Size of the company has nothing to do with it. An NFL team that hires 10 mediocre quarterbacks doesn't have the position settled. You only need one starter, but you do need a good one.
You don't need 50 people tinkering with the DirectX and HLSL portions of a game engine. You don't want 50 people tinkering with it. That will just make an enormous mess. You do, however, need one good one. And it's not something that just anyone can do. The overwhelming majority of computer programmers simply don't have the math background to do modern computer graphics. The background needed for DirectX 9.0c is substantially less, but still, most computer programmers wouldn't be able to do a good job of it. You really only need one person to deal with that part of the game engine--but he needs to be good at it.
And how do you find out if someone is good at it? Well, you hire him, let him try, and see what happens. A past track record can only tell you so much, as hardware capabilities have greatly increased as time has passed. Someone who is very good at having 2D sprites move around on a screen isn't automatically good at rendering 3D models.
Even if you do get someone really good to work on the graphics part of your game engine, if he leaves the company before the product is done, you're in trouble. If he didn't document things all that well so that the next guy to come along can decipher it, then you're in really big trouble. I'd imagine that getting bought out by EA isn't great for employee retention, either.
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Furthermore, you don't get to make fundamental game engine decisions the day that your game launches. You have to make those decisions years ahead of time. If each model uses this many vertices, this many textures, this many uniforms, they get shared with other data this often, and so forth, then how many frames per second would you get if you have 20 characters on the screen running on hardware that will launch 3 years from now? You can't just fire up a time machine and go check.
Hardware not going where you expected it to go is a real concern, too. My favorite example of this is EverQuest II, which was built around needing high single-threaded CPU performance. Even when the game launched, Intel was still promising that they were well on their way to a 10 GHz Pentium 4. Then physics got in the way, and a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 that launched that year was the highest stock-clocked desktop processor that would launch until 2012. Even today, the highest stock-clocked desktop processor ever is only 4.2 GHz.
Or to take a more recent example, just a few months ago, Nvidia surprised people by announcing that Tegra 4 wouldn't have unified shaders. Rather, it only has a handful of vertex shaders, so if you wanted to have a lot of vertices in your models, it's going to completely choke on a Tegra 4.
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It's never a case of "this game engine has everything you need", unless you're trying to make a really generic clone. You can pick between a bunch of different game engines that have a lot of the capabiilties that you need, but nowhere near all of them. And then you have to guess which engine is easiest to modify to get exactly what you need, taking into account that "build your own" may sometimes be the correct answer. But you don't actually find out how hard it is to change a game engine to do what you want until you try it, as it depends on a zillion little details that don't make it into the marketing literature--and don't necessarily even make it into the code comments.
Pleasure to read your posts. Always learning something. Thank you
It's not always good to side with someone who admits to never bothering to install the game in question, in this case SWTOR. The points brought up are mostly fillers for the mastermind plot: convince someone you know what you are talking about! (when you don't).
Wouldn't you like to discuss the matter with someone who understands other player concerns? Real players .. actual players =D
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
This game was a cash grab on a popular IP and it wasn't even a very well hid attempt either.
That's all, nothing else matters, game is shit and was never intended to be good, only appear as serviceable enough to play for "OMG STAR WARSSS HURR DURR" types.
"All" games are a cash grab to a greater or lesser extent - the issue is about the value that customers believe they are getting.
In a very real way however SWTOR was a huge success. Bioware created a beta Star Wars game, presumably touted as "the next big subscription based game" and that must have helped get the $620M in cash and c. $240M in performance related stock options to various employees that EA paid in the takeover.
Coupled with the IP cost this probably saddled SWTOR with some very challenging financial targets: its budget, sales targets etc. For at the end of the day games are EA's only source of revenue.
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
Since when did I praise the game engine?
Plese, for the love of any and all Sith gods, just install the game and see for yourself!
This game was a cash grab on a popular IP and it wasn't even a very well hid attempt either.
That's all, nothing else matters, game is shit and was never intended to be good, only appear as serviceable enough to play for "OMG STAR WARSSS HURR DURR" types.
"All" games are a cash grab to a greater or lesser extent - the issue is about the value that customers believe they are getting.
In a very real way however SWTOR was a huge success. Bioware created a beta Star Wars game, presumably touted as "the next big subscription based game" and that must have helped get the $620M in cash and c. $240M in performance related stock options to various employees that EA paid in the takeover.
That's an interesting point. The game doesn't have to be successful to EA to be successful to Bioware as it was before they got bought by EA. If the goal is to sell your company for a ton of money, then that succeeds or fails when you get paid, regardless of what comes afterwards.
And that points to a more general issue with licensing game engines: licensing one lets you get started faster and look like you've done a lot, even if it backfires by the time launch day rolls around. While EA is surely aware of that, people funding games on Kickstarter may not be.
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
Since when did I praise the game engine?
