Originally posted by Quizzical Originally posted by DarkcrystalOriginally posted by bishboshI 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 etcif 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 unity3dmmorpgs are a big thing and you need large amounts of capital, experience, skills and manpower to make them.
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own ENGINE great but your a fool, Most that do fail , they spend to much money on building it and time and then its out of date, if its small scale great go for it.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 greatSo 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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by Drakynn People can only go by what they have seen so far fromt he HeroEngine and that means judging it on Warhammer Online,SW:TOR and Faxion OnLine all of which have suffered form poor optimization/performance and constant breaking after patches.
Our homegrown local lifetime pursuit HE hater hasn't even shown up in the thread yet.
Ah, we're not in the swtor forum, that explains the delay.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Originally posted by Drakynn People can only go by what they have seen so far fromt he HeroEngine and that means judging it on Warhammer Online,SW:TOR and Faxion OnLine all of which have suffered form poor optimization/performance and constant breaking after patches.
Originally posted by Drakynn People can only go by what they have seen so far fromt he HeroEngine and that means judging it on Warhammer Online,SW:TOR and Faxion OnLine all of which have suffered form poor optimization/performance and constant breaking after patches.
Warhammer didn't use the hero engine.
I stand corrected I guess I thoguht it did coz the graphic performance and look was similar but it did indeed use the gamebryo engine.
Not to be contrary for the sake of it, but given my lack of knowledge on developing games , much less an Mmo , from what I've gleaned from this thread do we really want more half-assed Indie mmo teams? I fully believe innovation will start with our Indie developers , but in the last few years I've spent alot of money "supporting" new Indie developers who are trying to make an Mmo. Every one of those developers has disappointed me, they don't seem to understand what they are getting into. ( Granted nor do I ) I say this rhetorically, Do we as the market want to invest our money on studio's utilizing "off the shelf" ( as one poster called it) engines? The market used to be saturated with large studio clones, now it seems its filling to the brim with Indie studio's who are cashing in on our desire for something different, and ontop of that these "off the shelf" engines are simply opening the door wider. The alternatives are to not support any titles, or those from larger studio's with some experience.
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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.
I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
I can definitely see this as being a great tool for indie developers and higher learning institutions as well. Would be a great platform to learn how to program. Not to mention the capability for many parties to work together on the same project. I feel like this will bring about some great projects and seems more affordable than some of the alternatives.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift. I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough. I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
Not to be contrary for the sake of it, but given my lack of knowledge on developing games , much less an Mmo , from what I've gleaned from this thread do we really want more half-assed Indie mmo teams? I fully believe innovation will start with our Indie developers , but in the last few years I've spent alot of money "supporting" new Indie developers who are trying to make an Mmo. Every one of those developers has disappointed me, they don't seem to understand what they are getting into. ( Granted nor do I ) I say this rhetorically, Do we as the market want to invest our money on studio's utilizing "off the shelf" ( as one poster called it) engines? The market used to be saturated with large studio clones, now it seems its filling to the brim with Indie studio's who are cashing in on our desire for something different, and ontop of that these "off the shelf" engines are simply opening the door wider. The alternatives are to not support any titles, or those from larger studio's with some experience.
Just my thoughts.
I've had some pretty good experiences with the indie MMOs that I've played (A Tale in the Desert, Puzzle Pirates, Wizard 101, Spiral Knights). Maybe you're playing the wrong games?
If an indie studio promises that they're going to do anything and everything to create the ultimate game (Project Universe, I'm looking at you), then of course they're not going to deliver. But if they scale back their ambitions to only doing a few things well--and perhaps things that most MMOs don't do well--that's a lot more doable.
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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.
I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
Pretty cool idea. Other than the occasional venture into torus territory (ex:UO), most game maps like you said stick to cylinders. Would be cool to experience an actual round map, especially in an exploration type game.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.
How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.
How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!
Originally posted by Quizzical Originally posted by lizardbonesOriginally posted by QuizzicalI 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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread too much, or maybe this information will be relevant to some other developers out there.
When the player view point is moving, is the player moving, or is the object they are walking on rotating? The reason I ask is for multiplayer environments. I was looking at Unreal and Unity, and it looked possible to have a round surface to run around on, but the mechanics to make it happen were that the surface rotated under the player viewpoint, rather than the player viewpoint running around on the surface. This was because there is a static "down" for gravity. This is fine for a single player environment, but multiple players couldn't rotate the same object at the same time. Also, the skybox would have stayed in a static position, which might look weird. At the time, I didn't see a way to write in a different gravity property for the system.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by botrytis Originally posted by theoneandonlyI dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!
The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.
How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!
