The end of HeroEngine?

[Jerba]

Bad news, the company behind HeroEngine has financial troubles. While this won't affect SWTOR since they long cut ties with the original HeroEngine developers, I still find it important to keep up-to-date to the history of the engine. So let's start at the beginning...

 

 

If you remember, HeroEngine was started when Simutronics, a game developer, was developing their own MMO called Hero's Journey (which was never released) and they had developed so many tools that they figured instead of creating a game, they would focus on creating an MMO engine. There were already plenty of game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine but no engines specifically for the things MMOs demand.

 

In 2005, when World of Warcraft was writing record player numbers, BioWare started development on SWTOR, they set up the Austin studio and were looking for tools to get started. At E3, one of the BioWare executives, Gordon Walton (who previously had worked on SWG), approached the people at Simutronics, was shown the beta version of their engine and how to use the tools. HeroEngine was perfect to help kickstart the development of SWTOR. Of course, at the time, he didn't know that the engine was not made for an MMO with millions of players, or he thought the engineers would be able to improve the engine more than they eventually did.

 

In any case, BioWare fully licensed the engine and source code, they had long discussions with the HeroEngine developers and made various improvements to the engine over time. In 2007, BioWare was purchased by Electronic Arts but everything continued normally. Around this time, development on Elder Scrolls Online started and they also used HeroEngine to quickly start developing the game, but they later wrote their own engine and no longer use HeroEngine. In 2007-2008, SWTOR was announced but it took a few more years before we knew that they were using HeroEngine.

 

In 2010, Idea Fabrik purchased HeroEngine from Simutronics and they created HeroCloud, which is the same as HeroEngine except the game is hosted in the cloud, so developers can just start developing without having to run their own servers. There were hundreds of developers using HeroEngine to test out ideas but only very few games that made it to release, The Repopulation is one of the biggest ones after SWTOR. Since SWTOR's release in 2011, BioWare continuously updated the engine on their own (which at BioWare means, outsourcing it to the Russians at Sperasoft), which is why it is very different from the original HeroEngine now.

 

But now, it looks like the final weeks of HeroEngine could have come, unless another company opts to take it over:

Today I come to you with an update that unfortunately contains some bad news, however, please read this entire message because it will outline how we plan to overcome this hurdle.

 

My name is Steve, and I am the COO here at Forever Interactive. Given the gravity of this update I felt it was only right that you all get this information straight from the horse's mouth in a timely manner and as transparent as possible.

We found out on Wednesday that the company who makes our game engine, Idea Fabrik, is in contract and financial renegotiations. Myself and the rest our C-Suite here have been apprised of the situation with Idea Fabrik, but since our affiliation with them only goes as far as an end-user, it is not our place to talk about their business, nor situation. The long and short of it is as of today (Friday, October 30th, 2015), our VoZ servers have been shut down. This is affecting all game developers using Hero Engine wholesale, not just us. We have been with Hero since its inception and were ported over as legacy users to the Hero Cloud platform, so we are very sympathetic to their struggles and wish them the best of luck with this and any other endeavors they undertake. [...]

 

Since we were under the Hero cloud platform, the most immediate thing you will notice will be that come end of business day today, the game will be offline and inaccessible… This is unfortunately unavoidable and we do deeply apologize for this. If we had ANY control over this or any immediate options to prevent this service interruption, believe me, we would make use of them. [...]

This was written by the developers of Visions of Zosimos, another game developed on HeroEngine. So what does this mean for the future? I'm not sure yet but it would be sad to see HeroEngine go down. For all its limitations, I still find it to have some very innovative features, like the multiple instances, and HeroBlade where developers can just jump in and run around the world they just created - it just wasn't made for a 2010s game the scale of SWTOR.

Edited November 1, 2015 by Jerba

[CarpeSangrea]

Isn't repopulation also using hero engine? That would suck royally if it hurt development of that game.

[Jerba]

Isn't repopulation also using hero engine? That would suck royally if it hurt development of that game.

From my understanding, they don't use HeroCloud but licensed the engine and have their own servers, similar to how SWTOR does it. So they shouldn't be affected too much.

Edit: I was wrong, see below.

Edited November 4, 2015 by Jerba

[Anaesha]

Prime example of why you should build your own Engine if you have the resources to do so.

[Jerba]

Small update:

Greetings loyal VoZ fans,

On Friday, we reported on some news that our Engine developer is in financial negotiations, and as a result, we would be losing our servers at the end of that business day. At the start of Friday’s business day, our servers were down, but as of Saturday, they were back up and running. We have been guaranteed by Idea Fabrik that they will remain active for at least the next week. We apologize for any confusion this has caused and as always, we will keep you all informed as we receive any information on this matter, as it unfolds.

