Originally posted by Quizzical

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.

There are plugins available for Unity3d that allow you to create your own shaders..

Check this webdemo of a some very nice terrain shaders.. i picked this up last night.

http://www.stobierski.pl/unity/Terrain_WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

tho this is kind of getting away from the hero engine discussion, but you can also write your own shaders in HeroEngine 2 its one of the new features.

Originally posted by Quizzical

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.

It doesn't matter if the number is made up.  If you want to write your own engine, go for it. Almost everything I have ever read from developers about writing great 3D game engines from the ground up, is that it's a monumental undertaking.  I'm really not sure what your point is here.  You seem to believe that everyone is better off writing their own engine rather than licensing one, which is clearly *not true* for a lot of companies, especially indy developers who don't have the resources of a fully funded game company.

So where is your robust 3D MMO engine? I'd like to take a look at it since you fancy yourself an expert.

Originally posted by Caldrin

Originally posted by Quizzical

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.

 

There are plugins available for Unity3d that allow you to create your own shaders..

Check this webdemo of a some very nice terrain shaders.. i picked this up last night.

http://www.stobierski.pl/unity/Terrain_WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

tho this is kind of getting away from the hero engine discussion, but you can also write your own shaders in HeroEngine 2 its one of the new features.

Here's apparently what the Hero Engine says about doing shaders:

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Shader

They start by saying there are two kinds of shaders.  Well, there are two kinds of shaders that the Hero Engine will let you use.  There are actually six kinds of shaders, but the Hero Engine won't let you touch hull, domain, geometry, or compute shaders.  That's presumably simply because they're limited to DirectX 9.0c.  But still, that means modern 3D graphics is off-limits.

I'm guessing that their list of "variables" allowed is the DirectX equivalent of OpenGL uniforms.  If they're actually the equivalent of OpenGL variables, then egad, that's useless.  But if they only allow certain ones--and artificially make a lot of types off-limits, then that seems awfully restrictive.  I suppose that you could probably repurpose some for things that have nothing to do with the variable name, but that's something of a kludge and having variable names that have nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of the variable is rather than opposite of good coding practices.

As for the Unity Engine, here's what they have to say:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/Shaders.html

They still offer the basic vertex and fragment shaders, though I'm not sure what amount of customizability they give you there.  They also offer surface shaders, which are supposed to be more customizable and allow tessellation.  Here's what they say about surface shaders:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-SurfaceShaderTessellation.html

They seem to focus mostly on how to compute the tessellation degree.  In OpenGL, the work there would mostly be done in vertex shaders; I'm guessing that it's the same for DirectX.

They give examples, but not explicit, so I have no idea if you can do much with it.  They compute the tessellation degree by calling a function without showing you the function, so I have no idea what the function does.  They talk about making the tessellation depend on distance or edge length, but not curvature or boundary status, and you'll be completely crippled if you can't make it depend on those last two.  Not being able to use curvature just means that you'll sometimes have to tessellate a lot more than necessary in some places in order to get adequate tessellation in others, which means your code will be poorly-optimized.

Having nothing at all about a boundary is far more problematic, as that means you can't attach tessellated surfaces to each other.  That means you can't use tessellation to do anything complex unless you tessellate the whole thing in one go, which would be a nightmare to set up.  That would make things much harder than necessary, which defeats the point of licensing a game engine.  Well, the alternative is to just accept that you're going to have a lot of graphical artifacting when different surfaces tessellate a common boundary differently, but that's also undesirable.

I also don't see an explicit homeomorphism between the simplicial manifold with boundary given in the vertex data and the manifold with boundary that you're actually trying to draw.  (Well, there's no hard rule that they have to be manifolds, but that will usually make your life easier.)  It looks like they're relying on a texture for that, and the texture isn't explicitly given.  For irregular shapes like faces, that's kind of what you have to do.  But if you want to draw a more regular shape like a sphere or cylinder?  You could create a texture for it, but it's wildly inefficient.

And again, if you want to attach surfaces to each other along their boundaries to create more complex shapes, details in how texture filtering works will probably give you graphical artifacting.  That's not a problem with how texture filtering works; it's a problem of using it for things that it isn't meant for.

Modern Graphics are not an issue for most gamers, anything on Par with WoW graphics, or Elderscrolls Online graphics or SWTOR graphics is more than sufficient for an MMO.

Moderns, tesselations and the such, are good for Single Player games. I do not want to be upgrading Computer every time a new MMO comes out.

And you would be making the same mistake as all of the MMO's who advertised "next generation" MMO did, limitiong your player base, creating frustration for people, and bad word of mouth from the onset of launch.

MMO's do not need latest graphics to be great. If you bargaining card is your latst Graphics then I know intuitivelly as a player based on previous experiences that you have no substance or good gameplay in your game. Or at least I know that i will not be having fun because I will be fighting with the performance issues instead of enjoying the gameplay, which comes down to not having a good gameplay anyways from a player's perspective.

What I want in MMO is a good representation of things not a realistic representation of things as to strike a balance between Gameplay and Performance without me having to upgrade to the latest OS (I hear Microsoft wants to offer DirectX 11.1 only on Windows 8) or Gear...forget it, too much hassle for most players. And I am not about to turn my PC in ot a Smartphone either with Windows 8...no way.

Just jumping in to give a perspective.

Originally posted by asmkm22

Originally posted by OG_Zorvan

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/

I've read that and it basically confirms what I was saying:  Bioware needed something fast and chose Hero Engine because it has impressive development tools (it does).  There are limitations in the engine, especially the early build that they purchased, which explain a lot of the design decisions behind SWtOR though.

For example, the common criticism of SWtOR being nothing but a bunch of coridoors and rooms has to do with how the Hero Engine handles zones and terrain.  Even their open world areas, like Tatooine and Alderan, simply use tricks to prevent the player from ever being able to see off very far in the distance.  Stuff like "dog leg" shaped maps, and painted skyboxes for "distant terrain."

The engine now has what's called "seamless 2.0" which does make open world a bit more viable, in that you can link two zones together without using a transition piece, however it is still limited enough that you still have to design your grid of zones in such a way as to prevent the player from loading too many zones at one time.

Example:  (zones named A, B, C, and D)

A  B

C  D

As you move from zone A to B, the engine knows it needs to start loading up zone B into memory, so that when you reach zone B, the transition is seamless to the player (who thinks they are just in the same open are).

If you move from zone A to D, the engine would end up having to load zones B, C, and D because you are potentially going to any of them (they are all in sight from the south east corner of zone A).  This overhoad of loading additional zones up is very significant, and something the engine isn't designed for.

So from a game design standpoint, you'd have to take that limitation into consideration and setup your map so that something is in the middle of all four zones, such as a moutain or very large building, preventing the possibility of running into that situation.

This is not all that uncommon for game design anyway.  You see it a lot in cities, where they are designed to be a big circle (Ironforge in WoW, Sanctuary in Rift, Human captial in GW2, etc).

Anyway, I only mentioned it because of the complaints people have of MMO's that aren't open-world enough.  It often has to do with the game engine limitations.  WoW used to have this problem, but was updated with Cata out of necessity.

No, if you read that, it confirms absolutely nothing of what you've spouted. The engine SWToR has couldn't even be called HeroEngine at the time they purchased it, it was loose and buggy bits of unoptimized code. By the time the HeroEngine was actually made, EAware had already butchered and cobbled the not-even-alpha code they purchased into a whole different monstrosity. Even further, as stated in that link ( make sure to read the comment section as well as the article, as the HeroEngine devs did give replies ), HeroEngine devs were eventually locked out of SWToR develoopment and when patches, updates, and fixes for HeroEngine were made, EAware got none of them by choice. EAware could have accepted help from the HeroEngine devs, but didn't.

Calling SWToR's engine HeroEngine is an insult and disgrace to the actual HeroEngine devs work. If it were me in charge of HeroEngine, I'd have demanded EAware to remove my product's name from theirs.

Originally posted by OG_Zorvan

Originally posted by asmkm22

I've read that and it basically confirms what I was saying:  Bioware needed something fast and chose Hero Engine because it has impressive development tools (it does).  There are limitations in the engine, especially the early build that they purchased, which explain a lot of the design decisions behind SWtOR though.

For example, the common criticism of SWtOR being nothing but a bunch of coridoors and rooms has to do with how the Hero Engine handles zones and terrain.  Even their open world areas, like Tatooine and Alderan, simply use tricks to prevent the player from ever being able to see off very far in the distance.  Stuff like "dog leg" shaped maps, and painted skyboxes for "distant terrain."