What i was trying to say, that there ara hundrents of people who will pay $99 but have no idea what to do with it.
Originally posted by Quizzical 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.
hmmm, but you are talking about graphics, no?
I don't think indy developers are necessarily looking to make graphica innovations so much as game play innovations.
Now having said that, the rest of your posts ring true. But I'm not sure that sentence above pertains for game play innovations.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.
I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
Pretty cool idea. Other than the occasional venture into torus territory (ex:UO), most game maps like you said stick to cylinders. Would be cool to experience an actual round map, especially in an exploration type game.
Most games stick to rectangles, or something else that is completely flat. They usually don't even get as far as cylinders, though some games do. Toruses (tori?) are pretty easy, too: if you go off of any edge, you come back on the opposite edge, without any rotation or orientation change necessary.
Spheres are much harder, as there isn't any nice way to map a plane onto a sphere. Look at all of the contortions that mapmakers have to go through to give you a map of Earth.
Originally posted by theoneandonlyI dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!
The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.
I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.
Originally posted by QuizzicalI 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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.
I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread too much, or maybe this information will be relevant to some other developers out there.
When the player view point is moving, is the player moving, or is the object they are walking on rotating? The reason I ask is for multiplayer environments. I was looking at Unreal and Unity, and it looked possible to have a round surface to run around on, but the mechanics to make it happen were that the surface rotated under the player viewpoint, rather than the player viewpoint running around on the surface. This was because there is a static "down" for gravity. This is fine for a single player environment, but multiple players couldn't rotate the same object at the same time. Also, the skybox would have stayed in a static position, which might look weird. At the time, I didn't see a way to write in a different gravity property for the system.
That depends on which coordinate system you're talking about. A game engine internally has to have a bunch of different coordinate systems, and you have to convert between them a lot. That's why when people ask about designing a game, I insist that you absolutely must be comfortable with change of basis matrices to do 3D graphics, or else you're not going to get anywhere.
Internally, every object has a position in the coordinate system for the region it is in. Every region (32 in my game world) has its own coordinate system, and objects near regional boundaries often have to be converted into the coordinate system of the adjacent region(s). In this coordinate system, it is the player who moves while the trees and rocks and so forth stay put. Eventually there will be NPCs and mobs and some other animated objects that also move, but I haven't made them yet.
There is also a coordinate system for the camera. In every single frame, every nearby object has to be converted from region coordinates to camera coordinates. Then there are some tests to see if the object might plausibly appear on the screen, and if not, it is skipped. If it might appear, then the uniforms to draw it are computed and get passed along to the rendering thread, which sorts things and sends them along to the video card to draw. The rendering thread never sees anything in regional coordinates, but only camera coordinates, so from that perspective, the camera stays put and everything else in the world moves.
Each object implicitly has its own coordinate system, and various surfaces that make up the object have their location given in the object's coordinate system, which then gets converted to regional coordinates. The object's coordinate system is a simple translation of region coordinates, so this is pretty easy.
There are also clip coordinates, window coordinates, and screen coordinates, but that's all done on the video card, and the CPU side of the code doesn't touch it at all other than to update some uniforms when the player makes certain changes, such as resizing the window. Well, the window size is relevant to determining whether objects will appear on the screen, I suppose.
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."
Are you talking about a game engine or a graphics engine?
Originally posted by Souldrainer There are some good things that this engine brings to the table, like stable network management. However, if you are an indie dev who has fewer than 10 games under your belt, I strongly advise you to avoid RPGs and MMOs until you have a good grasp on the fundamentals of game design.
This doesn't matter at all.
WoW was Blizzard's first MMO. It did very well.
SWTOr was BioWare's first MMO. It did very bad.
It's all about knowing what makes a good MMO. BioWare claimed it was story. Nope.
Originally posted by Hedake Originally posted by lizardbonesOriginally posted by botrytisOriginally posted by theoneandonlyI dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.
Hero's cloud handles the game storage and distribution and some middleware pieces that the developer won't have to deal with like a chat system and billing systems. They are short cutting the development process of an MMO for indie developers.
Let's say a game gets 500 dedicated players, at $5 a player per month. That's $2500 a month. Hero gets $750 a month for hosting the game, providing the development platform and for the completed middleware. That's a lot of money. At the same time, they've made it possible for someone to write a game without a lot of upfront costs, aside from time. They've also handled a good bit of paper work in the server setup, bandwidth and billing.
I don't think it's a bad deal for a small scale indie developer.
The downside, as Quizzical pointed out is that the developer is limited by what the system is capable of. You want the chat or auction system tied to a mobile application? Well, you might have to wait for Hero to do it, pay a good bit more money for a better license, or write it and host it yourself, along with all the backend systems that were included in the Hero Cloud.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.
