Originally posted by theoneandonly

I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.

How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.

 

That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by lizardbones  

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Originally posted by Quizzical I wanted to create a seamless, round world.  Can I do that with Hero Engine, or any other off-the-shelf game engine, for that matter?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to use tessellation very extensively, to the extent that turning tessellation "off" is logical nonsense apart from surfaces that are supposed to appear completely flat.  Can I do that and still draw whatever shapes I want with Hero Engine or any other off-the-shelf game engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to have many thousands of trees in my game world, and make every single tree look different from every other.  Can I do that with the Hero Engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  There's a bunch of other stuff that I want to do that you've likely never seen, but I'd have no hope of shoehorning it into Hero Engine.  And I'm pretty sure that I can do a lot of it, though perhaps I shouldn't talk too much while it's still "I think I can" as opposed to "I have done."

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Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.  

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I wanted a sphere, like Earth.  A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other.  It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat.  For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat.  And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.

Gravity doesn't vary.  The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are.  Kind of like on Earth.

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Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread too much, or maybe this information will be relevant to some other developers out there.

When the player view point is moving, is the player moving, or is the object they are walking on rotating? The reason I ask is for multiplayer environments. I was looking at Unreal and Unity, and it looked possible to have a round surface to run around on, but the mechanics to make it happen were that the surface rotated under the player viewpoint, rather than the player viewpoint running around on the surface. This was because there is a static "down" for gravity. This is fine for a single player environment, but multiple players couldn't rotate the same object at the same time. Also, the skybox would have stayed in a static position, which might look weird. At the time, I didn't see a way to write in a different gravity property for the system.

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Originally posted by botrytis

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Originally posted by theoneandonly I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits. How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.  

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That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

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The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by theoneandonly

I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.

How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.

 

That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

What i was trying to say, that there ara hundrents of people who will pay $99 but have no idea what to do with it.

Originally posted by Quizzical  If the hope of indie games is innovation, then using an off-the-shelf game engine will stifle that, even if it does make it easier to make a simple game that kind of works.

hmmm, but you are talking about graphics, no?

I don't think indy developers are necessarily looking to make graphica innovations so much as game play innovations.

Now having said that, the rest of your posts ring true. But I'm not sure that sentence above pertains for game play innovations.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Quizzical

I wanted to create a seamless, round world.  Can I do that with Hero Engine, or any other off-the-shelf game engine, for that matter?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to use tessellation very extensively, to the extent that turning tessellation "off" is logical nonsense apart from surfaces that are supposed to appear completely flat.  Can I do that and still draw whatever shapes I want with Hero Engine or any other off-the-shelf game engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to have many thousands of trees in my game world, and make every single tree look different from every other.  Can I do that with the Hero Engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  There's a bunch of other stuff that I want to do that you've likely never seen, but I'd have no hope of shoehorning it into Hero Engine.  And I'm pretty sure that I can do a lot of it, though perhaps I shouldn't talk too much while it's still "I think I can" as opposed to "I have done."

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Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.

I wanted a sphere, like Earth.  A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other.  It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat.  For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat.  And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.

Gravity doesn't vary.  The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are.  Kind of like on Earth.

Pretty cool idea. Other than the occasional venture into torus territory (ex:UO), most game maps like you said stick to cylinders. Would be cool to experience an actual round map, especially in an exploration type game.

Most games stick to rectangles, or something else that is completely flat.  They usually don't even get as far as cylinders, though some games do.  Toruses (tori?) are pretty easy, too:  if you go off of any edge, you come back on the opposite edge, without any rotation or orientation change necessary.

Spheres are much harder, as there isn't any nice way to map a plane onto a sphere.  Look at all of the contortions that mapmakers have to go through to give you a map of Earth.

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by botrytis

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Originally posted by theoneandonly I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits. How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.  

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That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

---

The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.

 

I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by lizardbones  

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Originally posted by Quizzical I wanted to create a seamless, round world.  Can I do that with Hero Engine, or any other off-the-shelf game engine, for that matter?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to use tessellation very extensively, to the extent that turning tessellation "off" is logical nonsense apart from surfaces that are supposed to appear completely flat.  Can I do that and still draw whatever shapes I want with Hero Engine or any other off-the-shelf game engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to have many thousands of trees in my game world, and make every single tree look different from every other.  Can I do that with the Hero Engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  There's a bunch of other stuff that I want to do that you've likely never seen, but I'd have no hope of shoehorning it into Hero Engine.  And I'm pretty sure that I can do a lot of it, though perhaps I shouldn't talk too much while it's still "I think I can" as opposed to "I have done."

