conference room. Somebody has to set the standard. Much like how we went from Floppy disks to CD's, it has to be done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stalkobot Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 The engine may or may not be up to the job but most of the problems in SWTORs running is firmly down to Bioware haphazard approach. See those 2 swtor processes in the task manager? Thats not a good thing, they are there because BW had to "fudge it" as opposed to setting it all up right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corbanite Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 The engine may or may not be up to the job but most of the problems in SWTORs running is firmly down to Bioware haphazard approach. See those 2 swtor processes in the task manager? Thats not a good thing, they are there because BW had to "fudge it" as opposed to setting it all up right. I thought they were a way of getting past the 2 gig per process memory limit imposed by having a 32 bit client. So it all runs as a client/server. Perhaps releasing a 64 bit client will solve a lot of issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stalkobot Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 I'd say Cry3 was released too late for SWTOR and wasnt available for it. U3 would be okay though. The advantage of Hero Engine is fast & efficient prototyping. Which in the end should lead to very fast content creation. Future will tell if BW can do this when they fixed the current issues. The problem is: (from 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. “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.”" BW bought an unfinished engine and decided they could do a better job of finishing & optimizing it than the original devs. Haha, seen this before. The British government bought some Chinook helicopters, Boeing wanted $10million or so for the software to run it. The Brit procurement guy goes "hey, lets save a few pounds and have our software nerds write the software needed to fly them, one told me in the pub they could do it easy and its just a big con". $600million down the toilet later they had to spend $40million at Boeing to put their mess right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
turjake Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 All I am seeing is that the game (engine) isnt quite as optimized as it could have been. There are also bugs. I am not sure what some other engine would have helped, they still need to optimize and possibly modify it to make sure their critical game components do run smoothly and reliably. Also writing own engine might work for the companies who happen to have a game-engine-genious or few in their payroll, rest might consider lisensing an engine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stalkobot Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 I thought they were a way of getting past the 2 gig per process memory limit imposed by having a 32 bit client. So it all runs as a client/server. Perhaps releasing a 64 bit client will solve a lot of issues. It was a fudge pure and simple and simply horrible in such an expensive project, some information halfway down here. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1072766-SWTOR-processor-dependant/page2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LordSkyKnight Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 I guess you and all the others talking about Hero engine are specialized in software programming and IT.......... Doesnt take an expert with a doctorate to decide that something is crap when they see it. It's a crappy game engine period. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
turjake Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Haha, seen this before. The British government bought some Chinook helicopters, Boeing wanted $10million or so for the software to run it. The Brit procurement guy goes "hey, lets save a few pounds and have our software nerds write the software needed to fly them, one told me in the pub they could do it easy and its just a big con". $600million down the toilet later they had to spend $40million at Boeing to put their mess right. I always thought that no-one wants to use the software of any military equipment you buy from other countries, since you dont know what kind of kill-switch algorithms there are embedded. Anyway, bit off topic, sorry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gankdalf_ Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Apparently Elder Scrolls Online will be using the Hero Engine. In that case I won't be buying it then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corbanite Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 (edited) It was a fudge pure and simple and simply horrible in such an expensive project, some information halfway down here. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1072766-SWTOR-processor-dependant/page2 actually your link is basically saying what I said.. It's a way of getting more memory for a 32 bit process SWTOR is definitively loading assets from disk constantly probably because a whole planet cannot fit into the 2 gigabytes of address space a 32bit process has access to. A lot of software does this sort of thing, it typically called streaming, and there are a lot of approaches. a 64 bit process would eliminate the need if this is the case for all the high IO usasge. it would seem this is the price we pay for accessing the widest customer base. Edited May 13, 2012 by corbanite Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stalkobot Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 I always thought that no-one wants to use the software of any military equipment you buy from other countries, since you dont know what kind of kill-switch algorithms there are embedded. Anyway, bit off topic, sorry Thats not the way we British do things, we had Polaris missiles for years before we got the codes that would enable us to use them That said we dont really live in fear of the yanks invading us Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stalkobot Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 (edited) In that case I won't be buying it then. Well the link provided previously http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/ shows that SWTOR bought a unfinished, pre production item and butchered it themselves. That should give you some hope that the engine itself may be good, just not utilised well currently. Unreal 4 engine should be popping up soon though. They also seem to be distancing themselves a little in the comments undernieth lol heroengine says: January 9, 2012 at 2:43 pm I am sure that BioWare had rooms full of engineers who customized the engine for their needs. That is normal for projects of that scale. Because of the way they chose to convey combat and the graphical style, they clearly had to highly tailor the renderer for their own needs. 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. On the other hand, from the videos we saw before release it looks like most of the tools and production process are still in place, and that’s what we focus on when we show people why HE is special. I think the game is awesome and I am sure that BioWare will release patches that address the issues that people are reporting. They are a solid developer with an amazing track record for making great games that work well. Edited May 13, 2012 by Stalkobot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhiroc Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 From my experience with MMOs since about 2000, SWTOR is the most "stable" game I've ever played at launch (meaning that I personally have neither experienced a server or client crash). To the extent that the choice of an engine that has already had a lot of stability issues worked on, don't discount that aspect. I can imagine the forums if this game had the stability of even Eve online when it launched (server crashes about every other week to begin then maybe monthly for a while, client crashes maybe weekly, not being to log in again for hours or a day if you got kicked due to a client crash or disconnect). As for the choice of Hero over Unreal, I played in the aborted beta of Stargate Worlds which used a combination of UE and Big World, and that was a crash/glitch-fest to the point where I couldn't even start to play for a month at one point, and even when I did, had the entire screen go bonkers when I did. So I don't find the idea of using UE to be an automatic win. As for 64 vs 32-bit clients, most people don't really understand the implications of this. It is not "automatic" that one should go 64-bit for everything. In fact, using 64-bit has some performance negatives that must be considered, over and above the fact that not everyone runs the 64bit OS. When running a 64-bit process, every "pointer" (an indirect reference to memory) has to be 64 bits wide, and every direct memory reference has to refer to a 64-bit address. This increases the data and instruction segment sizes, leading to much less efficient use of processor h/w memory caches. In the performance game, cache hit ratios are incredibly important, given how "slow" main memory is compared to caches. In a properly-designed 64-bit OS (not sure if Windows fits that bill), the "penalty" for running 32-bit on 64-bit is mostly that of having to "translate" the arguments to and return values from system calls, which isn't all that much of an overhead. To this day, some 64-bit OSes still have the majority of their applications as 32-bit. Not sure if it has changed, but the last time I looked, the recommendation for Ubuntu linux was to run the 32-bit OS for a desktop system, and only use 64-bit for servers. So don't be quick to jump on the term "64-bit" blindly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drudenfusz Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Doesnt take an expert with a doctorate to decide that something is crap when they see it. It's a crappy game engine period. And what makes you think it is the engine and not just BioWare's screw up? Right, you have no clue, so don't make any assumptions if you can't tell things apart. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Averran Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Hello everyone, We know that a number of you wish to discuss the Hero engine and in order to keep the discussion together we ask that everyone use this thread. This will help to ensure our forums are tidy and everyone can participate in the ongoing conversation. We will be closing this thread, feel free to carry on there! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts