What is Reddit's opinion of
Hero Engine?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
33 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Well, as a software engineer: the engine is putting too much work on only one core of the CPU and not utilizing multi-core and GPU to the fullest.
So you are right that it it the engines fault, but the other post is NOT wrong. He is right in the regard that the game is stressing your CPU too much. You have to accept that it is easy for unoptimized software to stress any hardware into obedience.
On fleet, characters do not execute skills that affect other characters. In OPS/WZs/group content they do.
Now the CPU is calculating WHAT to render before your GPU does the HOW. With characters moving, firing skills, and this information coming from the server, the CPU has to process this BEFORE it passes the information to your GPU.
This is
- relying on the raw processing power (clock, instruction set) of ONE CPU core
- turning down graphics will not impact it almost at all
- poorly optimized can mean that it runs shit on your particular model of CPU even though it runs faster on theoretically slower models
Now the problem is that when developing SWTOR in 2011/2012 the Hero Engine (http://www.heroengine.com/) was "forked" - meaning diverted from the original source code that ideafabrik kept working on. Meaning that Bioware could no longer update the engine with newer, more efficient versions that were released over the years. In the meantime it seems most if not all developers that were working on the engine itself at Bioware Austin left or moved on. I am pessimistic they will start a project of optimizing the engine as it would require a lot of time from experienced developers to do it - and that would be very costly. There is no magic switch/silver bullet.
IIRC, HeroEngine wasn't even finished when development of SWTOR began. EA more or less took an unfinished version of it and said, "we'll do it ourselves" so now it's more or less a Frankenstein engine of unfinished Hero and EA in-house. The last code drop EA got from HeroEngine was in 2009. It has been all in-house since then.
Actually they did know they had a sinking ship or atleast a ship was some big fucking holes. They were RECOMMENDED by the developer of the hero engine to not use it for their project especially considering it being incomplete and poorly documented. Bioware said fuck that this is what we want. Now you have this game. There was some commentary by an engineer at bioware about how horribly fucked everything was but I can no longer find it.
http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/
Bioware does not use state-of-the-art Hero Engine for SW:TOR, they licensed it way when it was barely a prototype and proceeded to fork it their own way. It's a whole different beast.
Take everything im about to say with a grain of salt, im by no means an expert or whatever. One of the biggest issues at hand for ZoS, is that ESO runs on a really old engine (http://www.heroengine.com/he-games) so optimizing things is quite the challenge. Rewriting everything over to a new engine would take a crazy ammount of resources, something they do not have to spare right now. On pc, the performance right now honestly isn't all too bad, by all means is it still worse to competing games, and I think ZoS has still a very far way to go to get to an acceptable state, but there is improvements. The addition of multicore support has pushed a few frames, but it's still pretty subpar, and still doesn't utilize all cores efficiently, such as other, new up to date games does.
But I completely agree with what you're saying, this should NOT be acceptable, and there needs to be improvements. Not only in terms of performance do we need to see an improvement, but also in terms of balance for the likes of PvE, and other things. We've been waiting for a long time now, but there's still pretty marginal improvements that's being done. I can only imagine though for you as a console players, all these issues must be way worse. On my new desktop at home, running an 8700k, clocked to 5ghz at all cores with a 1080ti, I still run into performance issues. I hope to see improvements over the next year, but I highly doubt it after what I've seen in terms of improvements over the years.
I just wish we could atleast have some transparency, we're being completely left out in the dark, and it sucks.
> Name a game currently using Hero Engine of any kind besides swtor.
Repopulation is using the unmodded version of Hero Engine currently.
Here are a couple small time games using it: http://www.heroengine.com/spotlight/
Of course, SWTOR isn't using the Hero Engine: it is using a custom built engine based off of the Hero Engine. Nobody uses SWTOR's engine except SWTOR.
I'm hoping for a completely new engine released as a new xpac. They could use a version of the Frostbite engine. It doesn't have to be highly graphics intensive, although games like Tera and Planetside prove MMOs can be pretty.
This is the only game I know of that was released using HeroEngine and we can see how well that works. HeroEngine's games spotlight is like a graveyard for games that never were.
Alot of the problem is that Bioware used a partially finished product and then customized it so as the Hero Engine matured, Bioware was likely unable to merge in their changes. After a while, their "tons of engineers" were let go, and so work on the Hero Engine for SWTOR is probably a can of worms or too much for the current dev team to take on.