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Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.  

---

I wanted a sphere, like Earth.  A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other.  It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat.  For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat.  And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.

 

Gravity doesn't vary.  The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are.  Kind of like on Earth.

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Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread too much, or maybe this information will be relevant to some other developers out there.

When the player view point is moving, is the player moving, or is the object they are walking on rotating? The reason I ask is for multiplayer environments. I was looking at Unreal and Unity, and it looked possible to have a round surface to run around on, but the mechanics to make it happen were that the surface rotated under the player viewpoint, rather than the player viewpoint running around on the surface. This was because there is a static "down" for gravity. This is fine for a single player environment, but multiple players couldn't rotate the same object at the same time. Also, the skybox would have stayed in a static position, which might look weird. At the time, I didn't see a way to write in a different gravity property for the system.

 

That depends on which coordinate system you're talking about.  A game engine internally has to have a bunch of different coordinate systems, and you have to convert between them a lot.  That's why when people ask about designing a game, I insist that you absolutely must be comfortable with change of basis matrices to do 3D graphics, or else you're not going to get anywhere.

Internally, every object has a position in the coordinate system for the region it is in.  Every region (32 in my game world) has its own coordinate system, and objects near regional boundaries often have to be converted into the coordinate system of the adjacent region(s).  In this coordinate system, it is the player who moves while the trees and rocks and so forth stay put.  Eventually there will be NPCs and mobs and some other animated objects that also move, but I haven't made them yet.

There is also a coordinate system for the camera.  In every single frame, every nearby object has to be converted from region coordinates to camera coordinates.  Then there are some tests to see if the object might plausibly appear on the screen, and if not, it is skipped.  If it might appear, then the uniforms to draw it are computed and get passed along to the rendering thread, which sorts things and sends them along to the video card to draw.  The rendering thread never sees anything in regional coordinates, but only camera coordinates, so from that perspective, the camera stays put and everything else in the world moves.

Each object implicitly has its own coordinate system, and various surfaces that make up the object have their location given in the object's coordinate system, which then gets converted to regional coordinates.  The object's coordinate system is a simple translation of region coordinates, so this is pretty easy.

There are also clip coordinates, window coordinates, and screen coordinates, but that's all done on the video card, and the CPU side of the code doesn't touch it at all other than to update some uniforms when the player makes certain changes, such as resizing the window.  Well, the window size is relevant to determining whether objects will appear on the screen, I suppose.

Originally posted by Quizzical

 

So let me get this straight.  The problem with writing your own game engine is that it will be outdated?  But if you use the DirectX 9.0c Hero Engine (welcome to 2005!), that's not outdated?  Does Hero Engine offer support for a bunch of custom effects done through geometry shaders?  How about extensive use of tessellation?  Post-processing effects done via framebuffer objects, or whatever the DirectX equivalent is?  If not, then it doesn't support modern computer graphics, period.

The problem isn't just the DirectX version.  It's what you do with it that matters.  If you ostensibly use DirectX 11, but don't do anything with it that couldn't be done just as well in DirectX 9.0c, then you're not doing modern computer graphics.  Now, there is a fair bit that you can do with older APIs, such as every game ever made before 2007, and a lot of the ones made since then.  Using outdated graphics methods isn't the kiss of death for a game.  But trying to keep up to date is hardly an argument for using the Hero Engine.

I wanted to create a seamless, round world.  Can I do that with Hero Engine, or any other off-the-shelf game engine, for that matter?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to use tessellation very extensively, to the extent that turning tessellation "off" is logical nonsense apart from surfaces that are supposed to appear completely flat.  Can I do that and still draw whatever shapes I want with Hero Engine or any other off-the-shelf game engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to have many thousands of trees in my game world, and make every single tree look different from every other.  Can I do that with the Hero Engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  There's a bunch of other stuff that I want to do that you've likely never seen, but I'd have no hope of shoehorning it into Hero Engine.  And I'm pretty sure that I can do a lot of it, though perhaps I shouldn't talk too much while it's still "I think I can" as opposed to "I have done."

Are you talking about a game engine or a graphics engine?

Originally posted by Souldrainer
There are some good things that this engine brings to the table, like stable network management. However, if you are an indie dev who has fewer than 10 games under your belt, I strongly advise you to avoid RPGs and MMOs until you have a good grasp on the fundamentals of game design.

This doesn't matter at all.

WoW was Blizzard's first MMO. It did very well.

SWTOr was BioWare's first MMO. It did very bad.

 

It's all about knowing what makes a good MMO. BioWare claimed it was story. Nope.

I don't understand why people bash Hero Engine. It's a great engine. Before SWTOR flopped, it was leasing out at over 1m.

It wasn't the engine's fault. It was the developers' fault.

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Originally posted by Hedake

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Originally posted by lizardbones  

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Originally posted by botrytis

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Originally posted by theoneandonly I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits. How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.  

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That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

---

The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.  

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I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.

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Hero's cloud handles the game storage and distribution and some middleware pieces that the developer won't have to deal with like a chat system and billing systems. They are short cutting the development process of an MMO for indie developers.

Let's say a game gets 500 dedicated players, at $5 a player per month. That's $2500 a month. Hero gets $750 a month for hosting the game, providing the development platform and for the completed middleware. That's a lot of money. At the same time, they've made it possible for someone to write a game without a lot of upfront costs, aside from time. They've also handled a good bit of paper work in the server setup, bandwidth and billing.

I don't think it's a bad deal for a small scale indie developer.

The downside, as Quizzical pointed out is that the developer is limited by what the system is capable of. You want the chat or auction system tied to a mobile application? Well, you might have to wait for Hero to do it, pay a good bit more money for a better license, or write it and host it yourself, along with all the backend systems that were included in the Hero Cloud.

Originally posted by XAPGames

The Repopulation is working with Hero.  I'm curious to see how they do with it.

Yup.. Hero engine and open world :)

Originally posted by mmoDAD

I don't understand why people bash Hero Engine. It's a great engine. Before SWTOR flopped, it was leasing out at over 1m.

It wasn't the engine's fault. It was the developers' fault.

This^^^

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by theoneandonly

I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits.

How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.

 

That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

It's not quite that black and white.  I mentioned it earlier because it was relevant, but what I didn't mention was that it also covers a lot of backend infrastructure for the game, that would otherwise cost you to maintane.  A game using the Hero Cloud (the $99 yearly sub thing) includes the server hosting and payment collection (means to charge people for your game).

That may or may not be a better deal than simply hosting the game on your own servers using your own bandwidth, but it is an option.  You can also develop the game on the Hero Cloud model and migrate it all over to your own stuff by purchasing an actual license for $75k and an additional 7% revenue share.  If your'e company is very large they could probably negotiate better terms (I suspect Bioware did just that with SWtOR).

For comparison, licensing the Unreal Engine isn't too far off, although a bit more complicated.  It's free for non-commercial use so don't have to really spend any money while in development.  Once your game goes live, you only start to owe something after your revenue hits $50k, at which point they collect 25% of your revenue.  They do not provide hosting or payment services, however.

There is probably an option for licensing the Unreal Engine with lower/no royalty fees, but I don't have details in front of me.  Industry standards are generally lower 6 digits though.

 

MMO's are not cheap to make or maintane no matter how you go about.  Blizzard was in a particularly advantageous position due to creating WoW using an existing in-house game engine (the WC3 engine) so they not only already had the technical expertise for it, but they owed nothing for it's use.  And since it had already paid for itself through the WC3 games, it was essentially "free" when compared to pretty much every other MMO which had to license existing egines just to avoid spending 3 or 4 years building one before even starting on their game.

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by lizardbones  

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by lizardbones  

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Originally posted by Quizzical I wanted to create a seamless, round world.  Can I do that with Hero Engine, or any other off-the-shelf game engine, for that matter?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to use tessellation very extensively, to the extent that turning tessellation "off" is logical nonsense apart from surfaces that are supposed to appear completely flat.  Can I do that and still draw whatever shapes I want with Hero Engine or any other off-the-shelf game engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  I wanted to have many thousands of trees in my game world, and make every single tree look different from every other.  Can I do that with the Hero Engine?  By writing my own, I could and did.  There's a bunch of other stuff that I want to do that you've likely never seen, but I'd have no hope of shoehorning it into Hero Engine.  And I'm pretty sure that I can do a lot of it, though perhaps I shouldn't talk too much while it's still "I think I can" as opposed to "I have done."

