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Hero Engine?
Odysses
Member Posts: 581
Why did Bioware choose this one? Don't know alot about it and wondering if it's much better then other game engines around ie Turbine's or AoC.
Comments
They chose it because there aren't really any other commercially available mmo ready engines out there. They could have built one from scratch, but that would have taken longer and taken up a much larger portion of their budget.
The Hero Engine does have a lot of really great features, though they opted not to use all of them.
I think in hindsight they would have build one from the ground up. There were one or two interviews that sort of led me to believe they had to do a lot customizations to make the HeroEngine do exactly what they wanted.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
Only those at Bioware could probably give a decent, real answer to that. However, from the looks of it, it allows ease of content creation and optimization across a spectrum of pc configurations. Kind of like the 800lb Chuck Norris in the room. Same broad access approach, while still stepping it up a notch or two on the graphics. Besides, everyone likes their Heros, whether they be Luke Skywalker, some pop singer singing about heros, Jet Li starring in a movie called Hero, or Superman... being a Hero.
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Tried- L2, Ryzom, WAR, DDO, PWI, Tab Rasa, Requiem, Champs, AA, JD, PWI, SUN, Dawntide
Played- SWG (pre-cu), AoC, VG, WoW, LoTRO,CoX, EQ2, DAOC, GW, PotBS, Aion, MO,APB, NASA, Fallen Earth, DCUO, Rift
Playing- EVE, Black Prophecy, TOR
Waiting for- Tera, Jumpgate Evo, WH40K, WWE, WOD, TSW
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"Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," Double Fine President Tim Schafer said. "Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."
That's what I'm hoping someone with a bit more knowledge may point out.
Does it support 64 bit cpu's, multi core's, SLI or Crossfire, dx11? Are there any other games that are using the Hero Engine?
At least they didn't use something like Gamebryo.. thank god!
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
I need to take this advice more.
It's a 32 bit program. It supports multi cores VERY well. SLI and Crossfire are supported. BioWare has opted to NOT support Dx11 yet, however the engine itself does support it. The engine also supports PhysX, but again BioWare opted to NOT support this as well.
It's not dx11 so probably not a 64bit operation. Like most programs still out, it probably only uses dual core, etc. still. Again, the aim was for people playing something just above the toasters they were using to play WoW, being able to play this on the low end, and the high end freaks also being happy with the quality (while realizing they aren't even close to pushing their machine in the process).
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Tried- L2, Ryzom, WAR, DDO, PWI, Tab Rasa, Requiem, Champs, AA, JD, PWI, SUN, Dawntide
Played- SWG (pre-cu), AoC, VG, WoW, LoTRO,CoX, EQ2, DAOC, GW, PotBS, Aion, MO,APB, NASA, Fallen Earth, DCUO, Rift
Playing- EVE, Black Prophecy, TOR
Waiting for- Tera, Jumpgate Evo, WH40K, WWE, WOD, TSW
--
--
"Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," Double Fine President Tim Schafer said. "Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."
I stand clarified and corrected. You sir, are a gentleman and a Scoundrel.
-----------------------
Tried- L2, Ryzom, WAR, DDO, PWI, Tab Rasa, Requiem, Champs, AA, JD, PWI, SUN, Dawntide
Played- SWG (pre-cu), AoC, VG, WoW, LoTRO,CoX, EQ2, DAOC, GW, PotBS, Aion, MO,APB, NASA, Fallen Earth, DCUO, Rift
Playing- EVE, Black Prophecy, TOR
Waiting for- Tera, Jumpgate Evo, WH40K, WWE, WOD, TSW
--
--
"Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," Double Fine President Tim Schafer said. "Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."
There are more than a dozen games in development using the engine. The next to release will likely be Dominus.
The engine also has great support for phasing, which the game uses exentively. It runs on sever clusters, so through sharding it can easily support MILLIONS of players on a single server if they so desired.