How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!
It's not quite that black and white. I mentioned it earlier because it was relevant, but what I didn't mention was that it also covers a lot of backend infrastructure for the game, that would otherwise cost you to maintane. A game using the Hero Cloud (the $99 yearly sub thing) includes the server hosting and payment collection (means to charge people for your game).
That may or may not be a better deal than simply hosting the game on your own servers using your own bandwidth, but it is an option. You can also develop the game on the Hero Cloud model and migrate it all over to your own stuff by purchasing an actual license for $75k and an additional 7% revenue share. If your'e company is very large they could probably negotiate better terms (I suspect Bioware did just that with SWtOR).
For comparison, licensing the Unreal Engine isn't too far off, although a bit more complicated. It's free for non-commercial use so don't have to really spend any money while in development. Once your game goes live, you only start to owe something after your revenue hits $50k, at which point they collect 25% of your revenue. They do not provide hosting or payment services, however.
There is probably an option for licensing the Unreal Engine with lower/no royalty fees, but I don't have details in front of me. Industry standards are generally lower 6 digits though.
MMO's are not cheap to make or maintane no matter how you go about. Blizzard was in a particularly advantageous position due to creating WoW using an existing in-house game engine (the WC3 engine) so they not only already had the technical expertise for it, but they owed nothing for it's use. And since it had already paid for itself through the WC3 games, it was essentially "free" when compared to pretty much every other MMO which had to license existing egines just to avoid spending 3 or 4 years building one before even starting on their game.
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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."
Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Our homegrown local lifetime pursuit HE hater hasn't even shown up in the thread yet.
Ah, we're not in the swtor forum, that explains the delay.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Warhammer didn't use the hero engine.
I stand corrected I guess I thoguht it did coz the graphic performance and look was similar but it did indeed use the gamebryo engine.
Not to be contrary for the sake of it, but given my lack of knowledge on developing games , much less an Mmo , from what I've gleaned from this thread do we really want more half-assed Indie mmo teams? I fully believe innovation will start with our Indie developers , but in the last few years I've spent alot of money "supporting" new Indie developers who are trying to make an Mmo. Every one of those developers has disappointed me, they don't seem to understand what they are getting into. ( Granted nor do I ) I say this rhetorically, Do we as the market want to invest our money on studio's utilizing "off the shelf" ( as one poster called it) engines? The market used to be saturated with large studio clones, now it seems its filling to the brim with Indie studio's who are cashing in on our desire for something different, and ontop of that these "off the shelf" engines are simply opening the door wider. The alternatives are to not support any titles, or those from larger studio's with some experience.
Just my thoughts.
I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
I've had some pretty good experiences with the indie MMOs that I've played (A Tale in the Desert, Puzzle Pirates, Wizard 101, Spiral Knights). Maybe you're playing the wrong games?
If an indie studio promises that they're going to do anything and everything to create the ultimate game (Project Universe, I'm looking at you), then of course they're not going to deliver. But if they scale back their ambitions to only doing a few things well--and perhaps things that most MMOs don't do well--that's a lot more doable.
Pretty cool idea. Other than the occasional venture into torus territory (ex:UO), most game maps like you said stick to cylinders. Would be cool to experience an actual round map, especially in an exploration type game.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.
How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.
That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!
I wanted a sphere, like Earth. A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other. It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat. For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat. And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.
Gravity doesn't vary. The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are. Kind of like on Earth.
Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread too much, or maybe this information will be relevant to some other developers out there.
When the player view point is moving, is the player moving, or is the object they are walking on rotating? The reason I ask is for multiplayer environments. I was looking at Unreal and Unity, and it looked possible to have a round surface to run around on, but the mechanics to make it happen were that the surface rotated under the player viewpoint, rather than the player viewpoint running around on the surface. This was because there is a static "down" for gravity. This is fine for a single player environment, but multiple players couldn't rotate the same object at the same time. Also, the skybox would have stayed in a static position, which might look weird. At the time, I didn't see a way to write in a different gravity property for the system.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
What i was trying to say, that there ara hundrents of people who will pay $99 but have no idea what to do with it.
hmmm, but you are talking about graphics, no?
I don't think indy developers are necessarily looking to make graphica innovations so much as game play innovations.
Now having said that, the rest of your posts ring true. But I'm not sure that sentence above pertains for game play innovations.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Most games stick to rectangles, or something else that is completely flat. They usually don't even get as far as cylinders, though some games do. Toruses (tori?) are pretty easy, too: if you go off of any edge, you come back on the opposite edge, without any rotation or orientation change necessary.