You didn't, but some people here are so set in their ways they can only see posting through the prism of "for" or "against."
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
Since when did I praise the game engine?
You didn't, but some people here are so set in their ways they can only see posting through the prism of "for" or "against."
Well you have to realize that when the SWTOR graphics engine sucked ass, it's a little irritating when someone comes by and says its not that bad, then gives pages upon pages of the story of why it isn't so bad, then admits to never playing the game.
Maybe you didn't read anything and were not paying attention?
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
Since when did I praise the game engine?
You didn't, but some people here are so set in their ways they can only see posting through the prism of "for" or "against."
Well you have to realize that when the SWTOR graphics engine sucked ass, it's a little irritating when someone comes by and says its not that bad, then gives pages upon pages of the story of why it isn't so bad,
He didn't say it wasn't that bad. He was merely trying to explain how engines work. Learn to read.
then admits to never playing the game.
Ironic considering you love to argue with me over Vanilla SWG, a game you know nothing about and obviously never played. When posters start asking "why can't this be done to the engine?" it's nice to have someone come along and explain the basics.
Maybe you didn't read anything and were not paying attention?
Of course I read it. The difference is I took it for what it was, an explanation on how coding for engines work. You took that explanation as a defense of the game which is exactly what I was referring to. Once again you pop in talking smack on something you are totally clueless about.
You played the game? Good for you. So do I. Doesn't make either of us experts in coding engines.
I'm not coming in here saying "this class needs to be nerfed because it's way overpowered". Having not played the game, I wouldn't know about that.
But if the discussion is on the difficulty of modifying a game engine to do what you want, do you really want to exclude someone who has made his own 3D graphics engine in favor of random rants by people who have never messed with the inside of a game engine?
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
Since when did I praise the game engine?
You didn't, but some people here are so set in their ways they can only see posting through the prism of "for" or "against."
Well you have to realize that when the SWTOR graphics engine sucked ass, it's a little irritating when someone comes by and says its not that bad, then gives pages upon pages of the story of why it isn't so bad,
(1) He didn't say it wasn't that bad. He was merely trying to explain how engines work. Learn to read.
then admits to never playing the game.
(2) Ironic considering you love to argue with me over Vanilla SWG, a game you know nothing about and obviously never played.
Maybe you didn't read anything and were not paying attention?
(3) Of course I read it. The difference is I took it for what it was, an explanation on how coding for engines work. You took that explanation as a defense of the game which is exactly what I was referring to. Once again you pop in talking smack on something you are totally clueless about.
(1) In your haste for a rebbutal you glossed over any key point. He is saying the engine isn't that bad because Hero isn't that bad and some work went into it via EA to make it alright, so how could it be bad? EA is saying their engine was horrible from the start. Then it comes out that Quizzical never ever played SWTOR.
(2) I'll argue SWG where facts exist. It's a weak argument to say I know nothing about a topic. Your own SWG bias is to blame here.
(3) The information provided was rudimentary at best, with some fluff thrown in. Basic material is what you were provided with, enough to make it seem like EA had a really good engine. Either way, it impressed general SWTOR fans, so credit given. The gaming community was the ones left without a game.
(1) In your haste for a rebbutal you glossed over any key point. He is saying the engine isn't that bad because Hero isn't that bad and some work went into it via EA to make it alright, so how could it be bad? EA is saying their engine was horrible from the start. Then it comes out that Quizzical never ever played SWTOR.
I never made that argument.
The question of whether Hero Engine is good as an engine available for license is a question of how hard it is to modify it to be able to do what you want and do it well (runs fast, minimal bugs) as compared to other engines available for license. Ideally, you'd want it to be able to efficiently do a lot of things that you need for your game, and you'd want it to be relatively easy to modify the engine to be able to do what you need that it wasn't built to do when you licensed it.
But the Hero Engine as available for license is very different from the the game engine that SWTOR uses. They have a common ancestry in that they both came from the Hero Engine as it was a long time ago. But then EA forked the code base as you inevitably have to do if you want to make a serious game.
The question of how good SWTOR's game engine is for SWTOR has a lot more to do with how good the EA employees who modified the engine after forking the code base than how good the Hero Engine that they licensed was. Playing SWTOR today won't tell you much about how hard it was to make modifications to a game engine years ago.
Furthermore, even for SWTOR's game engine, just playing the game doesn't tell you as much as you might think. If a game engine absolutely cannot do something that whoever makes the game doesn't want to do anyway, that isn't a problem with the game engine. Game design decisions that you disagree with may make the game bad, but if the engine can efficiently do everything that the company wanted it to do, then it could be a good engine for a bad game.
Another important feature of a game engine is how hard it is to make content work with it. If two different game engines let you make graphics that look just as good, and the first gets you 5% higher frame rates, while the latter makes it only cost 1/3 as much to create content and add it to the game, then there's a pretty strong argument that the latter game engine is better. But that's not something that you can tell just from playing the game.
The quotes from James Ohlen make it sound like he thinks that the game engine is bad. And he might well be right. But blaming it all on the Hero Engine is ridiculous. If you buy and use tools that can't do what you want, it doesn't automatically mean the tools are bad (though they might well be). It means you're an idiot for buying and using them.
A perfectly good screwdriver doesn't necessarily make a good hammer. If you have a screwdriver and are trying to use it as a hammer and it's not working well, the problem is with the user, not the tool.
Hero Engine might well be a great engine available for license. It might be terrible. It might be a sensible choice for some games and a terrible choice for others. It might have some very good code for some of its features, and other broad swaths of code that are complete junk and should be scrapped in their entirety. But you can't tell just from playing SWTOR, or any other game that uses the Hero Engine for that matter.
(1) In your haste for a rebbutal you glossed over any key point. He is saying the engine isn't that bad because Hero isn't that bad and some work went into it via EA to make it alright, so how could it be bad? EA is saying their engine was horrible from the start. Then it comes out that Quizzical never ever played SWTOR.
I never made that argument.
I already told him this so at this point he's just arguing for the sake of arguing.
The question of whether Hero Engine is good as an engine available for license is a question of how hard it is to modify it to be able to do what you want and do it well (runs fast, minimal bugs) as compared to other engines available for license. Ideally, you'd want it to be able to efficiently do a lot of things that you need for your game, and you'd want it to be relatively easy to modify the engine to be able to do what you need that it wasn't built to do when you licensed it.
But the Hero Engine as available for license is very different from the the game engine that SWTOR uses. They have a common ancestry in that they both came from the Hero Engine as it was a long time ago. But then EA forked the code base as you inevitably have to do if you want to make a serious game.
The question of how good SWTOR's game engine is for SWTOR has a lot more to do with how good the EA employees who modified the engine after forking the code base than how good the Hero Engine that they licensed was. Playing SWTOR today won't tell you much about how hard it was to make modifications to a game engine years ago.
Furthermore, even for SWTOR's game engine, just playing the game doesn't tell you as much as you might think. If a game engine absolutely cannot do something that whoever makes the game doesn't want to do anyway, that isn't a problem with the game engine. Game design decisions that you disagree with may make the game bad, but if the engine can efficiently do everything that the company wanted it to do, then it could be a good engine for a bad game.
Another important feature of a game engine is how hard it is to make content work with it. If two different game engines let you make graphics that look just as good, and the first gets you 5% higher frame rates, while the latter makes it only cost 1/3 as much to create content and add it to the game, then there's a pretty strong argument that the latter game engine is better. But that's not something that you can tell just from playing the game.
The quotes from James Ohlen make it sound like he thinks that the game engine is bad. And he might well be right. But blaming it all on the Hero Engine is ridiculous. If you buy and use tools that can't do what you want, it doesn't automatically mean the tools are bad (though they might well be). It means you're an idiot for buying and using them.
A perfectly good screwdriver doesn't necessarily make a good hammer. If you have a screwdriver and are trying to use it as a hammer and it's not working well, the problem is with the user, not the tool.
Hero Engine might well be a great engine available for license. It might be terrible. It might be a sensible choice for some games and a terrible choice for others. It might have some very good code for some of its features, and other broad swaths of code that are complete junk and should be scrapped in their entirety. But you can't tell just from playing SWTOR, or any other game that uses the Hero Engine for that matter.
We'll see in the next few years how well the engine really is. Both TESO and Repopulation are using it in some fashion
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.
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.
That makes it sound like they used the Hero Engine basically as scratch work, but little to no code from Hero Engine will actually make it into the game they release.
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.
That makes it sound like they used the Hero Engine basically as scratch work, but little to no code from Hero Engine will actually make it into the game they release.
That's how I took it. Don't know why people think Hero Engine is remotely even being used coding wise and developmental wise for the actual engine that's going to be used for the game.
(1) In your haste for a rebbutal you glossed over any key point. He is saying the engine isn't that bad because Hero isn't that bad and some work went into it via EA to make it alright, so how could it be bad? EA is saying their engine was horrible from the start. Then it comes out that Quizzical never ever played SWTOR.
I never made that argument.
I already told him this so at this point he's just arguing for the sake of arguing.
The question of whether Hero Engine is good as an engine available for license is a question of how hard it is to modify it to be able to do what you want and do it well (runs fast, minimal bugs) as compared to other engines available for license. Ideally, you'd want it to be able to efficiently do a lot of things that you need for your game, and you'd want it to be relatively easy to modify the engine to be able to do what you need that it wasn't built to do when you licensed it.
But the Hero Engine as available for license is very different from the the game engine that SWTOR uses. They have a common ancestry in that they both came from the Hero Engine as it was a long time ago. But then EA forked the code base as you inevitably have to do if you want to make a serious game.
