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Hero Engine 2 $99/year ~ Indy MMOs
MindTrigger
Member Posts: 2,596
I've been keeping an eye on businesses like Idea Fabrik's Hero Engine because I am interested in indy MMORPG games. Hero Engine 2 just dropped recently and along with things such as updated graphics, they have also made some improvements that are specifically targeted at indy developers to aid in development speed. Hang in there with me, because this post is a bit of a thought up-chuck rather than a fleshed out idea.
I've heard people whine about Hero Engine around here, though most of the whining has been based on shortcomings seen in SWTOR. I won't go into details, because there are plenty of discussions about the subject available, but SWTOR did not even truly use Hero Engine 1. Bioware licensed a beta version of engine years ago, and then developed it on their own.
Still, even if you don't like engines like Hero for large-scale MMO games, it's pretty amazing to see what they are offering for $99/ year. Especially when you factor in that they are including middleware such as SpeedTree, PhysX and other game development staples. Think about that. For $99, you get instant access to a cloud-based server of your own, with all the tools you'll probably ever need to make a small indy title. Not to mention they provide you with the server hosting and bandwidth for your future customers.
I haven't been following the development of Notch's new 0x10c game in development, but it really made me start thinking about how important indy games are going to be for the future, especially in light of so many game companies choosing the path of cloning past success, rather than stepping outside the box and trying new things.
(Info about Notch's new game in early development in case you didn't know about it)
Recently on these boards, there were discussions about Greed Monger, and the use of middleware assets for indy development. Some people complained that Greed Monger may be using some stock assets in their game, though the developers have stated that they have hired their own artists and are making their own assets too. Really, if people are wanting to play new games made by solo-devs or small teams, then we are going to have to get past all of the bickering about middleware, and just see if the developer can make fun gameplay.
The fact is, to build a completely unique MMO world with 100% unique assets requires more time and money than most indy developers are going to have access to. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what kinds of projects engines like Hero can help people put together for a fraction of the cost. If only they could get a "lite" version of it out there for free, I think they would see a lot more people tinkering on small projects and coming up with great ideas.
Let's also not forget the potential for tools like Hero Engine for prototyping. I think there is room for people to make and sell MMO gameplay systems in addition to art assets, engines and other middleware. Do you have a great idea for a unique crafting and resource system, for example? Why not prototype it in small scale with something like Hero or Unity, and then sell the idea to a larger company?
This whole subject also made me think about smaller super-niche MMO games. As a small developer, how do you measure success? For example, if I was to make a small MMO sandbox game that only kept about 1000-5000 players subscribed, would that suck for me? As a small business or side business, I say no. No it wouldn't. Your overhead on something that size wouldn't be bad at all, and if you were charging $5 per month we're talking about $25,000 per month gross on the higher end of my example. I know from being an IT Pro that server space and bandwidth for a small game like this would not cost a fortune.
As someone who loves MMO games from playing them to following the ins and outs of the industry, it gets my mind spinning. Just while I was writing this I was thinking about fun things to learn from, such as trying to recreate the Star Wars Galaxies crafting system in small scale.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Comments
*Handclaps!*
I had no idea it was as low as $99 a year. This is exactly the sort of thing that independant and niche games need to put out (relatively) inexpensive games, or game concepts. I'd been hoping to see this sort of thing show up for years.
Let the clades begin forming en masse!
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Right, and I didn't even talk about how Hero Engine is designed from the ground up to make development much more friendly than it ever could be for indy developers. They way they have made it so you can design the world while you are in it (or your whole team) is pretty incredible. They claim to have systems in place to minimze coding in a lot of ways too, which is fantastic.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.
Game engines are designed to do particular things. If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great. But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options: modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.
If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you. Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it. It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been. If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3: abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.
There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create. They're not. You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too). But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too. Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.
I'd like to add that the graphics portion of a game engine is very performance sensitive, but not very long. You're supposed to write shaders to do graphics computations, in order to make the game engine process your art assets in exactly the manner that you want. In order to get acceptable performance for a game, shaders need to run millions of times per second--or in the case of pixel/fragment shaders, hundreds of millions of times per second. So they're not going to take thousands of lines of source code.