Maybe they don't want to cause a bank run or heard of something that wasn't meant for release. But in any case, it appears that the HeroCloud servers are still running for now.

[Wolvereen]

IMHO this (hero)engine BW/EA uses is SWTOR's biggest issue...

 

sadly, we won't get any engine upgrade

[Jerba]

IMHO this (hero)engine BW/EA uses is SWTOR's biggest issue...

 

sadly, we won't get any engine upgrade

Yeah, sadly the engine limits a lot of what we can get as content but from my understanding, it has to do with the base framework (which does not appear to be very optimized) and not so much with the engine itself. Because HeroEngine is great for collaboratively working, and when SWTOR started development, they wanted to quickly have something to compete with WoW and not spend years developing their own engine. HeroEngine allows them to easily make changes to the game in real time and test it, but the problem was that there was a lot of downtime (where they had to fix the engine) and designers had nothing to do.

 

Now, ten years later, there are other issues that were not important when they bought the engine. Like how it only uses DirectX 9, how it does not work on 64-bit or multiple cores. And getting those things updated to the modern age is almost as difficult as creating an entirely new engine. I don't really want to do the blame game since we know far too little about SWTOR's development to know for sure; it is wrong to blame HeroEngine because it could just as easily be the fault of the engineers who were tasked with optimizing the engine or the executives who decided to use HeroEngine or to outsource the engine optimizations. In the end, we have the same result that the designers have to work with what they got, and we have to accept the FPS losses and positioning bugs if we want to play this game.

Edited November 2, 2015 by Jerba

[Jerba]

Looks like the Repopulation is affected after all:

The update has not yet happened. We can't really comment on it at the moment as the delay is not on our end, and there is only so much we are privy to or able to discuss. We'll have an update as soon as we can.

Q: Was this supposed to go live today?

Originally yes, it was supposed to go live today. But unfortunately, as J.C. posted on the previous page, the release has to be delayed till next week - looking at Wednesday as far as I know.

Unfortunately we can only say so much due to confidentiality agreements. A third party partner of ours has run into some issues though which are having a trickle down affect on us. This has prevented 15.10.1 from being deployed (it was ready on our end 10 days ago) and may have an affect on things moving forward. We became aware of this issue less than a week ago, and have been working with them to try to minimize its impact. We can't say much else at this time, when we can we will.

 

I am also aware that some of this information has been leaked by other teams. But we do ask you to please understand if we can not comment on those specific statements from others. We do respect our confidentiality agreements on these things, and the last thing they need at this point is to worry about more external pressure while they attempt to solve the situation and minimize the damage.

Q: Is there something we the community can do to help?

Probably not. It's just one of those situations that we'll need to let play out and see where things are at when the dust settles.

I would also add that nobody is more disappointed in these delays to the patches than we are. We had a very aggressive timeline planned for the remainder of the year which woulds have seen 15.10.1 available on the 22nd of last month, and the hardcore server and account perks release next week. We were blindsided by these issues, but are hopeful that a solution can be reached in a timely manner.

Q: I think its time the Repoluation Dev Team sit down and perhaps shed some light over this and how it will affect The Repopulation and its community.

@zendog: We can't really do that yet until we know what is going to happen here. Best case scenario, we're just looking at a patch delay for them to get things back up to speed. Other scenarios could involve downtime and legal battles, or Hero Engine being bought by another company. Until we allow the situation to play out on their end, will be hard for us to provide a real update. At this point, similar to the community, we're in a holding pattern waiting to see what will happen.

So oddly enough I just saw a post on Massively saying that the Repopulation has been delayed due to Hero Engine issues. This did not come from us, but my guess is that it is referencing this post. Just to clarify, there has been no delay on anything other than the patch at this point. Anythign else is only speculation, and that news did not come from us. We are still waiting to see how this situation progresses.

 

So I figured that should be clarified before I call it a night.

Unfortunately we cannot speak much to it at this time as JC has mentioned before, we hope to have something out soon though (in a few days hopefully). At the moment though the game servers are up and running, but there are other issues ongoing.

Q: Here's a question maybe you could answer: lets assume the worst happens, the heroengine collapses. How hard would it be to port your assets and mechanics to a new engine? Would that bankrupt the game, be a minor inconvenience, or be a major but do-able undertaking?

 

In the event that the worst case scenario does happen, we still have outs. But it would be a major setback. Certainly we haven't worked this long on the title to abandon it. So we'll explore all options.

With regards to porting to a new engine, one of the issues there is that code is mostly in HeroScript which is Hero engine exclusive, and some of Hero's conventions like GLOMMing are very cool features that are not available in other engines. So it would need a complete rewrite of code to do that. Though art assets, items, quests, and things of that nature could moved over relatively quickly. Something like that would be a last resort.

http://massivelyop.com/2015/11/04/the-repopulation-delayed-due-to-hero-engine-issues/

https://www.therepopulation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=11171

Edited November 6, 2015 by Jerba

[tjmck]

I don't think you could even call this the Hero engine anymore, they bought a beta version of the engine and then massively rewrote it to do what they needed it to do for the game as the beta version couldn't do all that they wanted. So instead of them using better game engines designed for what they wanted to do with swtor...we got this...and are stuck with the multi-weekly "Change the engine" posts....

[Jerba]

They released an official statement:

As some of you have learned already, we are facing difficult times at Idea Fabrik PLC. Because of outside 3rd party related issues, we may be facing some down time to all our HeroEngine and HeroCloud services.

 

Though we are confident that Idea Fabrik is not going out of business and the HeroEngine and HeroCloud services will be restored, the issues we face right now mean a possible black out (or interruption) of all services. This will include all HeroBlade services as well as all web services.

 

It has been speculated that funding is the primary issue. And this is partially true. Due to forces outside of the company, at this time we are legally and morally bound in what information we are able to give regarding the causes. However I can say that it does not involve any of our middleware partners.

 

We are working hard to prevent any outages, however, if one does occur, rest assured that we will work twice as hard to get all survives back up and running.

 

Idea Fabrik PLC is a public company that relies on third party financing. We are currently in negotiations to secure our funding for the present and the future. This however does take time, and sadly, could result in a possible downtime of services. Since we were not given adequate time to make any adjustments, we are working very hard towards this goal.

 

While I realize this information may seem vague, we sincerely apologize for not being able to say more at this time. Please rest assured that we are doing everything to either prevent this or make it as painless and short as possible.

 

Best,

Alex, Chairman of the Board at Idea Fabrik PLC

My understanding is that one of the investors refuses to give any more money to Idea Fabrik, which is why they are no longer able to pay the server costs and may need to shut down the servers until they get stable financing again.

I can definitely understand that investors are rather wary -- HeroCloud doesn't make much money while the MMOs are in development, they receive a small fee but their business model relies on the revenue share so as long as The Repopulation and other games are still in development, they don't make any money yet.

Edited November 7, 2015 by Jerba

[Shayddow]

I don't find this too surprising. Let me give you a little background.

I used to play one of the 2 major games Simutronics offers. Dragonrealms. <the other is gemstone>. Started playing in 1996. Was a customer for over 14 years. Great game for its time. But... no graphics. Text based. <not cell-phone style text, computer text. Like typing in DOS>. RPG. Most Gamemasters for DR and GS were VOLUNTEERS. <not employees - more like contractors- they do get a small stipend as "bonus">. The Hero-engine was developed by these individuals.

Usual game population when I used to play was around 300 - 400 characters a night <and some of these were run by more than one individual, as you could play multiple characters at once>. So..... some of what the OP posted comes at no surprise.

[WorldSmasher]

Bad news, the company behind HeroEngine has financial troubles. While this won't affect SWTOR since they long cut ties with the original HeroEngine developers, I still find it important to keep up-to-date to the history of the engine. So let's start at the beginning...

 

 

If you remember, HeroEngine was started when Simutronics, a game developer, was developing their own MMO called Hero's Journey (which was never released) and they had developed so many tools that they figured instead of creating a game, they would focus on creating an MMO engine. There were already plenty of game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine but no engines specifically for the things MMOs demand.

 

In 2005, when World of Warcraft was writing record player numbers, BioWare started development on SWTOR, they set up the Austin studio and were looking for tools to get started. At E3, one of the BioWare executives, Gordon Walton (who previously had worked on SWG), approached the people at Simutronics, was shown the beta version of their engine and how to use the tools. HeroEngine was perfect to help kickstart the development of SWTOR. Of course, at the time, he didn't know that the engine was not made for an MMO with millions of players, or he thought the engineers would be able to improve the engine more than they eventually did.

 

In any case, BioWare fully licensed the engine and source code, they had long discussions with the HeroEngine developers and made various improvements to the engine over time. In 2007, BioWare was purchased by Electronic Arts but everything continued normally. Around this time, development on Elder Scrolls Online started and they also used HeroEngine to quickly start developing the game, but they later wrote their own engine and no longer use HeroEngine. In 2007-2008, SWTOR was announced but it took a few more years before we knew that they were using HeroEngine.

