I hear this a lot from players who's knowledge of the subject starts with "Hero engine" and ends at "sucks". Is there anyone who can elaborate on the hero engine debacle? What does it mean?

I've never seen as much peripheral hate towards an engine. In fact, I haven't ever seen mention of an engine in any other MMO I've played. I could not tell you what GW2 or WoW run on and I doubt the player base could as a whole. Is there substance behind the often claimed "blame the hero engine" . What makes it technically different then any other engine? Wildstar's or WoW or GW2s? What does engine even mean in the context of an MMO? Why 3 years later would it still be the source of all SWTORs woes?

An engine is basically the back bone of the game. Core mechanics, textures etcetera all get piled on top of it and that's what your game is. General unstability, crashing, clipping and other such nonsense are usually problems inherent to the engine rather than anything else.

For example fallout and skyrim both run on versions of bethesdas custom in house engine. It let's you do really cool things with the overworld and AI but it is infamous for crashing and bugs.

The reason hero sparks such ire isn't even the hero engines fault. That is entirely with BW who decided to use not only a new generally unproven engine to build their cutting edge MMO on but to use a new generally unproven still in alpha engine to build their cutting edge MMO on.

Basically they figured they could fix any problems the engine had as a result of it's early life cycle and presumably reap some benefit. Launch and the months after proved to very much not be the case. SWTOR was riddled with performance issues and to this day does not run spectacularly on most machines and has more than a few hang up bugs from launch.

CaptainAPop pretty much covered it.

One of the big problems with using a 3rd party engine is simply it is not ones own. That is why you will also see a lot of posts around the forums where people point out the devs response of "not technically possible" etc. For what ever reasons, it is not possible because they did not build it. That coupled with what was obviously a pushed early christmas release didn't leave Bioware with much of a chance to retain its original customer base.

It is also interesting that you mentioned those two MMO's as this points out one of the, if not the main issue with MMO games and the engines they use. GW2 is built using an updated version of GW1 (In House) and as far as i am aware WoW is also in house. Any changes, fixes, implementations,patches or hotfixes needed can be easily assessed and implemented by the developers (in a fast as possible time frame) as they are fully aware of the engines limitations.

Now take SWTOR, i don't mean to sound negative but the developers answers are pretty much the key to the true issue. They simply did not or do not have the experience that the others mentioned above have with the engine in use. "not technically possible" and any other form that that response is posted in is clearly not true. Two facts prove this. Firstly, because it is not their own in-house engine they CANNOT possibly be fully aware of what it can or cannot do (Developers who have been using the Unreal engine for years are still improving their developments) it is also common sense and those sort of answers shouldn't fool anyone with an ounce of it. Secondly, some of the features previously asked for by players that were also previously "not technically possible" have since turned up, this is not as a surprise and/or acknowledgement of the request but simply because they did, in fact, find out that it was technically possible.

Like i said, i do not rest any blame with Bioware as a whole on this. It has however, proved that MMO's (which require far more post release updates, fixes and changes than any other game type) should use in-house engines. I feel, however, as much as i enjoy this game, that SWTOR unfortunately for all involved proved this.

Also OP, you might be more aware of some of the greater engines out there than you think. Like mentioned, Bethesda's engine is amazing, the modding community of Elder Scrolls proves that. Unreal obviously speaks for itself across all gaming generations. Frostbite engine (See Battlefield games) is leaps and bounds above all other FPS developing companies at the moment and expect to see it in all its updated glory for Battlefront 3.

Probably should have sticked with modifying the Aurora engine further.

It was used first for Neverwinter Nights and was modified for KOTOR and The Witcher. Pretty sure Jade Empire used it as well.

Considering how it kept pushing back the boundaries for NWN1, it was a very good engine capable of stuff that was first deemed impossible.

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

Scroll down the see their games and engines used. This is for anyone who wishes to validate what i previously said. Take the mass effect series which uses the Unreal Engine. The graphical and technical improvements between each game is easily seen, and all 3 can run on last generation consoles (before anyone says the graphics were better because it uses more hardware). This shows that over time they became more proficient with the engine and things became "technically possible". You will also notice the new dragon age and "star wars" game using the Frostbite Engine...

They are using 3rd party engines more and more and on quite clearly successful games. However, only one MMO (see my previous post for the outcome of this).

The short version: Bioware built SWTOR on someone else's engine (Hero Engine) while it was still in alpha. They now have a bug-riddled engine, and because they didn't build it, they have no idea how to fix some of the core issues. Hence, performance issues to this day, and a lot of hatred from the players.

