It really makes me laugh when I see people bashing a technology they have NO CLUE about!
What's to know? The fact that they took a buggy, incomplete, undocumented fork of the code (according to the guys that licensed it to them) is all you need to know. The fact they produced a working game at all is verging on miraculous. I linked the pertinent stuff earlier in the thread so wont bother again.
You know what makes me laugh (rather smugly)? People that assume that everyone shares the same limitations they do. Though I agree most people have no clue.
I'm currently a programmer but not working in the game industry anymore although I have worked with Renderware and Direct X in the past so i'll give my 2cents.
Had it been a smaller and less reputable company I would have said the 3rd party engine was a good choice. However even in 2005 BW making a name for themselves putting out quality products(similar to Blizzard), they had revenue, good developers and landed an amazing IP so I feel they definitely should have developed in house. If you have no network code experience you go out and hire the best network coders in the industry, nuff said . Certainly with the Star Wars IP they could have all the funding they need.
The problem with buying someone elses engine is you really dont know where the performance or memory issues are and you dont want to re-write the whole thing. Yes there are performance tools ect but it's still not as good as writting it yourself. The other biggie is that since they didn't write the ancestor or base code it becomes much harder to find and fix things. If I'm looking at someone elses code to fix a bug one of the first things I like to do if possible is talk to the person to find out if there is a reason they coded it like they did because you can easily fix one thing and sometimes break many others(sound familar in SWTOR?) if you don't fully understand the original developers line of thought.
Think of it like this...if you had a Corvette and you wanted it to be faster with better performance than all other Corvettes and option 1 is to take it to a local hot rod shop that specializes in all different models and has occassionally worked on Corvettes or you could hire the entire team of engineers that designed and built the engine itself(if you have the money). The original designers are the ones that could squeeze everything out of that engine whereas lets say Bioware is the hotrod shop. They know how to work on cars and replace things and add new things but dont have the 100% understanding of the original engineers since they didn't create it themselves. For example BW made a recent post(I can link it if necessary) where they admitted they had a problem(read bug) in Illum where some timers were not resetting on captured nodes and just couldn't figure it out before live date so had to launch without that functionality.
Now look at Bethesda. In the video Here @ :41 they mention they created a brand new engine to take advantage of the latest hardware. They also mention their obsession with 'attention to detail', something that is severly lacking in Swtor(read lifeless worlds). The engine also scales so if you have older hardware it will still run good. Skyrim runs worlds better on my hardware (gtx 580) than Swtor. Sure Swtor has to tone it down since there could be alot of players(course this is solved by instancing) but even when there isn't alot of players it's still painfully slow. Not to mention Bethesda's engine makes BW's implementation of the Hero engine look like complete garbage.
On a positive note I've heard rumors of Bethesda possibily creating a MMORPG but that could be just rumors though it's nice to dream.
Comments
The game runs well on my system, maybe even better than WoW, so not sure where the big fail of the hero engine is.
Although their shadows kill my fps, so that's all that I think could be improved.
What's to know? The fact that they took a buggy, incomplete, undocumented fork of the code (according to the guys that licensed it to them) is all you need to know. The fact they produced a working game at all is verging on miraculous. I linked the pertinent stuff earlier in the thread so wont bother again.
You know what makes me laugh (rather smugly)? People that assume that everyone shares the same limitations they do. Though I agree most people have no clue.
I'm currently a programmer but not working in the game industry anymore although I have worked with Renderware and Direct X in the past so i'll give my 2cents.
Had it been a smaller and less reputable company I would have said the 3rd party engine was a good choice. However even in 2005 BW making a name for themselves putting out quality products(similar to Blizzard), they had revenue, good developers and landed an amazing IP so I feel they definitely should have developed in house. If you have no network code experience you go out and hire the best network coders in the industry, nuff said . Certainly with the Star Wars IP they could have all the funding they need.
The problem with buying someone elses engine is you really dont know where the performance or memory issues are and you dont want to re-write the whole thing. Yes there are performance tools ect but it's still not as good as writting it yourself. The other biggie is that since they didn't write the ancestor or base code it becomes much harder to find and fix things. If I'm looking at someone elses code to fix a bug one of the first things I like to do if possible is talk to the person to find out if there is a reason they coded it like they did because you can easily fix one thing and sometimes break many others(sound familar in SWTOR?) if you don't fully understand the original developers line of thought.
Think of it like this...if you had a Corvette and you wanted it to be faster with better performance than all other Corvettes and option 1 is to take it to a local hot rod shop that specializes in all different models and has occassionally worked on Corvettes or you could hire the entire team of engineers that designed and built the engine itself(if you have the money). The original designers are the ones that could squeeze everything out of that engine whereas lets say Bioware is the hotrod shop. They know how to work on cars and replace things and add new things but dont have the 100% understanding of the original engineers since they didn't create it themselves. For example BW made a recent post(I can link it if necessary) where they admitted they had a problem(read bug) in Illum where some timers were not resetting on captured nodes and just couldn't figure it out before live date so had to launch without that functionality.
Now look at Bethesda. In the video Here @ :41 they mention they created a brand new engine to take advantage of the latest hardware. They also mention their obsession with 'attention to detail', something that is severly lacking in Swtor(read lifeless worlds). The engine also scales so if you have older hardware it will still run good. Skyrim runs worlds better on my hardware (gtx 580) than Swtor. Sure Swtor has to tone it down since there could be alot of players(course this is solved by instancing) but even when there isn't alot of players it's still painfully slow. Not to mention Bethesda's engine makes BW's implementation of the Hero engine look like complete garbage.
On a positive note I've heard rumors of Bethesda possibily creating a MMORPG but that could be just rumors though it's nice to dream.