The engine now has what's called "seamless 2.0" which does make open world a bit more viable, in that you can link two zones together without using a transition piece, however it is still limited enough that you still have to design your grid of zones in such a way as to prevent the player from loading too many zones at one time.

Example:  (zones named A, B, C, and D)

A  B

C  D

As you move from zone A to B, the engine knows it needs to start loading up zone B into memory, so that when you reach zone B, the transition is seamless to the player (who thinks they are just in the same open are).

If you move from zone A to D, the engine would end up having to load zones B, C, and D because you are potentially going to any of them (they are all in sight from the south east corner of zone A).  This overhoad of loading additional zones up is very significant, and something the engine isn't designed for.

So from a game design standpoint, you'd have to take that limitation into consideration and setup your map so that something is in the middle of all four zones, such as a moutain or very large building, preventing the possibility of running into that situation.

This is not all that uncommon for game design anyway.  You see it a lot in cities, where they are designed to be a big circle (Ironforge in WoW, Sanctuary in Rift, Human captial in GW2, etc).

Anyway, I only mentioned it because of the complaints people have of MMO's that aren't open-world enough.  It often has to do with the game engine limitations.  WoW used to have this problem, but was updated with Cata out of necessity.

No, if you read that, it confirms absolutely nothing of what you've spouted. The engine SWToR has couldn't even be called HeroEngine at the time they purchased it, it was loose and buggy bits of unoptimized code. By the time the HeroEngine was actually made, EAware had already butchered and cobbled the not-even-alpha code they purchased into a whole different monstrosity. Even further, as stated in that link ( make sure to read the comment section as well as the article, as the HeroEngine devs did give replies ), HeroEngine devs were eventually locked out of SWToR develoopment and when patches, updates, and fixes for HeroEngine were made, EAware got none of them by choice. EAware could have accepted help from the HeroEngine devs, but didn't.

Calling SWToR's engine HeroEngine is an insult and disgrace to the actual HeroEngine devs work. If it were me in charge of HeroEngine, I'd have demanded EAware to remove my product's name from theirs.

That's always going to happen when you fork the source code to customize things yourself.  You change the way the game engine wants things structured to fit your game, and then any changes made to the "standard" version of the game engine assume the previous structure and don't fit your version of it.  But you have to do it anyway unless you want the version you're using to be poorly optimized because the standard version can't customize things for every particular game.

Originally posted by JC-Smith
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.

you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.

in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)

Why are you guys so worried about these engines?  I mean...Tbh the hardest part is actually getting/making  the art assets o.o

Obv just art assets because its friggin fun to make sound effects...*whacks a watermelon* @_@

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JC-Smith
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.

you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.

 

in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)

So you think CCP were in the wrong to go about making EVE: Online and now there newest MMO in development? You think the creators of Dark Fall were in the wrong? You think it's wrong for Us to be making Greed Monger? You think it's wrong for JC-Smith and his team to be making The Repopulation (I've personally worked with them for a week or 2, GREAT group of guys!)? There are plenty of Indies making MMOs... Yes just as many if not more fail but oh well They learned Lessions which they can go on and use on future games!

Originally posted by Suraknar

Modern Graphics are not an issue for most gamers, anything on Par with WoW graphics, or Elderscrolls Online graphics or SWTOR graphics is more than sufficient for an MMO.

Moderns, tesselations and the such, are good for Single Player games. I do not want to be upgrading Computer every time a new MMO comes out.

And you would be making the same mistake as all of the MMO's who advertised "next generation" MMO did, limitiong your player base, creating frustration for people, and bad word of mouth from the onset of launch.

MMO's do not need latest graphics to be great. If you bargaining card is your latst Graphics then I know intuitivelly as a player based on previous experiences that you have no substance or good gameplay in your game. Or at least I know that i will not be having fun because I will be fighting with the performance issues instead of enjoying the gameplay, which comes down to not having a good gameplay anyways from a player's perspective.

What I want in MMO is a good representation of things not a realistic representation of things as to strike a balance between Gameplay and Performance without me having to upgrade to the latest OS (I hear Microsoft wants to offer DirectX 11.1 only on Windows 8) or Gear...forget it, too much hassle for most players. And I am not about to turn my PC in ot a Smartphone either with Windows 8...no way.

Just jumping in to give a perspective.