Let me grab an example from a project I'm working on:
#version 420
layout(triangles, equal_spacing, ccw) in;
uniform vec3 moveVector;
uniform mat3 camMatrix;
uniform mat3 objMatrix;
uniform vec4 axes;
out vec3 teNormal;
out vec3 teTexCoord;
void main() {
teTexCoord = mat3(gl_in[0].gl_Position.xyz, gl_in[1].gl_Position.xyz, gl_in[2].gl_Position.xyz) * gl_TessCoord;
teTexCoord.xy = normalize(teTexCoord.xy);
teNormal = normalize(camMatrix * (objMatrix * vec3(teTexCoord.xy * (axes.y / axes.x), 0.0f)));
gl_Position = vec4(camMatrix * (objMatrix * (teTexCoord * axes.xxz) + moveVector), 1.0f);
}
(Yes, I do comment my code. I removed the comments before posting it here.) Dense, yes. But not long. They can get somewhat longer than that, but if you're taking hundreds of lines for a shader, you're probably doing it wrong. The graphics part of a game engine basically consists of writing several dozen shaders and then the code to feed in the data that the shaders will process. Think that will cost millions of dollars?
Make your own game engine and you can make it do whatever you want. If you don't, you'll be severely restricted in what you can do. Does the Hero Engine let you write your own shaders? If the hope of indie games is innovation, then using an off-the-shelf game engine will stifle that, even if it does make it easier to make a simple game that kind of works.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
If you can't get a competent programmer, then don't you think that will cause an awful lot of problems for your game? And problems that licensing a game engine can't fix, no less.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
interesting version
---------------------------
Corpus Callosum
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That means the shader uses GLSL version 4.2, which corresponds to OpenGL 4.2. I didn't create the numbering convention.
I have researched quite a few game engines because i am currently looking into making my own casual multiplayer game. hero engine is basically a toy to play around with for people who arent really serious about making games for money.
high quality large scale mmorpgs/games do not work well with one solution fits all stuff like hero engine. im sorry but thats the way it is.
hero engine uses some weird hero script which probably doesnt give the developer much control over anything and it probably runs slow as shit.
the whole hero cloud server crap is bullshit. no decent mmorpg or online game will run on servers which they have little control over.
if the developer doesnt have control over server-client interaction and the mulitplayer code, developer cannot guarantee stability, no hacks , no lag etcc etc
if you want to make a big huge mmorpg, you probably cant . stop dreaming.... you would need to build your own complex game engine or pay $500k-$1000k for a proprietary game engine which you would then heavily modify...
if you are making a smaller game make your own primittive game engine or use unity3d
mmorpgs are a big thing and you need large amounts of capital, experience, skills and manpower to make them.
i think game design is probably the last thing you have to worry about.
i would worry about business management, capital, experience and knowledge in the industry, engineering skills
probs better if they just contacted bioware (swtor division) for some "expert" advice
also im pretty sure eso,swtor use a proprietary version of hero engine with heavy mods and swtor peformance still sucked despite heavy use of instancing
There's an enormous difference between a license to use the engine as-is, and a license that gives you the source code and lets you modify it however you wish. The former cripples you and the latter doesn't. But the latter also isn't available for $99/year.
man you have no idea what you are talking about lol. no offense, but you need to reseach more, use Hero for a few years and come back and post something educated. truely sad.
can u list a game which uses hero engine non propriatary?
3 hero engine games that i know -
dominus - shutdown before release
faxion - shutdown shortly after release (i actually tried this one and performance was utter crap despite low res low polygon gfx)
swtor - runs like crap despite ageing gfx and heavy instancing, heavily criticised game for unoriginality and poor performance, switched to f2p
do you honestly think heroengine will pay for whatever your bandwidth costs are for $99/ year once your game is released and pay for server maint with this measly amount of money? no they wont because hero engine sucks and they know only retards who think making an mmorpg weekend leisurely affair.
the engine is easy to use, fast content creation and very appealing -- it designed to lure noobs who think they can make an mmorpg into paying $99/year. hero engine people know these mmorpgs will never materialise. this is why proper companies by proprietary licenses which cost undisclosedly large amounts.
That right there is the entire concept of an off-the-shelf game engine. Hero Engine versus some other has nothing to do with it. But you already knew that.
Before everyone gets all excited about this, keep in mind that the Hero Engine is not at all designed for "open world" gameplay. It's more like GW2 design, where you have some decent zone sizes conencted with loading screens.