The question of how good SWTOR's game engine is for SWTOR has a lot more to do with how good the EA employees who modified the engine after forking the code base than how good the Hero Engine that they licensed was. Playing SWTOR today won't tell you much about how hard it was to make modifications to a game engine years ago.
Furthermore, even for SWTOR's game engine, just playing the game doesn't tell you as much as you might think. If a game engine absolutely cannot do something that whoever makes the game doesn't want to do anyway, that isn't a problem with the game engine. Game design decisions that you disagree with may make the game bad, but if the engine can efficiently do everything that the company wanted it to do, then it could be a good engine for a bad game.
Another important feature of a game engine is how hard it is to make content work with it. If two different game engines let you make graphics that look just as good, and the first gets you 5% higher frame rates, while the latter makes it only cost 1/3 as much to create content and add it to the game, then there's a pretty strong argument that the latter game engine is better. But that's not something that you can tell just from playing the game.
The quotes from James Ohlen make it sound like he thinks that the game engine is bad. And he might well be right. But blaming it all on the Hero Engine is ridiculous. If you buy and use tools that can't do what you want, it doesn't automatically mean the tools are bad (though they might well be). It means you're an idiot for buying and using them.
A perfectly good screwdriver doesn't necessarily make a good hammer. If you have a screwdriver and are trying to use it as a hammer and it's not working well, the problem is with the user, not the tool.
Hero Engine might well be a great engine available for license. It might be terrible. It might be a sensible choice for some games and a terrible choice for others. It might have some very good code for some of its features, and other broad swaths of code that are complete junk and should be scrapped in their entirety. But you can't tell just from playing SWTOR, or any other game that uses the Hero Engine for that matter.
We'll see in the next few years how well the engine really is. Both TESO and Repopulation are using it in some fashion
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.
The hero engine is solid. (I mean the real version, not the alpha).
Just a correction, TESO used Hero for early development / prototyping .. but they designed their own in-house engine, since. They will not use Hero for the final product. TESO is not using it in any "fashion".
It's was a hot topic for TESO (Hero Engine). Because of the bad press from SWTOR, Zenimax had to issue statements that Hero was only used for rough blocking. (I believe them when they say they built their own engine, their game will support Macs from launch, Hero doesn't do MAC.)
As to SWTOR and Hero, there is a ton of disconnect of some sort going on.
Simutronics stated Gordon Walton had to have the Hero engine despite their warnings that the engine was still, for lack of a better term, "Alpha". According to Simtronics, Walton stated that he had to have it specifically so hundreds of developers could work on the game simultaneously. As to the "Alpha-ness" of the engine, Walton said Bioware (not EA yet) had enough engineers to handle any blips that might come up. This was at the begining of a 6 year development process.
Now, according to Ohlen, Bioware's version of the Hero engine didn't let multiple teams work on the game at once for 5 years. (which was supposed to be the entire point of using Hero in the first place.)
Ohlen further states that the bulk of Bioware's effort (which would eventually include EA's deep pockets), which included over 300 engineers, were spending their time trying to alter and optimize the engine for SWTOR's needs.
For further head scratching, Ohlen statees that Bioware/EA had 300 engineers working on the engine problems (with what I think most can agree with lackluster results) whereas Simutronics, in the same time, came out with their commercial ready to go Hero engine 2.0, with their 25 full time employees and 100 contractors in the entire company.
Either the truth is being twisted somewhere, or ToR's development is more tragedy then anything else.
Originally posted by KaiserPhoenix imagine how great swtor would've been if they made it on the Unreal Engine 3...
One could only wonder ..
Although design issues are worthy of a new topic..
Just noting the Unreal 3 engine woulda been a bad choice. It's networking layer is not built for MMOs and at the time of development and launch they would have experienced similar issues to other previous UE3 mmo projects in terms of instability, glitshes, etc.
It'd effectively have been the same song and dance with a different engine.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
This game was a cash grab on a popular IP and it wasn't even a very well hid attempt either.
That's all, nothing else matters, game is shit and was never intended to be good, only appear as serviceable enough to play for "OMG STAR WARSSS HURR DURR" types.
Thats your point of view. By the way what MMo are you playing?
Originally posted by ignore_me The engine was also responsible for the packaging of overvalued real estate properties, unintended acceleration in Toyota cars, and Richard garriot being insensitive to others.
While it's correct that the engine isn't the single factor which explains all of Tor's woes, it is certainly a major player.
Just as an example, it has now been over a year since Ilum has been temporarily shut down.
I know this post preceded Quizzical's epic dissertations, but I had to amend this by pointing out how it appears that Bioware attempted to build the 400 mph golf cart using Hero and their own super-powered programming skillz.