Spheres are much harder, as there isn't any nice way to map a plane onto a sphere. Look at all of the contortions that mapmakers have to go through to give you a map of Earth.
I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.
That depends on which coordinate system you're talking about. A game engine internally has to have a bunch of different coordinate systems, and you have to convert between them a lot. That's why when people ask about designing a game, I insist that you absolutely must be comfortable with change of basis matrices to do 3D graphics, or else you're not going to get anywhere.
Internally, every object has a position in the coordinate system for the region it is in. Every region (32 in my game world) has its own coordinate system, and objects near regional boundaries often have to be converted into the coordinate system of the adjacent region(s). In this coordinate system, it is the player who moves while the trees and rocks and so forth stay put. Eventually there will be NPCs and mobs and some other animated objects that also move, but I haven't made them yet.
There is also a coordinate system for the camera. In every single frame, every nearby object has to be converted from region coordinates to camera coordinates. Then there are some tests to see if the object might plausibly appear on the screen, and if not, it is skipped. If it might appear, then the uniforms to draw it are computed and get passed along to the rendering thread, which sorts things and sends them along to the video card to draw. The rendering thread never sees anything in regional coordinates, but only camera coordinates, so from that perspective, the camera stays put and everything else in the world moves.
Each object implicitly has its own coordinate system, and various surfaces that make up the object have their location given in the object's coordinate system, which then gets converted to regional coordinates. The object's coordinate system is a simple translation of region coordinates, so this is pretty easy.
There are also clip coordinates, window coordinates, and screen coordinates, but that's all done on the video card, and the CPU side of the code doesn't touch it at all other than to update some uniforms when the player makes certain changes, such as resizing the window. Well, the window size is relevant to determining whether objects will appear on the screen, I suppose.
Are you talking about a game engine or a graphics engine?
You make me like charity
This doesn't matter at all.
WoW was Blizzard's first MMO. It did very well.
SWTOr was BioWare's first MMO. It did very bad.
It's all about knowing what makes a good MMO. BioWare claimed it was story. Nope.
I don't understand why people bash Hero Engine. It's a great engine. Before SWTOR flopped, it was leasing out at over 1m.
It wasn't the engine's fault. It was the developers' fault.
The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.
I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.
Hero's cloud handles the game storage and distribution and some middleware pieces that the developer won't have to deal with like a chat system and billing systems. They are short cutting the development process of an MMO for indie developers.
Let's say a game gets 500 dedicated players, at $5 a player per month. That's $2500 a month. Hero gets $750 a month for hosting the game, providing the development platform and for the completed middleware. That's a lot of money. At the same time, they've made it possible for someone to write a game without a lot of upfront costs, aside from time. They've also handled a good bit of paper work in the server setup, bandwidth and billing.
I don't think it's a bad deal for a small scale indie developer.
The downside, as Quizzical pointed out is that the developer is limited by what the system is capable of. You want the chat or auction system tied to a mobile application? Well, you might have to wait for Hero to do it, pay a good bit more money for a better license, or write it and host it yourself, along with all the backend systems that were included in the Hero Cloud.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Yup.. Hero engine and open world
"You are all going to poop yourselves." BillMurphy
"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
This^^^
"You are all going to poop yourselves." BillMurphy
"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
It's not quite that black and white. I mentioned it earlier because it was relevant, but what I didn't mention was that it also covers a lot of backend infrastructure for the game, that would otherwise cost you to maintane. A game using the Hero Cloud (the $99 yearly sub thing) includes the server hosting and payment collection (means to charge people for your game).
That may or may not be a better deal than simply hosting the game on your own servers using your own bandwidth, but it is an option. You can also develop the game on the Hero Cloud model and migrate it all over to your own stuff by purchasing an actual license for $75k and an additional 7% revenue share. If your'e company is very large they could probably negotiate better terms (I suspect Bioware did just that with SWtOR).
For comparison, licensing the Unreal Engine isn't too far off, although a bit more complicated. It's free for non-commercial use so don't have to really spend any money while in development. Once your game goes live, you only start to owe something after your revenue hits $50k, at which point they collect 25% of your revenue. They do not provide hosting or payment services, however.
There is probably an option for licensing the Unreal Engine with lower/no royalty fees, but I don't have details in front of me. Industry standards are generally lower 6 digits though.
MMO's are not cheap to make or maintane no matter how you go about. Blizzard was in a particularly advantageous position due to creating WoW using an existing in-house game engine (the WC3 engine) so they not only already had the technical expertise for it, but they owed nothing for it's use. And since it had already paid for itself through the WC3 games, it was essentially "free" when compared to pretty much every other MMO which had to license existing egines just to avoid spending 3 or 4 years building one before even starting on their game.
You make me like charity