Also, the $99 a year is a great place to start, but there are some pretty hefty licensing fee's if your game ever goes live, and charges people. Something like 35% of all profits go directly to them, if I remember.
You make me like charity
oh wow might as well just use UDK (powered by unreal engine 3). its free until you make 50k and then you have to give them 30% of how much you make.
both very expensive but at least unreal engine 3 is known to be a good performer
I think this is a very good thread.
While making an MMO is indeed a quite complex endeavor I think Off the shelf engines can at least help many to get a clear idea or what is involved. And you never know who can come up with some good ideas in the process and why not even a game or two.
Plenty of people have good ideas, but othen no guidance on how to make them a reality, and off the shelf engines can help in giving thet guidance, even if it does not pan out, at these prices it is accessible even for experimenting, learning, getting some experience. Worse case scenario you will make nothing with it, moderate case scenario a nice single player game can come out of it, a better case a small MMO, or as the OP states, a Proptotype for a trylly great MMO.
There are many engines out there but this is a list from Gamasutra:
Torque Game Builder, Garage Games
Valve Source Engine, Valve
Unreal Engine, Epic
HeroEngine, Simutronics Corporation
Gamebryo, Emergent
You can look them up.
None of this can be negative for anyone, it is but positive, and like it happened in so many other fields, success is not bound by only One way of doing things.
Cheers!
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
The Repopulation is working with Hero. I'm curious to see how they do with it.
oH REALLY! I have my degree in Game design and work as a Dev this is a total lie, there are plenty of games out there that use Hero and alot of the other Known engines.
If you write your own ENGINE great but your a fool, Most that do fail , they spend to much money on building it and time and then its out of date, if its small scale great go for it. But the way the industry is going, soon you will barely need programmers.... Heck now you barely do besides for Networking and some advance AI, etc..... By the way Programming and Scripting are two different things.....you can get alot more work done at a faster rate with the current Engines, I have worked With Hero, UDK, Unreal there is a difference, Unity , Cry 2 and 3. Plus many many more, to sit there and say this to funny, right now I work with a company that uses Hero and its an MMo. Do your research and you will know which ones use it....
Unity also can make a MMo and do fine, its great for IOS and such but just as good with Mmo's heck Unreal can do MMo's it can be done and has, I would not advise it since there are better ones for MMo's Hero being one, but its a great engine.
Funny post, I love when gamers think... They know about Game Design when they have no clue..
@ XapGames your SIg is so true... But I'm more on the Artside , but I code , Script as well... But I do more art work then anything, I do know C#, C++ Java, FLASH, LUA, a few others, but I'm an Environment Artist, Texture artist . I do alot of free lance work to.. of Modeling etc...
PS: Repopulation is doing great
a degree in game design? is that even a real degree? sorry but respectable universaties dont offer game design degrees...btw im going into my final year of an engineering degree (a proper real mans degree with maths and technology, not some painting arts crap which your can learn on youtube)
$50 your mmo will fail or it wont even come into frution. im guessing your company is a bunch of friends and you guys think you can make a mmo. good luck with that.
you are clearly biased as you are already locked into development with hero engine. has repopulation even been released?
writing your own engine is foolish? this is the most dumb thing i have heard. how about you have a look at what happens in the real world. most big games have been built of in house engines custom made for that game. diablo, starcraft, warcraft, WoW, gw2, battlefield, CoD, halflife even indie games such as minecraft have their own custom engine. wtf are you smoking?
no serious mmorpg dev or businessman will use these hobby toy engines.
1. first of all UDK/hero engine ask for ~30% of your profits.... that is a huge amount of money. get a proprietary license and pay the ~ < $1 mil fee once off and get access to source code etc etc (i would buy unreal over hero ; track record, superior tech etc)
2. without access to source code you wont have much control over how the game engine works and your game will suck
Edit: Good Lord the WoT bug got me, TL;DR version: Its a good engine to learn game building, use Unity or Unreal if you want to market and sell your game.