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.”
http://www.heroengine.com/support/terms-of-service/ if they were going out of service, the developers will receive full source as per contract agreement :) also i can't find any source about hero engine going out of business.. do you have a source?
Makes sense I suppose, instead of a framework to extend it was more a code base to jump start the project.
Still begs the question of where things went wrong, players tended to blame the engine, Simutronics said the ball was in Bioware's court:
http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/#comments (comment by Neil the President of HeroEngine) > we can’t really give you any insight on how their game is performing in that way, and I’m sure they are working hard at improving any specific issues they are seeing. BioWare is responsible for their own game, we gave them the tools.
Which is funny, as that was one of Hero Engine's big selling points, but how many times have you seen the same 12 NPCs throughout your game play?
Interesting, I didn't realize it was so common for companies to modify licensed engines.
As a player I drew my impressions mostly 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.”
And http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/51387 > We didn't think we were going to be ready to license the game [engine] to outside companies, but they really just came to us and beat our door down.
"Hero" engine. Yes, i remember, there were a lot of threads about it. They bought an unfinished, unoptimized almost undocumented product and began building on it: http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/ A lot of outsourcing was going on too. It all adds up.
And Bioware buy an "alpha" version of the Hero Engine. http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/
>We took an early version of our game to the legendary 2005 E3 show [...] 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. [...] We were concerned over their making major changes to our engine, but we loved the size of the check that came with the deal.
This is the automatic naming structures for wordress (which they are using) for when you either a) copy a prexisintg page to make a new one or b) accidently try to name a page when you already used it once somewhere else (it names it original-2).
If you go to http://www.heroengine.com/spotlights/swtor/ it actually redirects to the new one.
As much as I love the tinfoil the theory of swtor2, this 'hint' doesn't work :P
They should be shot for using a $99 game engine for a game with a $200 million dollar budget.
For those who didn't know. SWTOR uses a shitty 3rd party game engine that costs $99
You can get better responses on /r/gamedev
If you said what your own technical knowledge, scope and budget are it would provide way more information.
If you are planning to write everything from scratch.. well good luck and see you in a few years if everything goes well, but also you'd either want to build a cloud based system using AWS, Digital Ocean etc which is overall more expensive than owning your own hardware but much less money upfront if you start small and scale. Or you'd want to build a traditional cluster with your own hardware which means a lot of upfront costs to get a datacenter spot, the servers, and admins to manage them, but for a large operation is the only real choice.
Or if don't have a large development team and want a realistic timeframe to release on, look up one of the many third party services for MMO's, like http://www.heroengine.com/
Operational prices for any of these depend entirely on how much traffic you'll get. Development costs however you can save a lot by using third party services.
Much of the development time was spent on art and writing and design, which is obvious in the end product. Notice no one saying the end-game gear looking terrible, or the storylines for the classes (or any other quest) being terrible. The trouble is, that time would have been better spent on optimization, Things like responsive controls and playability.
The Hero engine was licensed by EA seven years ago, and only in 2011 has the company that MADE the engine finally come and said they are satisfied with it and have fixed all the bugs. Now remember that SWTOR is not running on that version, its running on the 7-year old version, which Bioware had to learn (from scratch, with no documentation).
Direct quote from HeroEngine's own site 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.”
The game feels and plays sloppy because the engine is unfinished and poorly optimized. This is because of their decision to license the engine prior to it being actually ready for deployment.
The engine that the game was built on was displayed at the 2005 E3 show, in the form of a game that Simutronics was building, Hero's Journey.
During that show, they talked to a developer who was starting a project at bioware and wanted to license the tools, even though they were not ready as a product.
A few months later, Simutronics got a call and then Bioware licensed the engine. I couldn't find (or remember) the 2005 E3 dates, but it was likely in june/july, and a few months later would have made the game development process start in lat 2005/early 2006.
Source: http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/
Haha. Bet I'd get paid a heck of a lot better, if I were.
Used to play Simutronics games way back and found out about it when I noticed Elonka doing the Penny Arcade news.
I'd talk the shit out of their games if they let me play with Hero Engine, though.
