Originally posted by wowclones

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by wowclones

Originally posted by bishbosh

I have researched quite a few game engines because i am currently looking into making my own casual multiplayer game. hero engine is basically a toy to play around with for people who arent really serious about making games for money.

high quality large scale mmorpgs/games do not work well with one solution fits all stuff like hero engine. im sorry but thats the way it is. 

hero engine uses some weird hero script which probably doesnt give the developer much control over anything and it probably runs slow as shit. 

the whole hero cloud server crap is bullshit. no decent mmorpg or online game will run on servers which they have little control over. 

if the developer doesnt have control over server-client interaction and the mulitplayer code, developer cannot guarantee stability, no hacks , no lag etcc etc

 

if you want to make a big huge mmorpg, you probably cant . stop dreaming.... you would need to build your own complex game engine or pay $500k-$1000k for a proprietary game engine which you would then heavily modify...

 

if you are making a smaller game make your own primittive game engine or use unity3d

 

mmorpgs are a big thing and you need large amounts of capital, experience, skills and manpower to make them.

man you have no idea what you are talking about lol. no offense, but you need to reseach more, use Hero for a few years and come back and post something educated. truely sad. 

can u list a game which uses hero engine non propriatary?

3 hero engine games that i know -

dominus - shutdown before release

faxion - shutdown shortly after release (i actually tried this one and performance was utter crap despite low res low polygon gfx)

swtor - runs like crap despite ageing gfx and heavy instancing, heavily criticised game for unoriginality and poor performance, switched to f2p

 

do you honestly think heroengine will pay for whatever your bandwidth costs are for $99/ year once your game is released and pay for server maint with this measly amount of money? no they wont because hero engine sucks and they know only retards who think making an mmorpg weekend leisurely affair.

the engine is easy to use, fast content creation and very appealing -- it designed to lure noobs who think they can make an mmorpg into paying $99/year. hero engine people know these mmorpgs will never materialise. this is why proper companies by proprietary licenses which cost undisclosedly large amounts.

You are digging yourself a deeper hole, your post are growing more ignorant by the count.  Not sure what you are trying to prove but your points couldn't be more far off then they are right now. There are a handful of games using HeroEngine in development. The engine just became affordable to the indie 2 years ago, it takes longer than that to build an mmo genius. Dominus shutdown due to lack of funding, has nothing to do with Hero. Tor runs fine on my computer, not sure what you are talikng about, try upgrading your rig. Faxion Online would have been crap in any engine, ugly models, concept and lore. The Repopulation is using Hero, Visions of Zosimos, PathFinder Online and many other. Grow up, just because you didn't have the brain power to use Hero doesn't mean it's a bad engine, you just don't know how to use it.

haha brainpower to use hero engine? hero engine is one of the easiest engines to use. its a toy.

what kind of serious developer gives away 35% of his profits for use of an engine?

what kind of developer lets a 3rd party service provider manage their servers?

the whole idea of a low budget 3d open world mmorpg is stupid. hero engine doesnt make this idea feasible, it simply profits off the stupidity of people who think this idea is feasible.

every serious game developer using a 3rd party game engine buys a license for an undisclosedly large amount of money with full access to source code and fuck ton of support.  if you are buying a proprietary license why would you buy hero engine when there is cryengine, unreal, havoc, source, gamebryo <-- a.k.a engines with history of success?

you have 0 examples of games produced using hero engine (non proprietary) and those that use proprietary suck bad . who knows if it is the engine or the fail devs? hero engine is a risky and costly venture and therefore it sucks.

point with faxion and swtor is they both ran/run very poor framerates for their graphics. compare with tera (running on unreal engine).

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by Quizzical

If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.

Game engines are designed to do particular things.  If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great.  But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options:  modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.

If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you.  Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it.  It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3:  abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.

There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create.  They're not.  You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too).  But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too.  Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.

The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero.  I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.

However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team.  Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch.  If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc.  Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.

Have you tried it?  I have.  And I'm telling you, it's a lot easier than I expected, though you do need a strong math background for it, which is something that most programmers don't have.  But then, you'll need a strong math background to do a lot of other things well.  A game engine won't automatically play balance skills for you, and relying on reading forum whining won't get the job done, either.

I haven't done sound or networking code yet, though Java has built-in capabilities that I'll use.  At the moment, I'm taking the view that if everyone and his neighbor's dog could do sound a decade ago, then I can probably figure out how to do it today.  Meanwhile, the networking code absolutely must be customized to fit the exact data your game needs to send and take into account how time-sensitive various things are or else it will be terrible.

As for 3D APIs, you use either Direct3D or else OpenGL.  It takes a few weeks to learn either one, but most of the graphical things that games commonly do that seem like they should be hard are handled automatically by the API.

Now, if it's a really small project where you're trying to make a game on a $10,000 budget, then yeah, you want to license a game engine rather than creating your own.  But if you've got a $1 million budget, it doesn't cost that much to have one person spend a few months to create a 3D graphics engine that does exactly what you want it to do.

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by Quizzical

If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.

Game engines are designed to do particular things.  If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great.  But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options:  modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.

If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you.  Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it.  It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3:  abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.

There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create.  They're not.  You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too).  But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too.  Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.

The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero.  I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.

However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team.  Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch.  If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc.  Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.

you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).

serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because

1. they  dont give the developer much control

2. ~30% of your profits is way too expensive

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by Quizzical

If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.

Game engines are designed to do particular things.  If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great.  But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options:  modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.

If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you.  Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it.  It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3:  abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.

There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create.  They're not.  You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too).  But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too.  Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.

The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero.  I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.

However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team.  Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch.  If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc.  Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.

you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).

serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because

1. they  dont give the developer much control

2. ~30% of your profits is way too expensive

It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability.  For all intents and purposes, using Hero Cloud is a type of investment in your company, and for that investment, they are getting paid a percentage.  If you can't afford to hire enough people to build an engine from scratch in the time it would take, you are pretty much dead in the water before you even get started.  If you secure real investment, they might end up owning at least 30% of your business, and often times investment comes at the price of giving up majority ownership and control of your business

I've never used Hero Engine, but I have seen what some other devs are doing with it, such as The Repopulation, and it looks pretty damned good to me.  The Repopulation probably wouldn't even exist if they didn't have the option of licensing a turnkey engine, nor would Greed Monger or other projects.  This discussion wasn't about whether or not Hero Engine is the best choice for all projects.  It was about a great tool being available to get *INDY DEVELOPERS* started in game development for a very low cost of entry.

Let us also not forget that if I get Hero Engine for $99 and I walk away from my project before it's even done, for whatever reason, I'm only out my time plus $99.  Try that with traditional investment.  I haven't looked at their contract, but I imagine the fate of a finished game that fails at launch doesn't put you in the poor house either.

I'm not a fan of pharmaceutical anti-depressants, but I'm starting to think a lot of people around here could benefit from them.  Seriously.

Originally posted by MindTrigger

It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability.

Hooray for completely made up numbers that sound scary?

If you make your own game engine, you don't need for it to match everything that the Hero or Unity engines can do.  You only need for it to be able to do the things that you want to do in your particular game.  You don't have to try to think of everything that everyone could conceivably ever want to do in any game and implement all of that.

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by Quizzical

If you think that SWTOR has game engine problems using a heavily-customized version of the Hero Engine, then you should see the complete train wreck that it would have been if they used an uncustomized version of the Hero Engine.

Game engines are designed to do particular things.  If what you want to do is something that the game engine is designed to handle, great.  But as soon as you want to do something that the game engine designers didn't anticipate, you've basically got three options:  modify the game engine, find some roundabout way of cramming it into the game engine, or abandon that idea.

If you've got your own game engine, you take option 1 and don't think much of it.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, option 1 is not available to you.  Option 2 is sometimes unavailable to you, and is likely to carry a large performance hit even if you can do it.  It's nearly guaranteed to be more work than option 1 would have been.  If you're using an off-the-shelf game engine, then get used to taking option 3:  abandoning most of your creative ideas because they don't fit the game engine.

There seems to be this mystique that game engines are really hard to create.  They're not.  You do need a competent programmer with a decent background in mathematics (linear algebra is critical for anything 3D, and multivariable calculus is important, too).  But you'll need that in order to make a bunch of other things in your game work, too.  Trying to license a game engine as a way to get around needing to have anyone competent working on your project isn't likely to end well.

The point is for small projects, not the fact that SWTOR used a modified version of hero.  I code myself, and I understand the merits of writing your own code to do exactly what you want/need it to do.

However I completely disagree with you on it being easy to write your own 3D game engine, especially for a small indy dev team.  Besides the whole 3D world, lighting, sound and physics, there's netcode, weather, APIs and many other systems that would need to be put in from scratch.  If making a good 3D engine was easy, the market wouldn't need engines like Hero, Unity, Unreal, iD Tech, Source, etc.  Indy projects like Greed Monger and The Repopulation are using someone else's engine for a reason, and a lot of higher-end 3D games are licensing engines from companies that already did most of the hard work.

you need buy a proprietary license and get full access to source code if you want to use a 3rd part engine to make something like a 3d open world mmorpgs (i think this is what the "against" side in this argument is basically trying to say).

serious developers dont use the hobby versions of these engines because

1. they  dont give the developer much control

2. ~30% of your profits is way too expensive

It's not too expensive if you are *never* going to secure the $1 million+ and a couple years it may take to write your own engine, which will not even come close to Hero or Unity's capability.  For all intents and purposes, using Hero Cloud is a type of investment in your company, and for that investment, they are getting paid a percentage.  If you can't afford to hire enough people to build an engine from scratch in the time it would take, you are pretty much dead in the water before you even get started.  If you secure real investment, they might end up owning at least 30% of your business, and often times investment comes at the price of giving up majority ownership and control of your business

I've never used Hero Engine, but I have seen what some other devs are doing with it, such as The Repopulation, and it looks pretty damned good to me.  The Repopulation probably wouldn't even exist if they didn't have the option of licensing a turnkey engine, nor would Greed Monger or other projects.  This discussion wasn't about whether or not Hero Engine is the best choice for all projects.  It was about a great tool being available to get *INDY DEVELOPERS* started in game development for a very low cost of entry.

Let us also not forget that if I get Hero Engine for $99 and I walk away from my project before it's even done, for whatever reason, I'm only out my time plus $99.  Try that with traditional investment.  I haven't looked at their contract, but I imagine the fate of a finished game that fails at launch doesn't put you in the poor house either.

I'm not a fan of pharmaceutical anti-depressants, but I'm starting to think a lot of people around here could benefit from them.  Seriously.

is repopulation using the hobby version of hero engine (herocloud) or the did they buy a license with access to source code etc?

http://www.heroengine.com/heroengine/licensing-options/

source code access is $75k + 7% revenue. im guess repopulation went with this option. any developer which is actually serious about what they are doing will go with this option. herocloud is a toy.

Originally posted by mmoDAD

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.

There's more to having commercial success than having a good product.   Yes, it does help, but that in itself does not guarantee its success.

Originally posted by grimal

Originally posted by mmoDAD

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.

There's more to having commercial success than having a good product.   Yes, it does help, but that in itself does not guarantee its success.

mmoDAD ccompletely missed the part where blizzard has lots of experience with massive multiplayer with bnet and bioware has none and both companies have made other non mmorpg games. souldrainers advice is pretty good. i reckon you could subsitute 10 small indie games as he suggested with 1 succesful multiplayer indie game that people actually play. point is that you need skills/experience/money to make an mmorpg and until you acquire this you probs shouldnt bother. make a simple multiplayer game first-- see if you can do that.

An MMORPG as your very first project is probably a bad idea, unless it's awfully simple.  But ten other games first?  Why ten?  Does ten really give you that much more critical experience as compared to nine?

Originally posted by Ramonski7
Wow I never witness so much vemon spewing forth at someone that is just trying to ask if herocloud would be a good start for new or small indie teams to tinker with. We're not talking about the next UO here. I personally think it's fine to dabble in while moving from the concept phase to the materialize stage. It would allow you to test your fortitude while keeping your finacial well being safe. I look at this as a way for new ideas to surface just like XNA was to console gamers for indies. No harm in that. HeroCloud is nothing more to MMOs than XNA was to consoles. Which maybe a good thing to humble a lot of the people around here that keep thinking they can do better. Some may and many will not.

read thread again. i dont think anyone here has been even slightly rude to OP. a lot of people here dont seem to appreciate the engineering side of video games and the dont understand how important it is. multiplayer is a huge challenge and massively multiplayer is even harder. herocloud is fine for getting your feet wet but if you want to make actually make a massively multiplayer game and make money from it i would look elsewhere.

Hmm... while some of the more experienced people around here who are against the use of premade engines, are offering some valuable insight and information.

I still think that the spirit in which the OP is presentingthem is still valid and good. The premade engnes are a good start of the new people to get in to making a game. Not everyone can start coding their own engine just like that. And not everyone can make a game and grasp many of the notions that are involved. But everyone can learn and premade engines are a good way to learn in my opinion.