Games developed with HeroEngine
Faxion Online
Star Wars: The Old Republic from BioWare[10]
[edit] Unreleased games being developed with HeroEngine
Hero's Journey - Company's game the engine was developed for.
Origins - Developed by Burning Dog
Prime: Battle For Dominus by PitchBlack Games[11]
The Repopulation - Being developed by Above and Beyond Technologies
Visions of Zosimos by Forever Interactive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine
lol I'm actually in the application process to get access to the Hero Engine for development purposes
Very cool, I hope BW opts to make fewer servers with very high populations. I was surprised since BW is owned by EA that they would have their own Engine that is shared across all the studio's. Same with Activision and SOE and so on.
The Wiki link said it is currently single threaded, which would mean it does not support multi cores correct?
OOB It doesnt even supports multi-threading...
Any how back to the OP, AOC might have a better "engine" but it doesnt mean its a product. a game engine is much more than graphics, a company that looks for a game engine is looking for an engine that has a good toolkit and an SDK, a good engine like U3E does not require you to write a single line of code, you dont need a single programmer to make an Unreal game today, granted you want them becuase you will modify the engine but the UDK enalbes you to make complete games by using the UI and wirting simple scripts. Game companies when developing a game and an engine develope their own tools for that, those tools enable non-programers and programers alike to work quickly with the engine with out wiriting additinal code, when ever you see a tool programmer on the wanted posting for a game company thats just it.
Hero is one of the only few MMO engines which comes with a complete server side backend and an advance toolkit and and SDK on the market today.
In addition to that im pretty sure that BW got a pretty sweet deal on the licensing costs for that engine considering its a pretty nieche engine and might even gotten access to the complete source code. If BW would've been bought by EA couple of years earlier they probably would've based ToR on the same enginer that WAR uses with some heavy modification of the client side code.
The Hero Engine does not support DX11. That's easily verified by simply reading their support forums or asking.
It is *planned* in the Graphics 2.0 update, which isnt here yet. Not sure where you think its currently in.
Your right about the rest though
Still, its a dated engine compared to say.. cryengine, which of course alot of Asian MMO's use. Its main draw is its ease of use, and the ability to push updates "real time".
The wiki is incorrect, it is most definitely multi-threaded and supports multiple cores.
BW started this game before they were owned by EA, otherwise they might have opted to use a proprietary engine.
I use hero Engine for my MMOG. it's a great piece of software. Middleware to be exact. BW was smart to use it. So many out of the box features. Me and my content designers are still learning more about each time we run our dev server. of course they full access to the source code, but hey whats a million bucks for BW to spend.
Are you bored and need attention? Can't a 30 second google search answer you question?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
http://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php?topic=889.0
For reference, read the 2nd post and the 10th or so..
Yes its multi-cored, but no its not in the way you'd expect or in a way that would really help alot.
Looking for insight, the wiki has already been proven outdated. If you don't like the thread take a hike.
what about that song "Hero" by the nickelback singer and some other guy?
The x64 instruction set is backward compatible to 32-bit. Games are almost invariably 32-bit, as there has to be a 32-bit version or else many people will be completely unable to run the game. If you make a 64-bit version that abides by the limits of the 32-bit version, then you don't gain much from it being 64-bit. If you make both a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version, then you have to do a bunch of stuff twice. That's cost++;, and doesn't add much value to the game.
SWTOR scales well to three processor cores, and sees limited benefit to adding more cores beyond that. All things considered, that's pretty good CPU core scaling.
SLI works. I'd assume that CrossFire does, too, but if it doesn't, it surely will very soon.
Wikipedia says that Faxion used the Hero Engine.
"BioWare has opted to NOT support Dx11 yet, however the engine itself does support it. The engine also supports PhysX, but again BioWare opted to NOT support this as well."
DirectX 11 is backward compatible to at least 9.0c. I don't know about the internal details of whether it would be harder to code a game as 11 and only use 9.0c features, or code it directly as a 9.0c game.
GPU PhysX is such a pathetic Nvidia talking point that even Nvidia seems to have moved on.