 

In 2010, Idea Fabrik purchased HeroEngine from Simutronics and they created HeroCloud, which is the same as HeroEngine except the game is hosted in the cloud, so developers can just start developing without having to run their own servers. There were hundreds of developers using HeroEngine to test out ideas but only very few games that made it to release, The Repopulation is one of the biggest ones after SWTOR. Since SWTOR's release in 2011, BioWare continuously updated the engine on their own (which at BioWare means, outsourcing it to the Russians at Sperasoft), which is why it is very different from the original HeroEngine now.

 

But now, it looks like the final weeks of HeroEngine could have come, unless another company opts to take it over:

 

Today I come to you with an update that unfortunately contains some bad news, however, please read this entire message because it will outline how we plan to overcome this hurdle.

 

My name is Steve, and I am the COO here at Forever Interactive. Given the gravity of this update I felt it was only right that you all get this information straight from the horse's mouth in a timely manner and as transparent as possible.

We found out on Wednesday that the company who makes our game engine, Idea Fabrik, is in contract and financial renegotiations. Myself and the rest our C-Suite here have been apprised of the situation with Idea Fabrik, but since our affiliation with them only goes as far as an end-user, it is not our place to talk about their business, nor situation. The long and short of it is as of today (Friday, October 30th, 2015), our VoZ servers have been shut down. This is affecting all game developers using Hero Engine wholesale, not just us. We have been with Hero since its inception and were ported over as legacy users to the Hero Cloud platform, so we are very sympathetic to their struggles and wish them the best of luck with this and any other endeavors they undertake. [...]

 

Since we were under the Hero cloud platform, the most immediate thing you will notice will be that come end of business day today, the game will be offline and inaccessible… This is unfortunately unavoidable and we do deeply apologize for this. If we had ANY control over this or any immediate options to prevent this service interruption, believe me, we would make use of them. [...]

 

This was written by the developers of Visions of Zosimos, another game developed on HeroEngine. So what does this mean for the future? I'm not sure yet but it would be sad to see HeroEngine go down. For all its limitations, I still find it to have some very innovative features, like the multiple instances, and HeroBlade where developers can just jump in and run around the world they just created - it just wasn't made for a 2010s game the scale of SWTOR.

 

I guess running your business off of someone else' cloud is potentially bad for your business. Even if your business is successful, if the cloud you're doing business on goes down, so does your successful business...

[Haystak]

I guess running your business off of someone else' cloud is potentially bad for your business. Even if your business is successful, if the cloud you're doing business on goes down, so does your successful business...

 

Its actually common practice to see this done. Many smaller developers will lease out IT assets from third parties, as a startup or small company wont have the infrastructure or funds to own/operate a fully functional Data Center.

 

Leasing out also tends to be the better option for riskier operations as you can cut costs very easily without having to fire/hire people which in most countries is full of legalities.

[Jerba]

Its actually common practice to see this done. Many smaller developers will lease out IT assets from third parties, as a startup or small company wont have the infrastructure or funds to own/operate a fully functional Data Center.

 

Leasing out also tends to be the better option for riskier operations as you can cut costs very easily without having to fire/hire people which in most countries is full of legalities.

I agree, outsourcing development is a wise business decision because you save on the investment costs and only have running costs. It is also easier to scale up the studio during important times without hiring additional staff.

BioWare does a lot of outsourcing, which does save them costs but I also think it is the reason why they have not as much of a company spirit as a company like Blizzard has.

 

 

HeroEngine has released another post by the way and I'll quote it for completion's sake. That post does sound a lot less severe than what the Repopulation devs write but I imagine that in a situation like this, they don't want to give a cause for alarm.

Good day Everyone,

We have a small update to give you all. Though we are still very limited in what we are able to communicate, we are happy to say that servers are still up and running for the next few weeks. We are still negotiationing with 3rd parties, but are working very hard for a positive resolution.

 

We hope that this period of uncertainty will be over sooner than later. But do note, we are doing everything possible to get back to business as usual. We are dedicated to your dreams and hard work in making your dream MMO, which are at the top of our list.

 

We also want to let you all know that your amazing support as a community has not gone unnoticed. We thank each and every one of you that has put effort to help and support IF and HeroEngine, even with the very limited amount of information. The ideas, support emails, community cohesion, none of this has escaped us in any way.

 

So once more - Thank You!

Alex

https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,6056.0.html