It's not about producing AAA quality graphics.  That's unnecessary for a low-budget indie game.  It's probably also impractical, as a low budget doesn't let you produce the large quantities of high quality artwork that an AAA game demands.  Rather:

1)  It's about making developers' lives easier by letting them use the right tool for the job.  If a building project calls for the use of both a hammer and a screwdriver, you may be able to get by with just one of the two.  In a pinch, a sturdy screwdriver can be used as a hammer, or the "claw" part of a claw hammer can be used as a screwdriver for larger screws.  But it will sure make your life easier if you have both the hammer and the screwdriver available.

2)  It's about optimizing performance by offloading the work that video cards are good at onto the video card rather than having to do it on the processor instead.  Any image that you can compute on a video card, you could just as well compute on a processor (up to minor rounding errors) without using any sort of 3D API.  The drawback of this is an enormous performance hit.  Rather than frames per second, you'd likely be looking at seconds per frame.  Depending on what you want to do, in some cases, it could even be minutes per frame.  For a game, that's a non-starter.

The entire point of having a video card is that it's optimized to be very, very good at some things that x86 (and ARM) processors are terrible at.  x86 processors are optimized for doing a large number of operations sequentially with low latency, and to still perform well with a lot of branching.  Video cards completely choke on that sort of workload.  Rather, video cards are very good at situations that are extremely parallel and ask for you to perform exactly the same instructions in exactly the same order on many different pieces of data at the same time.

For the sorts of data that video cards are good at, you may realistically see improvement of two orders of magnitude (i.e., speed up by a factor of 100) by doing the computations on the GPU rather than the CPU.  Even if you're pairing an ultra-high-end $1000+ processor with a $60 video card, the video card may still commonly be an order of magnitude faster.

But that's only if you you're able to have the video card process the data.  Never mind tessellation for a moment; that requires understanding of some advanced mathematics, and even most AAA developers don't have the necessary expertise in-house.

Instead, let's talk about geometry shaders.  There are two very important things that geometry shaders do:  they let you see an entire primitive (typically a triangle) all at once, rather than only one vertex at a time.  And they can emit new primitives, rather than requiring all vertices, edges, and triangles to be created by the processor and fed to the video card.

The latter lets you have one triangle come in, and then pass it through.  Or one triangle comes in, and then two triangles go out.  Or zero.  Or 17.  Or any other number up to the cap (which I think is 64 in OpenGL 4.2).  And the shader can be aware of all of the triangles that you're going to output at once, rather than having to process them one at a time.

So what would you use that for?  For one, it lets you mostly handle particle effects on the GPU, with the CPU only handing the video card some token data to get started.  Or if you ever want to draw the same scene from more than one perspective (e.g., for stereoscopic 3D, Eyefinity without assuming that the monitor screens all lie in the same plane in real life, or a split-screen multiplayer game), that lets you save a ton of work.

More generally, geometry shaders are like mesmers in Guild Wars:  they seem useless at first, but they end up providing a very elegant solution to all sorts of weird problems.  And yet, if they had never existed, people wouldn't realize that they were missing and ought to be there.  Developers who are still using DirectX 9.0c likely don't realize that they're making things much harder on themselves than necessary.

And then, yes, the newer APIs can produce better quality graphics.  But that's largely because if you can do the same thing as before while putting a lighter load on your hardware, then that frees up resources to do more than you could before.

-----

So let's talk about hardware compatibility.  Tessellation requires DirectX 11 or later, or OpenGL 4.0 or later.  That means video cards from roughly the last three years.  But even if your game is designed around tessellation, it's not that hard to port it back to DirectX 10 or OpenGL 3.2.  (Well, I only know that for OpenGL, but I'd assume it's the same for DirectX.)  You can tessellate your data once on the processor before uploading it to the video card.  Doing tessellation properly means that you need so little vertex data that even if tessellating it before uploading it increases the size of the vertex data buffers by a factor of 100, that's still basically a rounding error.  Now maybe you need hundreds of KB instead of only several KB of video memory.

If you're using geometry shaders much, then porting that back to DirectX 9.0c is probably impractical, or at least more trouble than it's worth.  But that means your game requires a video card from roughly sometime in the last 6 years.  If you're starting a project today and think you'll take 3 years to finish it, then by the time it launches, it will require a video card from sometime in the last 9 years.  Is that really such an onerous hardware requirement?