If you want to learn how to build a game its probably one of the best engines to learn how to build a game on. It can still do things in development that other engines just dont do effectively. If you want to make a comercially viable game its not a great engine. Here's why from my experience. Simutronics/HeroEngine/IdeaFabrik never built a game with their own engine. They started but never finished it. This never gave them real world experience (as a company) to be able to know how to develop updates, market and support clients using their engine. Unreal has this and is able to support their customers with real examples of how to overcome a multiude of developer issues that devs may not know will come up. Early on, Bioware took the Hero engine from Simutronics and the two companies went separate ways. This hurt HeroEngine substantially in that their brand was married to a early version of their engine that was just a shell of what it is now. What Bioware did with it and the SWTOR outcome is on Bioware IMO, not on HeroEngine. The outcome for Hero was that they had no idea the issues that real devs experience with their engine but alot of bad press. It was a bad business move in my opinion to give away untested tech and not partner with a developer.
In addition to that, their relationship with many of their devs had been advesarial early on. Rather than work with their devs over the past 4 years they were largely confrontational. They often made code base changes that dramatically affected devs with little or no notice. One example is some time in early 2011 they changed the memory management of the engine as they transitioned from a engine focused on MMO's to an engine focused on "cloud" games. I dont know why they did this other than that cloud games have a smaller footprint than MMO's (larger client based MMO's like SWTOR et al, not web games with a 1GB client) and they would not need to dump the memory on the same scale. This would allow smaller games to have an unending feel if developed correctly. Prior to this change the engine would dump memory (similar to what wow/gw does) for zones that you are no longer in. This prevents the RAM from getting loaded and crashing the game. If you want to see what I mean load your favorite MMO and look at the memory performance. It should go up and down as you load unload areas. After the change the engine didnt dump memory effectively. It just kept loading and loading til crash.
As the MMO market dried up, HeroEngine pretty much all but abandoned the previous MMO Engine design (larger games) and started to move to support cloud/mobile gaming. At the same time, as Unreal wanted to stem the Unity tide (which was making inroads in mobile and 3D gaming) Unreal released a 30% revenue share, develop for free to start model. Hero followed with the same thing. Unfortunately for Hero, they didnt have the knowledge/examples of making a game, marketing a game, and supporting a game with their engine like Unreal does. You can do the $99 thing with Unreal with no royalty for the first 50k or so, then its like 25% after. Unreal and Unity both have many successful titles that make them very viable to actually get your game out there and sold.
Unreal and Unity both offer many additional support options for Graphics, AI, systems, code optimization and tech support that Hero just doesnt have the resources to match. Hero Engine is very easy to use, the coding isnt simple or optimal but managable. But if you really want to get your game out the door, you may want to start with another engine. I am currently using Unity as Unreal is more of a cannon and I dont really need that firepower for what I want to do now. Sorry for the reality check, just my two pennies.
So let me get this straight. The problem with writing your own game engine is that it will be outdated? But if you use the DirectX 9.0c Hero Engine (welcome to 2005!), that's not outdated? Does Hero Engine offer support for a bunch of custom effects done through geometry shaders? How about extensive use of tessellation? Post-processing effects done via framebuffer objects, or whatever the DirectX equivalent is? If not, then it doesn't support modern computer graphics, period.
The problem isn't just the DirectX version. It's what you do with it that matters. If you ostensibly use DirectX 11, but don't do anything with it that couldn't be done just as well in DirectX 9.0c, then you're not doing modern computer graphics. Now, there is a fair bit that you can do with older APIs, such as every game ever made before 2007, and a lot of the ones made since then. Using outdated graphics methods isn't the kiss of death for a game. But trying to keep up to date is hardly an argument for using the Hero Engine.
I wanted to create a seamless, round world. Can I do that with Hero Engine, or any other off-the-shelf game engine, for that matter? By writing my own, I could and did. I wanted to use tessellation very extensively, to the extent that turning tessellation "off" is logical nonsense apart from surfaces that are supposed to appear completely flat. Can I do that and still draw whatever shapes I want with Hero Engine or any other off-the-shelf game engine? By writing my own, I could and did. I wanted to have many thousands of trees in my game world, and make every single tree look different from every other. Can I do that with the Hero Engine? By writing my own, I could and did. There's a bunch of other stuff that I want to do that you've likely never seen, but I'd have no hope of shoehorning it into Hero Engine. And I'm pretty sure that I can do a lot of it, though perhaps I shouldn't talk too much while it's still "I think I can" as opposed to "I have done."