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Round as in sphere or round as in a cylinder? How big was it? Did you write in some sort of gravity effect changing where 'down' was? Just curious.  

---

I wanted a sphere, like Earth.  A cylinder is much easier, as that can just be a rectangle where going off of one side brings you back onto the other.  It's about 1 km in radius, and drawn such that locally, it looks flat.  For purposes of internal computations, it's a truncated icosahedron (the iconic soccer ball shape), and when you cross an edge, it "folds" the faces up so that it still looks flat.  And yes, there's massive amounts of fakery done at the vertices to cover up that you "lose" 12 degrees.   Gravity doesn't vary.  The idea is that it's a planet, so gravity always pulls you toward the center of the planet, no matter where you are.  Kind of like on Earth.

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Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread too much, or maybe this information will be relevant to some other developers out there. When the player view point is moving, is the player moving, or is the object they are walking on rotating? The reason I ask is for multiplayer environments. I was looking at Unreal and Unity, and it looked possible to have a round surface to run around on, but the mechanics to make it happen were that the surface rotated under the player viewpoint, rather than the player viewpoint running around on the surface. This was because there is a static "down" for gravity. This is fine for a single player environment, but multiple players couldn't rotate the same object at the same time. Also, the skybox would have stayed in a static position, which might look weird. At the time, I didn't see a way to write in a different gravity property for the system.  

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That depends on which coordinate system you're talking about.  A game engine internally has to have a bunch of different coordinate systems, and you have to convert between them a lot.  That's why when people ask about designing a game, I insist that you absolutely must be comfortable with change of basis matrices to do 3D graphics, or else you're not going to get anywhere.

Internally, every object has a position in the coordinate system for the region it is in.  Every region (32 in my game world) has its own coordinate system, and objects near regional boundaries often have to be converted into the coordinate system of the adjacent region(s).  In this coordinate system, it is the player who moves while the trees and rocks and so forth stay put.  Eventually there will be NPCs and mobs and some other animated objects that also move, but I haven't made them yet.

There is also a coordinate system for the camera.  In every single frame, every nearby object has to be converted from region coordinates to camera coordinates.  Then there are some tests to see if the object might plausibly appear on the screen, and if not, it is skipped.  If it might appear, then the uniforms to draw it are computed and get passed along to the rendering thread, which sorts things and sends them along to the video card to draw.  The rendering thread never sees anything in regional coordinates, but only camera coordinates, so from that perspective, the camera stays put and everything else in the world moves.

Each object implicitly has its own coordinate system, and various surfaces that make up the object have their location given in the object's coordinate system, which then gets converted to regional coordinates.  The object's coordinate system is a simple translation of region coordinates, so this is pretty easy.

There are also clip coordinates, window coordinates, and screen coordinates, but that's all done on the video card, and the CPU side of the code doesn't touch it at all other than to update some uniforms when the player makes certain changes, such as resizing the window.  Well, the window size is relevant to determining whether objects will appear on the screen, I suppose.

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I can conceptualize what you're talking about with the coordinate systems, but I don't think that's possible with the Hero or Unreal Engines. Maybe dynamically loading chunks in front of the player with each of the chunks large enough that the player can't see to the end of the chunk that's loading or something...Minecraft style. I'm not even sure you can do that with Unreal...don't know about Hero but I would guess that it's not remotely possible.

There are some pretty smart people in the world. I don't know why, but this makes me happy. :-)

Thanks for the info.

Originally posted by Hedake

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by botrytis

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Originally posted by theoneandonly I dont understend all the programming language that is used in this thread. But to me it looks like the way to rise the profits. How many people spend $20-50 a month on MMO? How many think that they will create the next WoW? And all they need is $99. Thats very cheap for a dream.  

---

That is initial cost - until you make a profit. Then they want 30% off the top - that is just crazy!!

---

The Hero Engine people would be acting as publishers in addition to providing the Hero Engine development tools. That's why they would be getting the 30%.