It would seem like the pre-pubescent Hero version was just one piece in an assembly line of suck, and Ohlen is attempting to Lee-Harvey-Oswald the Hero engine.
Originally posted by Vorthanion Heh, I had serious doubts about the Hero engine from the very start, but kept getting shouted down by supposed "armchair expert programmers" on this very site. I had read previously that the Hero engine was not well suited for MMOs. In fact, many of the current engines meet that sad criteria, such as the one that keeps getting regurgitated by Cryptic Studios.
You know why Cryptic's engine works for their games? Because they made their own engine for the express purpose of making the sort of games that they wanted to make. If EA had tried to use Cryptic's engine to make SWTOR, it's far from guaranteed that it would have worked out any better than using the Hero Engine. It could easily have turned out much worse. That's not a knock on Cryptic; their engine was built for Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter, but not for SWTOR. If it wouldn't have worked for SWTOR, well then, maybe that's because it was never intended to.
As for Hero Engine, yes, it was built with MMORPGs in mind. The original game was Hero's Journey, which may or may not have since been cancelled. The problem is that you can build an engine to do what you want to do in one particular game, but you can't build it to efficiently do everything that any MMORPG could ever want.
How's it feeling there in that armchair?
Saying that it might have been better or it might have been worse isn't a very strong statement.
We've seen how Cryptic's engine worked for Cryptic's games, but not how it would have worked for any other games. Cryptic had no need to implement functionality that they didn't need in their own games, even if a large fraction of other MMORPGs would have needed it. So for other companies to try to use Cryptic's engine could easily have had catastrophically bad results. Or it might not have. We don't know.
I'm sorry, but where do you get the impression that I said they might have been better off using an engine like Cryptic's? I merely used the Cryptic engine as another example of how there are many game engines out there that do not make for good MMOs. They take the massively multiplayer out of the equation with their ultra-instancing of the game world / lobby and the serious inability to support more than a hundred or so people per instance. I don't understand how engines used in games like EQ and Acheron's Call could handle thousands of people per server without instancing, yet they cannot or choose not to in games like SWTOR or just about any Cryptic game. Just because they want to make a more arcade style game doesn't mean players want to be isolated from each other in multiple instances.
you want to put thousands of todays mmo players in the same zone? give me a warning first , please
even if any engine could do that, with todays fluff,,imagine ironforge late night chat, but 1000 times worse
Originally posted by KaiserPhoenix imagine how great swtor would've been if they made it on the Unreal Engine 3...
The game engine was only one of many things wrong with swtor. The core game design was flawed in many ways, and this is something Ohlen doesn't bring up, and instead, he wants to blame everything else.
Originally posted by KaiserPhoenix imagine how great swtor would've been if they made it on the Unreal Engine 3...
The game engine was only one of many things wrong with swtor. The core game design was flawed in many ways, and this is something Ohlen doesn't bring up, and instead, he wants to blame everything else.
Yeah I think that's the best summation. There was no way the thing was not going to blow once they had their initial design set in stone. It might have looked better or had more players in an instance, but would still have been fatally flawed.
Ohlen can't say that, so the tech aspect gets the focus.
Ignore the cutscene behind the curtain, it was those Hero guys, and those meth-head content locusts!
To be fair, if the engine was as gimped as they say (and appears to have been) then all of a sudden designers are doing less designing and instead coming up with creative workarounds. (And creating an "ethos" for them).
I.E. Remove chat bubbles (who wants that clutter?) Add fleets. Mess with and kil Ilum. No combat log, because those are l33t. No add-ons. No cross-server functionality (That would ruin server community), Animal mounts are immersion breaking, space was always meant as a mini game (leak a super secret 3d space project) etc.
It's was a hot topic for TESO (Hero Engine). Because of the bad press from SWTOR, Zenimax had to issue statements that Hero was only used for rough blocking. (I believe them when they say they built their own engine, their game will support Macs from launch, Hero doesn't do MAC.)
As to SWTOR and Hero, there is a ton of disconnect of some sort going on.
Simutronics stated Gordon Walton had to have the Hero engine despite their warnings that the engine was still, for lack of a better term, "Alpha". According to Simtronics, Walton stated that he had to have it specifically so hundreds of developers could work on the game simultaneously. As to the "Alpha-ness" of the engine, Walton said Bioware (not EA yet) had enough engineers to handle any blips that might come up. This was at the begining of a 6 year development process.
Now, according to Ohlen, Bioware's version of the Hero engine didn't let multiple teams work on the game at once for 5 years. (which was supposed to be the entire point of using Hero in the first place.)
Ohlen further states that the bulk of Bioware's effort (which would eventually include EA's deep pockets), which included over 300 engineers, were spending their time trying to alter and optimize the engine for SWTOR's needs.