And, you know..I didn't have to pay for their games. Shit's expensive. ಠ_ಠ
Well, it was less developed than publicly stated, mostly due to the changes under the hood of how the HeroEngine scripting was organized. There were some amazing areas designed and some cool mob interaction in the works - state-based AI that would have allowed for a bit more complex of a response than what we normally see in MMOs. The ability for GMs to make changes to the game live and run some unique storylines would likely have been a really cool feature that is sorely lacking from modern MMOs.
That said, the new company (Idea Fabrik) does appear to want the HeroEngine to succeed, so hopefully we'll see some decent HE-based games in the future.
EDIT: Also, it appears you can apply to use HE for free now through HeroCloud. Sandbox is free and you can apply for a basic account for your team.
Took some digging. It was actually on the heroengine.com web site as a brag back in the day but has been long deleted. I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig it up.
Read down through the comments.
“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.”
this thread goes into the the issue, is from last year so it's recent
tl;dr - ZOS devs heavily modified the hero engine to make eso. It’s pretty clear the game uses some of the hero code as is shown by the issue in ESO that are present in other hero engine games, i.e. the hero engine
there is a reason HeroEngine is still listed on credits in ESO and it's expansions/DLCs and ESO is able to be listed on Hero Engine's webpage: http://www.heroengine.com/he-games
> I thought ESO used HeroEngine for prototyping only? There's no reference to it on splash screens (would be with Havok, etc and would also be in the copyrights). Further, it would be on the HeroEngine website, which it isn't. There's no reference to it in the Credits either, as far as I know.
It is in the Hero Engine Website, middle of the second row. S: http://www.heroengine.com/he-games ... Also ESO Install has/had powered by Hero Engine Splash screen.
But it indeed is heavily modified. But the old core system is bound to spit out sphagetti at varying degrees of regularity. Also ESO does use the megaserver architecture and they never seemed to figure out the cogs ever since they applied the Anticheat system.
You shouldn't get into this game, it seems broken as hell because it uses the Hero Engine like SWTOR.
http://www.heroengine.com/he-games
my advise : move to another game.
ESO does actually use the Hero Engine.
Sources:
[2] - http://www.heroengine.com/news/181-heroengine-licensee-zenimax-announces-elder-scrolls-online
There's a lot of ways an MMO backend could be made. Lots of big MMOs are just pure c++ servers, dealing with a ton of traffic and hooked to a few datastores. Parallelizing is the biggest concern when doing things from scratch like this.
There's things like SpatialOS [https://improbable.io/games] which are interesting, though not too battle tested yet.
Take a look at what other MMO engines have for features and figure out one-by-one how they're made (http://www.heroengine.com/heroengine/about-heroengine/server-systems)
AFAIK, ZeniMax used the Hero Engine to make ESO. Where as BethSoft uses a highly modified Gamebryo Engine that they have been tweaking for years, now called the Creation Engine.
So what ESO is waiting for if anything, is an updated Hero Engine.
Oh they knew it was crap, in fact the developers working on the alpha build even told them it was still crap.
>We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton. We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor. Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places. He knows games, especially online games.
>Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package.
>“I need this,” said Gordon. “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.” Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing. “This is just what I need! I want to license your engine.”
>We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine.
>“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.”
source: http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/
All they wanted was the development tools, the rest of the engine Bioware itself finished so it's not even Hero Engine anymore. They didn't license the engine, they bought exclusive rights and modified the engine, Hero's tech support isn't going to do anything because they are no longer responsible for it.
HSL probably wasn't even a thing in the engine back then.
Here is a blog post that explains a little bit about how Bioware came to use the Hero Engine for SWTOR and the role (or lack there of) that they played in it http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/
You can see one of the many hydra scripts for ToS Revan exported here.
It appears that Zenimax is a licensee of the HeroEngine according to the article below and they used it for their development purposes. Zenimax claims that they used two different engines, a custom one and the Heroengine. Article has been updated to reflect that. Thank you.
http://www.heroengine.com/2012/05/heroengine-licensee-zenimax-announces-elder-scrolls-online/
HeroCloud exists although my experience with it was twenty unemployed artists putting pressure on the three programmers to do things in a time frame that was implausible with a code none of us had any experience with, Sourceforge has a large variety of open source games that don't seem to have much trouble. Those are the only examples I can think of.
From an article I read on HeroEngine's site, BioWare basically bought all of the source of HeroEngine many years ago and forked it privately. HeroEngine is just the base that they started with. It's a completely different animal now, and the company that makes HeroEngine has nothing to do with it any longer.