 

I didnt read that they act as a publisher. If they do thats great. A publisher is responsible for distribution, advertising and marketing the game. I think the revenue cut is just a means to add additional revenue should your game be successful. You may still have to find a way to distribute it on your own though. Which could be via Steam Greenlight, Direct2Drive or just your own website.

They don't act as full publishers.  They only provide hosting and payment services.  Distribution and advertisement is up to you.

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.

WoW was new to MMO's, but not to multiplayer.  They had lots of experience with the client/server archetecture required for an MMO.  More importantly, they already had an in-house engine ready to be converted for use, so there was very little learning curve in development.  Blizzard actually did a very good job with WoW, but it wasn't random success.  They just had talented people.

SWtOR was basically the opposite in every way.  They had no multiplayer experience to speak of, and had to license the Hero Engine because they needed something fast.  If you look at the limitations of the Hero Engine, and the criticisms of SWtOR, it becomes fairly obvious that the development of the game was limited by the engine, which is never ideal.

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by Quizzical  If the hope of indie games is innovation, then using an off-the-shelf game engine will stifle that, even if it does make it easier to make a simple game that kind of works.

hmmm, but you are talking about graphics, no?

I don't think indy developers are necessarily looking to make graphica innovations so much as game play innovations.

Now having said that, the rest of your posts ring true. But I'm not sure that sentence above pertains for game play innovations.

It's not just graphics.  Game mechanics typically have graphics associated with them, and if you can't draw the graphics you need, you have to scrap the entire mechanic.

I didn't want a round world just for the sake of having a round world.  I want it to be light on one half of the world and dark on the other, and which "half" changes with time as the sun moves.  You can see the sun, and as the sun gets lower in the sky, the sky gets darker.  When the sun sets, the direct sunlight lighting disappears, so all you have left is some non-directional lighting from Rayleigh scattering.  And even that doesn't last very long before it gets completely dark.

Still just graphics, you say?  Well, this isn't:  if you're outside of a city when it is completely dark, you die instantly.  Lighting changes to make it clear that it's getting dark are essential to this.

The idea is that there will be 12 heroes, and up to 4 players.  Each player plays one of the heroes, while the rest stay in towns.  If you're in a town, you can switch to any hero in a different town, so when it's evening in your part of the world, you switch to a hero in a town where it's morning and continue playing.

There are three railroads that circumnavigate the world, and each passes through six cities.  You can get from any city to any other by riding the railroads.  Heroes that aren't actively being played will be able to be told to ride to a different city for a variety of purposes and will do so without any player actively playing them.

In order to go straight from one city to another, railroads have to be positioned at some odd angle.  I had to make a rather messy spreadsheet to compute the right angle.  If everything has to snap to a grid (as game engines sometimes require), you'd be forced to make railroads zigzag back and forth rather than go in a straight line.

So, can the unmodified Hero Engine 2 do that?

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Or let's wander off into something that definitely isn't graphical in nature:  security.  As everyone knows, bots are bad.  But trying to have mods ban bots as they find them is pretty ineffective.  What you really have to do is to make the bots not work.  But as one game developer put it, "the client is in the hands of the enemy".  Bot-writers can read system memory and grab data from there for bots to use.

So how do you stop that?  My proposal is to encrypt the few things in system memory that bots would want to read, and only briefly decrypt them as needed.  It will be a custom-done encryption, so any off-the-shelf tools to attack it will get nowhere.  It probably won't be a very strong form of encryption, but it doesn't need to be to give bot-makers fits.  That's still a ways off, so I haven't done it yet and I'm not sure how well it will work out.  But that requires access to low-level things in the game engine.  If I were using the unmodified Hero Engine 2, think I'd be able to do it?

Originally posted by asmkm22

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.

WoW was new to MMO's, but not to multiplayer.  They had lots of experience with the client/server archetecture required for an MMO.  More importantly, they already had an in-house engine ready to be converted for use, so there was very little learning curve in development.  Blizzard actually did a very good job with WoW, but it wasn't random success.  They just had talented people.

SWtOR was basically the opposite in every way.  They had no multiplayer experience to speak of, and had to license the Hero Engine because they needed something fast.  If you look at the limitations of the Hero Engine, and the criticisms of SWtOR, it becomes fairly obvious that the development of the game was limited by the engine, which is never ideal.

Completely false.

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/