For further head scratching, Ohlen statees that Bioware/EA had 300 engineers working on the engine problems (with what I think most can agree with lackluster results) whereas Simutronics, in the same time, came out with their commercial ready to go Hero engine 2.0, with their 25 full time employees and 100 contractors in the entire company.
Either the truth is being twisted somewhere, or ToR's development is more tragedy then anything else.
Yet they have admitted that there will be heavy use of instancing in TESO. Not something I like to hear in regards to an MMO.
Originally posted by Quizzical Originally posted by lizardbonesOriginally posted by QuizzicalOriginally posted by XthosIt seems like a huge mistake, I mean this is one of the biggest gaming companies, with veteran people, they should of known what they needed.....But I also do not believe much of what they say, they mislead/lied so much during TOR, about so many things that at this point, does it really matter?I guess if they blame the engine, it makes it even worse, because that may also mean their is no 'fixing' things, and it is basically what it is. You may be able to optimize things a little here and there, but it may never be what you want.I also wonder if this is why they went away from having a more open game, that a developer was talking about, well before release? Maybe the functionality of things prohibited that also?
What do you do if you're working on a game that is already halfway done when you realize that a lot of things that you still want to do are incompatible with the half that you've already done? Chopping out the things that you can't do without scrapping a lot of what you've already done means you lose much of what could have made the game fun.There really isn't a good answer to it. Your basic choices are:1) Cancel the project and eat whatever you've already spent on it as a loss,2) Press on and do the best you can, while realizing that the end result isn't going to be very good, or3) Delay the project by years and spend many millions of dollars more to scrap and redo a ton of things that you had already done, and hope that at the end of that, you're not in essentially the same situation as before with only a different set of things that you still wanted to do now incompatible with what you've already done.Taking choice (3) isn't very common, and is a bad idea unless you have strong reason to believe that you really can fix the problems. The only MMORPGs that I'm aware of to essentially do (3) are Tabula Rasa, Darkfall, and Final Fantasy XIV. It didn't work out very well for Tabula Rasa and doesn't look likely to work much better for Darkfall. OOOOH! I can answer this one! Standard procedure is to keep going, even if the product is going to be horrible. Even with a horrible product, something can be recouped from the investment, which isn't as bad as losing everything. It actually depends. If you've spent $10 million on a game so far, figure it would cost another $10 million to finish the game and bring it to market, and you'd only get $1 million in revenue, then you cancel the game. It's better to lose $10 million than $19 million.
Maybe you try to cut costs dramatically on what's left and shove the game out the door, but if you can't bring the costs for the rest of the project below what you expect to make by selling it, you cancel the game.
I do not work in the game industry, so I can't really speak specifically for game developers. I am also not a decision maker in any IT hierarchy, so I do not know the reasoning behind why these types of decisions are made. I just assumed the bit about getting something for a game project rather than nothing because it's the only logical reason I can think of to release some of the things that get released.
However, after nearly twenty years of working in IT, watching large scale projects get started, watching them stumble and not get canceled, I feel that I can say with some accuracy that once started, the larger the project is, the less likely the people who started it are going to cancel it. It seems to be even less likely that a project will get canceled if someone else become responsible for it. The project might turn into a zombie, never really going anywhere and never really dying, but they don't get cancelled.
To me, SWToR definitely falls into this category. It's was a huge project. It had some very obvious problems to the people inside the project, but it just kept going. Key things that could have improved the project like writing a game engine, or switching to a newer version of the game engine did not happen. They just kept running with what they had. As I said, I do not know the real reasons why they did this, and really, neither does anyone outside the project regardless of what gets said in interviews after the fact*. I just know that what they did, if things are being presented accurately, was not out of the ordinary. "Standard Procedure" is you just keep going, no matter what.
To see this in action, look at how many games get cancelled before going live, compared to how many games get published, removing those games that get cancelled because the company itself gets tanked. Compare the size of the companies and the size of the game projects themselves. The larger the game project, the less likely the game will be cancelled.
* Humans really are the worst source of information when you're trying to get to facts. Human memory and human perception are malleable to a pretty shocking degree, especially if someone wants to avoid responsibility or blame for something, like a game's performance.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Comments
It might be helpful to experience the game engine before you praise it, or defend it. All I'm saying.
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
"All" games are a cash grab to a greater or lesser extent - the issue is about the value that customers believe they are getting.
In a very real way however SWTOR was a huge success. Bioware created a beta Star Wars game, presumably touted as "the next big subscription based game" and that must have helped get the $620M in cash and c. $240M in performance related stock options to various employees that EA paid in the takeover.
Coupled with the IP cost this probably saddled SWTOR with some very challenging financial targets: its budget, sales targets etc. For at the end of the day games are EA's only source of revenue.
Since when did I praise the game engine?
Plese, for the love of any and all Sith gods, just install the game and see for yourself!
Begging you!