So unless some here have somethng to fear, i do not think that discouraging people from getting their feet wet with these engines which at 99$/year are a very affordable endeavor, is actually a good thing.

Many players have much better ideas than existing Devs (mainly due to constrtraints imposed on them by the industry), which these engines could help some to express without those constraints. It can only be good for the industry and I do not hink that there is anything to fear of.

I say anyone who ever wanted to put some of their Ideas to the test, go for it, pick one of these engines and let your creative juices guide you!

Originally posted by bishbosh

I have researched quite a few game engines because i am currently looking into making my own casual multiplayer game. hero engine is basically a toy to play around with for people who arent really serious about making games for money.

high quality large scale mmorpgs/games do not work well with one solution fits all stuff like hero engine. im sorry but thats the way it is. 

hero engine uses some weird hero script which probably doesnt give the developer much control over anything and it probably runs slow as shit. 

the whole hero cloud server crap is bullshit. no decent mmorpg or online game will run on servers which they have little control over. 

if the developer doesnt have control over server-client interaction and the mulitplayer code, developer cannot guarantee stability, no hacks , no lag etcc etc

 

if you want to make a big huge mmorpg, you probably cant . stop dreaming.... you would need to build your own complex game engine or pay $500k-$1000k for a proprietary game engine which you would then heavily modify...

 

if you are making a smaller game make your own primittive game engine or use unity3d

 

mmorpgs are a big thing and you need large amounts of capital, experience, skills and manpower to make them.

Tell that to the people making The Repopulation.

The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.

As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..

Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.

Most people put the hero engine down because of SWTOR.. Bioware used an old version of the engine and managed to mash it up bad as well..

At the end of the day HeroEngine is a very viable option for any indie company wanting to make an MMO. its also one of the best engines for multiple people working togeather, I have not seen it done better in any engine.

Saying that no one should try and make an MMO game as their first game, there is a shit ton of work invovled and a lot of things can go wrong.. best to make a few SP games and maybe a few small MP games first :)

Didnt realsie they had released HeroEngine 2 think ill have to take another look at it :)

Originally posted by JamesP
Tell the guys Developing the Repopulation all this crap and see what they say considering they are using Hero... I personally have a HeroEngine Server - I'll tell you one thing it's NOT designed for people with no Programming Experience. There's a TON of Programming you have to do. And it runs great on my old Single Core CPU with Integrated Graphics so I have no idea where people get that it doesn't perform well.

Frame rate isn't just a function of the game engine.  It depends tremendously on how much you're trying to keep track of and have to draw per frame, and on what you're trying to draw.  The first time I ran my game engine, it ran at about 200 frames per second on my AMD E-350 based laptop/netbook, even though it was horribly unoptimized.  It helped that the only thing it was trying to draw was a test pattern on the ground.  Getting 50 frames per second while drawing 20 times as much means I've made huge improvements in efficiency, even though the frame rate went way down.

Now, you probably already knew that.  But that's a point I was trying to make earlier in the thread, where someone was complaining that the Hero Engine is what forces SWTOR to limit how much it draws on the screen at once, as though some other game engine could draw arbitrarily large amounts of things without any performance problems.  While there are surely some game engines that are more efficient than others, it's not an easy thing to measure, especially considering that the relevant comparison is after you've made all of your optimizations to each.

The trick is, there is only so much blood you can sqeeze from a turnip. Also, if you don't have access to the code for the engine, at that price, that is where people make optimizations.

Originally posted by Caldrin

Tell that to the people making The Repopulation.

The HeroEngine and the HeroCloud is the perfect solution for an indie company wanting to create an MMO or some other online game. Heroscript is the way for people using heroengine to code in new things or manipulate the engine in different ways.. its just a different scripting language.. UDK also uses their own scriping language as well as many other game engines. You can also gain access to the source code for the hero engine via other license models.

As for making an MMO yes your right its a lot of work but HeroEngine does cut down that work quite a bit.. work that you would have to do if you where gonig to use Unity3d..

Unity is a nice engine as well, now with DX11 support as well but it is in no way setup to support MMOs and you have to do a lot of work to get it even close to being ready for an MMO.. you will also need to use middleware for the networking code.

Does DirectX 11 even matter if you're not using tessellation?  And how could one plausibly hope to do tessellation without writing your own shaders?  That's low-level stuff that an off-the-shelf game engine isn't going to give you access to without the full source code.