Even if you could port it back further to make it playable on older hardware, would the older hardware have the level of performance necessary to run your game?  People who would have bought a GeForce 7900 GTX or Radeon HD 1900 XT tend not to be the sort of people who would still be using the same video card a decade later.  Rather, the older hardware that might still be in use would be low end stuff like a GeForce 6150 SE that can't run most modern DirectX 9.0c games at playable frame rates, either.

As for operating systems, DirectX 10 and 11 are both compatible with Windows Vista, 7, and 8, and presumably future versions, too.  You mention DirectX 11.1, but using 11.1 is just stupid for anything beyond a tech demo.  I'm not advocating that for real games.  DirectX 10 does mean you lose compatibility with Windows XP, but if that bothers you, you can use OpenGL 3.2 instead and get compatibility with Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux, Mac OS X, and likely soon Google Android.

Maybe being incompatible with Windows XP is a problem today.  Think it will still be a problem three years from now, when you hope to finish your game if you start today?

Originally posted by MindTrigger

So where is your robust 3D MMO engine? I'd like to take a look at it since you fancy yourself an expert.

Would my game engine be better than the Hero Engine for making Greed Monger, The Repopulation, or any other game besides my own?  Nope.  Not even close.  They probably wouldn't be able to do much with my game engine.  Artists would be completely stuck, as mine produces artwork by typing out source code without any sort of graphical interface.  Even with full access to the source code, comments that assume that the reader understands, say, homology groups make perfect sense to me but would be completely baffling to anyone who doesn't.  Furthermore, some capabilities that most games need are completely missing from my game engine, and not going to be added.  For example, loading textures from a hard drive.

But you know what my game engine is better than Hero Engine for?  My game.  Because that's exactly what it's designed for.  I want to do a bunch of stuff that Hero Engine won't allow, but my game engine does.  This isn't peculiar to me, either; an awful lot of game engines that are designed for some particular game are the best engine for that particular game, or at least, far better than any off-the-shelf game engine that doesn't give you full access to modify the source code.

Originally posted by Castillle

Why are you guys so worried about these engines?  I mean...Tbh the hardest part is actually getting/making  the art assets o.o

Obv just art assets because its friggin fun to make sound effects...*whacks a watermelon* @_@

There's a lot of truth to that, though it depends on what you're doing.  If you're trying to create a purely text-based game, then no, creating the art assets isn't that hard.  But that's not what you meant.

Originally posted by JamesP

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JC-Smith
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.

you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.

 

in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)

So you think CCP were in the wrong to go about making EVE: Online and now there newest MMO in development? You think the creators of Dark Fall were in the wrong? You think it's wrong for Us to be making Greed Monger? You think it's wrong for JC-Smith and his team to be making The Repopulation (I've personally worked with them for a week or 2, GREAT group of guys!)? There are plenty of Indies making MMOs... Yes just as many if not more fail but oh well They learned Lessions which they can go on and use on future games!

It's kind of like being asked to evaluate NFL draft picks on draft day, and saying that you'd rather wait about a decade to see how good the players end up being in the NFL before you give teams their draft grades.

Have there ever been any good games that used the Hero Engine without having full access to the source code?  As far as I'm aware, no.  Will there ever be?  Find me in a decade and I can give you a better answer than I can today.

Originally posted by JamesP

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JC-Smith
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.

you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.

 

in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)

So you think CCP were in the wrong to go about making EVE: Online and now there newest MMO in development? You think the creators of Dark Fall were in the wrong? You think it's wrong for Us to be making Greed Monger? You think it's wrong for JC-Smith and his team to be making The Repopulation (I've personally worked with them for a week or 2, GREAT group of guys!)? There are plenty of Indies making MMOs... Yes just as many if not more fail but oh well They learned Lessions which they can go on and use on future games!

 i really dont know how you would define indie or non indie but the people who were making eve and darkfall seem to have a fairly strong engineering base. eve and darkfall use their own game engines and server technnologies. eve was an extremely well thought out practial and feasible mmorpg -->

- very few assets ( art, models, textures) due to space theme

- no story cutscenes and cgi stuff

- simple, slow paced combat

- no/minimal animation requirements

i cant say is wrong for you to make greed monger or above and beyond studios to make repopulation but i dont recommend  tackling huge projects such as mmorpgs unless you have the knowledge and experience and business mindset required. i have no idea what you guys are capable of but choosing an unproven engine, surrendering server control to a third party and the forfeiting 35% of your profits makes it hard for me to take you guys seriously. dont get me wrong, i would like for you guys to succeed, i really hope everything works out fine for you guys and i harbor no ill wishes i just dont find the whole idea of herocloud and small groups of  inexperienced dudes making mmorpgs very promising. having fun and learning lessons is great but it means nothing to an end user.

just a few questions:

- what are you doing about hackers?