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
That's an interesting point. The game doesn't have to be successful to EA to be successful to Bioware as it was before they got bought by EA. If the goal is to sell your company for a ton of money, then that succeeds or fails when you get paid, regardless of what comes afterwards.
And that points to a more general issue with licensing game engines: licensing one lets you get started faster and look like you've done a lot, even if it backfires by the time launch day rolls around. While EA is surely aware of that, people funding games on Kickstarter may not be.
You didn't, but some people here are so set in their ways they can only see posting through the prism of "for" or "against."
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Well you have to realize that when the SWTOR graphics engine sucked ass, it's a little irritating when someone comes by and says its not that bad, then gives pages upon pages of the story of why it isn't so bad, then admits to never playing the game.
Maybe you didn't read anything and were not paying attention?
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
(1) In your haste for a rebbutal you glossed over any key point. He is saying the engine isn't that bad because Hero isn't that bad and some work went into it via EA to make it alright, so how could it be bad? EA is saying their engine was horrible from the start. Then it comes out that Quizzical never ever played SWTOR.
(2) I'll argue SWG where facts exist. It's a weak argument to say I know nothing about a topic. Your own SWG bias is to blame here.
(3) The information provided was rudimentary at best, with some fluff thrown in. Basic material is what you were provided with, enough to make it seem like EA had a really good engine. Either way, it impressed general SWTOR fans, so credit given. The gaming community was the ones left without a game.
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
I never made that argument.
The question of whether Hero Engine is good as an engine available for license is a question of how hard it is to modify it to be able to do what you want and do it well (runs fast, minimal bugs) as compared to other engines available for license. Ideally, you'd want it to be able to efficiently do a lot of things that you need for your game, and you'd want it to be relatively easy to modify the engine to be able to do what you need that it wasn't built to do when you licensed it.
But the Hero Engine as available for license is very different from the the game engine that SWTOR uses. They have a common ancestry in that they both came from the Hero Engine as it was a long time ago. But then EA forked the code base as you inevitably have to do if you want to make a serious game.
The question of how good SWTOR's game engine is for SWTOR has a lot more to do with how good the EA employees who modified the engine after forking the code base than how good the Hero Engine that they licensed was. Playing SWTOR today won't tell you much about how hard it was to make modifications to a game engine years ago.
Furthermore, even for SWTOR's game engine, just playing the game doesn't tell you as much as you might think. If a game engine absolutely cannot do something that whoever makes the game doesn't want to do anyway, that isn't a problem with the game engine. Game design decisions that you disagree with may make the game bad, but if the engine can efficiently do everything that the company wanted it to do, then it could be a good engine for a bad game.
Another important feature of a game engine is how hard it is to make content work with it. If two different game engines let you make graphics that look just as good, and the first gets you 5% higher frame rates, while the latter makes it only cost 1/3 as much to create content and add it to the game, then there's a pretty strong argument that the latter game engine is better. But that's not something that you can tell just from playing the game.
The quotes from James Ohlen make it sound like he thinks that the game engine is bad. And he might well be right. But blaming it all on the Hero Engine is ridiculous. If you buy and use tools that can't do what you want, it doesn't automatically mean the tools are bad (though they might well be). It means you're an idiot for buying and using them.
A perfectly good screwdriver doesn't necessarily make a good hammer. If you have a screwdriver and are trying to use it as a hammer and it's not working well, the problem is with the user, not the tool.
Hero Engine might well be a great engine available for license. It might be terrible. It might be a sensible choice for some games and a terrible choice for others. It might have some very good code for some of its features, and other broad swaths of code that are complete junk and should be scrapped in their entirety. But you can't tell just from playing SWTOR, or any other game that uses the Hero Engine for that matter.
We'll see in the next few years how well the engine really is. Both TESO and Repopulation are using it in some fashion
TESO
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.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
That makes it sound like they used the Hero Engine basically as scratch work, but little to no code from Hero Engine will actually make it into the game they release.
That's how I took it. Don't know why people think Hero Engine is remotely even being used coding wise and developmental wise for the actual engine that's going to be used for the game.
The hero engine is solid. (I mean the real version, not the alpha).
Just a correction, TESO used Hero for early development / prototyping .. but they designed their own in-house engine, since. They will not use Hero for the final product. TESO is not using it in any "fashion".
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
It's was a hot topic for TESO (Hero Engine). Because of the bad press from SWTOR, Zenimax had to issue statements that Hero was only used for rough blocking. (I believe them when they say they built their own engine, their game will support Macs from launch, Hero doesn't do MAC.)
As to SWTOR and Hero, there is a ton of disconnect of some sort going on.
Simutronics stated Gordon Walton had to have the Hero engine despite their warnings that the engine was still, for lack of a better term, "Alpha". According to Simtronics, Walton stated that he had to have it specifically so hundreds of developers could work on the game simultaneously. As to the "Alpha-ness" of the engine, Walton said Bioware (not EA yet) had enough engineers to handle any blips that might come up. This was at the begining of a 6 year development process.