Example: SWTOR's engine is infamous for struggling to render text on-screen. It's why there are no speech bubbles, and never will be. Visit the fleet and disable player and NPC name-plates: your FPS will sky-rocket

This blog post from the Hero engine team should show you the problems:

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/

CaptainAPop pretty much covered it.

 

One of the big problems with using a 3rd party engine is simply it is not ones own. That is why you will also see a lot of posts around the forums where people point out the devs response of "not technically possible" etc. For what ever reasons, it is not possible because they did not build it. That coupled with what was obviously a pushed early christmas release didn't leave Bioware with much of a chance to retain its original customer base.

 

It is also interesting that you mentioned those two MMO's as this points out one of the, if not the main issue with MMO games and the engines they use. GW2 is built using an updated version of GW1 (In House) and as far as i am aware WoW is also in house. Any changes, fixes, implementations,patches or hotfixes needed can be easily assessed and implemented by the developers (in a fast as possible time frame) as they are fully aware of the engines limitations.

 

Now take SWTOR, i don't mean to sound negative but the developers answers are pretty much the key to the true issue. They simply did not or do not have the experience that the others mentioned above have with the engine in use. "not technically possible" and any other form that that response is posted in is clearly not true. Two facts prove this. Firstly, because it is not their own in-house engine they CANNOT possibly be fully aware of what it can or cannot do (Developers who have been using the Unreal engine for years are still improving their developments) it is also common sense and those sort of answers shouldn't fool anyone with an ounce of it. Secondly, some of the features previously asked for by players that were also previously "not technically possible" have since turned up, this is not as a surprise and/or acknowledgement of the request but simply because they did, in fact, find out that it was technically possible.

 

Like i said, i do not rest any blame with Bioware as a whole on this. It has however, proved that MMO's (which require far more post release updates, fixes and changes than any other game type) should use in-house engines. I feel, however, as much as i enjoy this game, that SWTOR unfortunately for all involved proved this.

 

Also OP, you might be more aware of some of the greater engines out there than you think. Like mentioned, Bethesda's engine is amazing, the modding community of Elder Scrolls proves that. Unreal obviously speaks for itself across all gaming generations. Frostbite engine (See Battlefield games) is leaps and bounds above all other FPS developing companies at the moment and expect to see it in all its updated glory for Battlefront 3.

It didn't PROVE anything. It didn't PROVE developers should use in house engines.

The ONLY thing this case shows is that the developers did a rough job with the engine they did use. That's the only conclusion you can come to.

You cannot make the leap and say "this proves developers on MMOs should use in house engines."

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/

Hero Engine = crap. That's all you need to know. Too bad bioware is run by a bunch of idiots or they could of did the samething GW2 did , graphical. Instead we have a game that looks like it was coded by 5 year olds using etch stretches.

I don't think the hero engine in itself is crap, BioWare used a not finished product, didn't kept in contact with the creators, changed stuff (maybe to the worse) and has nobody now who knows how to fix the engine... and I think the design decisions on how the game looks (which is an question of asthetics not graphics) has much to do with the engine, that the game cannot make mass PvP work on the other hand is an engine issue.

Clearly there was and possibly still is a lot of potential with this engine. For all the hype of other MMOs, I've yet to see one that overall has as much polish as this one. It just makes me wonder what could have been or what could be if this engine were optimized and used to its fullest.

I can't believe I'm doing this (defending EA), but it's not like they didn't give BW time in making the game. Time and plenty of funding.

The trouble is EA rushed the launch for Christmas 2011, and perhaps BW could have averted many of the things that made folks leave early that they put into SWTOR not too many months later (Group Finder and UI customization being key, but other things such as terrible bugs in the early Operations, and perhaps making a better marketing campaign emphasizing alt rolling as key in SWTOR, alongside making the legacy system more friendly for this).

As for the engine having trouble with many players in the same area at once, I doubt there is a solution (even given time) for that. The engine works for what BW set out to do before launch, make a good, story-based MMO, and have PvP limited to WZ map instances. Operations and FPs worked fine as well. They knew Ilum wasn't going to function at all beforehand.

When players didn't stick with the game early on, EA lost interest in improving the game, to this day, even when it is bringing in plenty of profits.

Maybe the engine can do better in some ways - the graphics improvements have certainly been nice, and the devs mentioned being able to work better with water before Makeb was released. But don't expect a drastic improvement in the overall performance of the engine - it kind of is what it is.

We may be able to hope EA puts some more money back into the game for the type of content that does work well, but that's 2015 at the earliest for us to see as players.