- herocloud servers have provide enough bandwidth, how are you ensuring they will?

- do you know what server hardware is being used and can you prove that it is good enough?

- have you tested your servers with the targetted number of concurrent users?

- how are you dealing with latency (do u have client side prediction or something in place)

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JamesP

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JC-Smith
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.

you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.

 

in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)

So you think CCP were in the wrong to go about making EVE: Online and now there newest MMO in development? You think the creators of Dark Fall were in the wrong? You think it's wrong for Us to be making Greed Monger? You think it's wrong for JC-Smith and his team to be making The Repopulation (I've personally worked with them for a week or 2, GREAT group of guys!)? There are plenty of Indies making MMOs... Yes just as many if not more fail but oh well They learned Lessions which they can go on and use on future games!

 i really dont know how you would define indie or non indie but the people who were making eve and darkfall seem to have a fairly strong engineering base. eve and darkfall use their own game engines and server technnologies. eve was an extremely well thought out practial and feasible mmorpg -->

- very few assets ( art, models, textures) due to space theme

- no story cutscenes and cgi stuff

- simple, slow paced combat

- no/minimal animation requirements

i cant say is wrong for you to make greed monger or above and beyond studios to make repopulation but i dont recommend  tackling huge projects such as mmorpgs unless you have the knowledge and experience and business mindset required. i have no idea what you guys are capable of but choosing an unproven engine, surrendering server control to a third party and the forfeiting 35% of your profits makes it hard for me to take you guys seriously. dont get me wrong, i would like for you guys to succeed, i really hope everything works out fine for you guys and i harbor no ill wishes i just dont find the whole idea of herocloud and small groups of  inexperienced dudes making mmorpgs very promising. having fun and learning lessons is great but it means nothing to an end user.

just a few questions:

- what are you doing about hackers?

- herocloud servers have provide enough bandwidth, how are you ensuring they will?

- do you know what server hardware is being used and can you prove that it is good enough?

- have you tested your servers with the targetted number of concurrent users?

- how are you dealing with latency (do u have client side prediction or something in place)

You have to have an awful lot of stuff in place before you can meaningfully test server capabilities.  If you're launching a game next week, then yeah, you need to have answers to all of those questions by now.  But if the first beta is a year or two away, the game could easily be in a state where the most you can do is have plans that you're fully aware are unlikely to survive contact with reality.

Originally posted by Suraknar

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!

 

Don't read too much into criticism with pre-made engines.  They are industry standard for a very good reason.  Namely, building a game engine up from scratch is very time intensive, which means expensive to do.  I offered criticism for Hero Cloud not because I think building it yourself is a better choice, just that a lot of people go into this not realize just how monumental a task creating a game really is, regardless of the engine used.

I would use Unity or Unreal 3 rather than the hero engine, hell I prob wouldnt even bother if I had to use it. It still doesnt support muticore/threads by default, alot of processes are kinda backward because features have been slapped in badly, rather than the engine being designed with things in mind from the ground up. It's kinda like a house that was built with no doors, windows or plumbing, then had these whacked in a year or two later by bazza the tradie for a few slabs of beer.

In short, its utter crap. 

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JamesP

Originally posted by bishbosh

Originally posted by JC-Smith
Having worked with Hero Engine for about a year and a half now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the thing. It's renderer isn't on par with the likes of Unreal Tech, but the editors, collaberative editing, networking is all just fine.

you have to release your game to the public before you make this claim. no one expects a developer to criticise their own work publicly.