Now, according to Ohlen, Bioware's version of the Hero engine didn't let multiple teams work on the game at once for 5 years. (which was supposed to be the entire point of using Hero in the first place.)
Ohlen further states that the bulk of Bioware's effort (which would eventually include EA's deep pockets), which included over 300 engineers, were spending their time trying to alter and optimize the engine for SWTOR's needs.
For further head scratching, Ohlen statees that Bioware/EA had 300 engineers working on the engine problems (with what I think most can agree with lackluster results) whereas Simutronics, in the same time, came out with their commercial ready to go Hero engine 2.0, with their 25 full time employees and 100 contractors in the entire company.
Either the truth is being twisted somewhere, or ToR's development is more tragedy then anything else.
Just noting the Unreal 3 engine woulda been a bad choice. It's networking layer is not built for MMOs and at the time of development and launch they would have experienced similar issues to other previous UE3 mmo projects in terms of instability, glitshes, etc.
It'd effectively have been the same song and dance with a different engine.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
tu quoque anyone?
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
I know this post preceded Quizzical's epic dissertations, but I had to amend this by pointing out how it appears that Bioware attempted to build the 400 mph golf cart using Hero and their own super-powered programming skillz.
It would seem like the pre-pubescent Hero version was just one piece in an assembly line of suck, and Ohlen is attempting to Lee-Harvey-Oswald the Hero engine.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
you want to put thousands of todays mmo players in the same zone? give me a warning first , please
even if any engine could do that, with todays fluff,,imagine ironforge late night chat, but 1000 times worse
those times are gone
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
The game engine was only one of many things wrong with swtor. The core game design was flawed in many ways, and this is something Ohlen doesn't bring up, and instead, he wants to blame everything else.
Yeah I think that's the best summation. There was no way the thing was not going to blow once they had their initial design set in stone. It might have looked better or had more players in an instance, but would still have been fatally flawed.
Ohlen can't say that, so the tech aspect gets the focus.
Ignore the cutscene behind the curtain, it was those Hero guys, and those meth-head content locusts!
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
To be fair, if the engine was as gimped as they say (and appears to have been) then all of a sudden designers are doing less designing and instead coming up with creative workarounds. (And creating an "ethos" for them).
I.E. Remove chat bubbles (who wants that clutter?) Add fleets. Mess with and kil Ilum. No combat log, because those are l33t. No add-ons. No cross-server functionality (That would ruin server community), Animal mounts are immersion breaking, space was always meant as a mini game (leak a super secret 3d space project) etc.
Yet they have admitted that there will be heavy use of instancing in TESO. Not something I like to hear in regards to an MMO.
OOOOH! I can answer this one! Standard procedure is to keep going, even if the product is going to be horrible. Even with a horrible product, something can be recouped from the investment, which isn't as bad as losing everything.
It actually depends. If you've spent $10 million on a game so far, figure it would cost another $10 million to finish the game and bring it to market, and you'd only get $1 million in revenue, then you cancel the game. It's better to lose $10 million than $19 million.
Maybe you try to cut costs dramatically on what's left and shove the game out the door, but if you can't bring the costs for the rest of the project below what you expect to make by selling it, you cancel the game.
I do not work in the game industry, so I can't really speak specifically for game developers. I am also not a decision maker in any IT hierarchy, so I do not know the reasoning behind why these types of decisions are made. I just assumed the bit about getting something for a game project rather than nothing because it's the only logical reason I can think of to release some of the things that get released.
However, after nearly twenty years of working in IT, watching large scale projects get started, watching them stumble and not get canceled, I feel that I can say with some accuracy that once started, the larger the project is, the less likely the people who started it are going to cancel it. It seems to be even less likely that a project will get canceled if someone else become responsible for it. The project might turn into a zombie, never really going anywhere and never really dying, but they don't get cancelled.
To me, SWToR definitely falls into this category. It's was a huge project. It had some very obvious problems to the people inside the project, but it just kept going. Key things that could have improved the project like writing a game engine, or switching to a newer version of the game engine did not happen. They just kept running with what they had. As I said, I do not know the real reasons why they did this, and really, neither does anyone outside the project regardless of what gets said in interviews after the fact*. I just know that what they did, if things are being presented accurately, was not out of the ordinary. "Standard Procedure" is you just keep going, no matter what.
To see this in action, look at how many games get cancelled before going live, compared to how many games get published, removing those games that get cancelled because the company itself gets tanked. Compare the size of the companies and the size of the game projects themselves. The larger the game project, the less likely the game will be cancelled.
* Humans really are the worst source of information when you're trying to get to facts. Human memory and human perception are malleable to a pretty shocking degree, especially if someone wants to avoid responsibility or blame for something, like a game's performance.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.