The short version: Bioware built SWTOR on someone else's engine (Hero Engine) while it was still in alpha. They now have a bug-riddled engine, and because they didn't build it, they have no idea how to fix some of the core issues. Hence, performance issues to this day, and a lot of hatred from the players.

 

Example: SWTOR's engine is infamous for struggling to render text on-screen. It's why there are no speech bubbles, and never will be. Visit the fleet and disable player and NPC name-plates: your FPS will sky-rocket

Just because someone else built it doesn't mean they have no idea how to fix it. Using that argument, no open source project could ever be successful unless it was maintained by the original developers. The issue is not that they don't understand the code (I'm pretty sure that they do, or they wouldn't be able to extend it) but that software generally is built for a specific purpose. You define a set of tasks that you want the software to handle and build it accordingly. If someone comes along and says "I want the software to also do this or that, although it was not designed to do it", the honest and accurate answer simply is "It's not technically possible".

In that regard, software behaves the same way as hardware. If someone said 100 years ago, that they wanted their car to go 200 km/h they would hear "technically not possible".

Of course they can extend the capabilities of the software and make it possible and they have proven to be able to do it (freeflight in GSF as an example), but in its present state, saying "technically impossible" is most likely a correct statement.

Regarding text on-screen:

I don't think rendering text on-screen is a problem. I see plenty of text on my screen when I play SWTOR and I don't think the dozens and hundreds of damage and healing numbers that are displayed during an ops fight cause any trouble.

The only thing I can think of that may be difficult at the moment is rendering text based on some other graphical object, and maintaining the relative position of the text when the object moves. To be honest, I have not tested that in ops fights, i.e. I don't know whether the damage and healing numbers stay at their initial displayed position when the object moves. Of course name plates and chat bubbles need be moved around with their owner objects, so that specific requirement could be a problem.

As for the engine having trouble with many players in the same area at once, I doubt there is a solution (even given time) for that.

For a quick-fix, try disabling name plates. The engine seems to have more trouble rendering text than polygons. Visit a busy section of the fleet and try it out yourself, switching name plates on and off, and watch your FPS skyrocket without them

I still leave nameplates for enemy players active, because for PVP I need some way of distinguishing friend from foe at a quick glance. But knowing that one of my allied players is called "Obi Wan Skywalker" really doesn't provide any benefit to me, so I'd rather take the extra 10fps from disabling the majority of nameplates.

Just because someone else built it doesn't mean they have no idea how to fix it. Using that argument, no open source project could ever be successful unless it was maintained by the original developers. The issue is not that they don't understand the code (I'm pretty sure that they do, or they wouldn't be able to extend it) but that software generally is built for a specific purpose. You define a set of tasks that you want the software to handle and build it accordingly. If someone comes along and says "I want the software to also do this or that, although it was not designed to do it", the honest and accurate answer simply is "It's not technically possible".

 

In that regard, software behaves the same way as hardware. If someone said 100 years ago, that they wanted their car to go 200 km/h they would hear "technically not possible".

 

Of course they can extend the capabilities of the software and make it possible and they have proven to be able to do it (freeflight in GSF as an example), but in its present state, saying "technically impossible" is most likely a correct statement.

 

Regarding text on-screen:

I don't think rendering text on-screen is a problem. I see plenty of text on my screen when I play SWTOR and I don't think the dozens and hundreds of damage and healing numbers that are displayed during an ops fight cause any trouble.

 

The only thing I can think of that may be difficult at the moment is rendering text based on some other graphical object, and maintaining the relative position of the text when the object moves. To be honest, I have not tested that in ops fights, i.e. I don't know whether the damage and healing numbers stay at their initial displayed position when the object moves. Of course name plates and chat bubbles need be moved around with their owner objects, so that specific requirement could be a problem.

This guy gets it. There are lots of assumptions going on from people who don't really know what they're talking about. Yes, they got an early version of the engine, but they also got all of the code to the engine. They were able to do anything they want with it, within the constraint of their own and the original design of the engine. To say that bugs and issues arise solely from the fact that it was beta is nothing but conjecture. Not to mention that even with a complete engine there will be lots of changes being made to the existing code, as well as systems written on top of the engine. Again, saying that fault lies in one area or another is nothing but conjecture.

To the argument that what happened in SWTOR proves that MMOs should build the engine in house, I actually think this makes a better case for using a tried and true engine than it does for building one yourself. Let's examine the situation. BioWare licensed a very incomplete engine, which means that in order for the game to work they had to complete it themselves. To put it in other words, when they licensed the game they got a nice set of design tools and a mostly empty box for an engine. By filling in all of the gaps and rewriting the little that was already there, they are pretty much 90% of the way to writing their own engine, which is why I refuse to claim that SWTOR is powered by the "Hero Engine", it's really BioWare's engine at this point. This is corroborated by the fact that pretty early on they stopped pulling code down from the actual Hero Engine, because the two had forked so much. And from what I gather of the story, they really only wanted the development tools anyway. The Hero Engine code itself was secondary as they always planned on mostly rewriting it.