 

in terms of released games, hero engine doesnt really have a great history. no doubt it is easy to use, allows multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time in real time and has plenty of built in assets and networking but personally i would go about making an mmorpg using it. heck i wouldnt go about making an mmorpg as an indie unless it was something very simple (eg. 2d, turn based, text based or just plain simple)

So you think CCP were in the wrong to go about making EVE: Online and now there newest MMO in development? You think the creators of Dark Fall were in the wrong? You think it's wrong for Us to be making Greed Monger? You think it's wrong for JC-Smith and his team to be making The Repopulation (I've personally worked with them for a week or 2, GREAT group of guys!)? There are plenty of Indies making MMOs... Yes just as many if not more fail but oh well They learned Lessions which they can go on and use on future games!

 i really dont know how you would define indie or non indie but the people who were making eve and darkfall seem to have a fairly strong engineering base. eve and darkfall use their own game engines and server technnologies. eve was an extremely well thought out practial and feasible mmorpg -->

- very few assets ( art, models, textures) due to space theme

- no story cutscenes and cgi stuff

- simple, slow paced combat

- no/minimal animation requirements

i cant say is wrong for you to make greed monger or above and beyond studios to make repopulation but i dont recommend  tackling huge projects such as mmorpgs unless you have the knowledge and experience and business mindset required. i have no idea what you guys are capable of but choosing an unproven engine, surrendering server control to a third party and the forfeiting 35% of your profits makes it hard for me to take you guys seriously. dont get me wrong, i would like for you guys to succeed, i really hope everything works out fine for you guys and i harbor no ill wishes i just dont find the whole idea of herocloud and small groups of  inexperienced dudes making mmorpgs very promising. having fun and learning lessons is great but it means nothing to an end user.

just a few questions:

- what are you doing about hackers?

- herocloud servers have provide enough bandwidth, how are you ensuring they will?

- do you know what server hardware is being used and can you prove that it is good enough?

- have you tested your servers with the targetted number of concurrent users?

- how are you dealing with latency (do u have client side prediction or something in place)

You have to have an awful lot of stuff in place before you can meaningfully test server capabilities.  If you're launching a game next week, then yeah, you need to have answers to all of those questions by now.  But if the first beta is a year or two away, the game could easily be in a state where the most you can do is have plans that you're fully aware are unlikely to survive contact with reality.

any good multiplayer is built with multiplayer in consideration right from the start. from the looks of repopulation they easily have enough stuff in the game to test servers. all you need is players in an area performing actions and seeing if the server can handle relaying/processing information between clients to each other assuming authoratative server model is being used. this should really be done asap and im sure most multiplayer games are subject to such testing asap. maybe swtor wouldnt have been so crap if they taken server/multiplayer capabilities seriosulsly right from the go.

Originally posted by asmkm22

Originally posted by Suraknar

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!

 

Don't read too much into criticism with pre-made engines.  They are industry standard for a very good reason.  Namely, building a game engine up from scratch is very time intensive, which means expensive to do.  I offered criticism for Hero Cloud not because I think building it yourself is a better choice, just that a lot of people go into this not realize just how monumental a task creating a game really is, regardless of the engine used.

Licensing game engines may be common, but launching an MMORPG on what is basically a trial version of a game engine that doesn't let you touch the source code?  Have any games done that and succeeded, ever?

-----

As for my own engine, it's not AAA graphics quality by any means.  Here's a few screenshots I just took:

Looks decent enough to my eyes, especially for a game with exactly zero artists working on it.  The weird cylinder in all of the screenshots is my placeholder character for use in testing collision detection, and won't be a part of the final game.

Also, at around 300 KB, each of those screenshots is larger than the entire game itself is at the moment.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by asmkm22

Originally posted by Suraknar

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!

 

Don't read too much into criticism with pre-made engines.  They are industry standard for a very good reason.  Namely, building a game engine up from scratch is very time intensive, which means expensive to do.  I offered criticism for Hero Cloud not because I think building it yourself is a better choice, just that a lot of people go into this not realize just how monumental a task creating a game really is, regardless of the engine used.

Licensing game engines may be common, but launching an MMORPG on what is basically a trial version of a game engine that doesn't let you touch the source code?  Have any games done that and succeeded, ever?

-----

As for my own engine, it's not AAA graphics quality by any means.  Here's a few screenshots I just took:

Looks decent enough to my eyes.  The weird cylinder in all of the screenshots is my placeholder character for use in testing collision detection, and won't be a part of the final game.

Also, at around 300 KB, each of those screenshots is larger than the entire game itself is at the moment.

opengl or directx?

also is directx free to use?