But even if they didn't work with a barebones alpha engine, they would still be rewriting existing parts of whatever completed engine they were working with, and also adding their own systems on top of the engine in order to power their game. It would be impossible to say, without first hand knowledge, exactly where the blame lies in what's going on. It could be an issue with the engine itself, or an issue with the work done on top of the engine. All you can truthfully claim to know is the result, not the cause.

ESO uses the Hero engine and as no problems coping with big open world pvp battles.

Zenimax Online has stated that they only used the Hero Engine for early testing and design, and the engine they are using is not Hero Engine, but something built in-house.

Probably should have sticked with modifying the Aurora engine further.

 

It was used first for Neverwinter Nights and was modified for KOTOR and The Witcher. Pretty sure Jade Empire used it as well.

 

Considering how it kept pushing back the boundaries for NWN1, it was a very good engine capable of stuff that was first deemed impossible.

Aurora is not a MMO engine, it cannot handle for example a persistent world, and other things that are important for MMO. And it was getting really ancient even in Dragon Age 2. that is why BW moved on to Frostbite for DA3.

I read a pretty good article that explained the differences in real layman terms, I just cannot dredge it up from my memory or browsing history...

Just because someone else built it doesn't mean they have no idea how to fix it. Using that argument, no open source project could ever be successful unless it was maintained by the original developers. The issue is not that they don't understand the code (I'm pretty sure that they do, or they wouldn't be able to extend it) but that software generally is built for a specific purpose. You define a set of tasks that you want the software to handle and build it accordingly. If someone comes along and says "I want the software to also do this or that, although it was not designed to do it", the honest and accurate answer simply is "It's not technically possible".

 

In that regard, software behaves the same way as hardware. If someone said 100 years ago, that they wanted their car to go 200 km/h they would hear "technically not possible".

 

Of course they can extend the capabilities of the software and make it possible and they have proven to be able to do it (freeflight in GSF as an example), but in its present state, saying "technically impossible" is most likely a correct statement.

 

Regarding text on-screen:

I don't think rendering text on-screen is a problem. I see plenty of text on my screen when I play SWTOR and I don't think the dozens and hundreds of damage and healing numbers that are displayed during an ops fight cause any trouble.

 

The only thing I can think of that may be difficult at the moment is rendering text based on some other graphical object, and maintaining the relative position of the text when the object moves. To be honest, I have not tested that in ops fights, i.e. I don't know whether the damage and healing numbers stay at their initial displayed position when the object moves. Of course name plates and chat bubbles need be moved around with their owner objects, so that specific requirement could be a problem.

This person gets it.

As for the FlyText location, I accidentally recorded it in my Sith Warrior Story videos (I was a moron and did not disable it after switching to Warrior from guild ops run). In this video, I get hit and pushed back, and the damage number stays in the original location.

Feel free to check what I mean (Warrior ending spoilers) =

ESO uses the Hero engine and as no problems coping with big open world pvp battles.

ESO is using hero engine 2.0, which is very stable. not only it is stable; hero engine 2.0 allows developers to deploy patches on the fly; devs can patch a major bug while keeping the servers live. problem with swtor is that bioware used a very very alpha version of hero engine; let's call it Hero Engine 0.0000000001; and then they tried to modify it to suit their needs, and Bioware failed terribly, just before swtor went f2p Bioware confessed that they spent over 100 million $ trying to make the hero engine 0.0000000001 mmorpg capable. It is not hero engine that is at fault here, misdirection of Bioware at that time was.

ESO is using hero engine 2.0, which is very stable. not only it is stable; hero engine 2.0 allows developers to deploy patches on the fly; devs can patch a major bug while keeping the servers live.

Source?

just before swtor went f2p Bioware confessed that they spent over 100 million $ trying to make the hero engine 0.0000000001 mmorpg capable.

Source?

ESO uses the Hero engine and as no problems coping with big open world pvp battles.

Pretty sure ESO only used Hero for prototyping and Hero is not the production game engine.

From a GameInformer article:

You licensed HeroEngine a long time ago. What role did the Hero Engine play in the development of ESO?

 

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.

Source?

 

Source?

Will give you the hint that his information was delivered with copious amounts of methane and let you guess the source from there. But you already knew that.