peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.

Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.

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Originally posted by night_gamer
peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.

Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.

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Of course your right, You either have to:

A: Put alot of Time into production
or
B: put alot of Cash into production
or
C: Both.

Originally posted by Nitth

 

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Originally posted by night_gamer
peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.

 

Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.

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Of course your right, You either have to:

A: Put alot of Time into production
or
B: put alot of Cash into production
or
C: Both.

lets comment variant A: if you have nothing else to do in next 5-10 years go for it. But is wrong from the start. You need to do games for today market. If you plan to develop everything low costs and keep the step with new hardware and stuff.. you probable never finish a game.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by hfztt

$99 / year

AND

Autodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.)

Its really the last part that kills the idea.

Where did you think the art assets were going to come from?  Microsoft Paint?

Not my point.

But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.

If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the  $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.

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Originally posted by hfztt

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by hfztt $99 / year AND Autodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.) Its really the last part that kills the idea.

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Where did you think the art assets were going to come from?  Microsoft Paint?

---

Not my point.

But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.

If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the  $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.

 

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Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by hfztt

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by hfztt $99 / year AND Autodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.) Its really the last part that kills the idea.

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Where did you think the art assets were going to come from?  Microsoft Paint?

---

Not my point.

 

But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.

If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the  $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.

 

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What about the open source Blender application? It seems functional at least.

 

It is, he's just overreacting.

Originally posted by asmkm22

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by hfztt

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by hfztt $99 / year AND Autodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.) Its really the last part that kills the idea.

---

Where did you think the art assets were going to come from?  Microsoft Paint?

---

Not my point.

 

But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.

If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the  $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.

 

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What about the open source Blender application? It seems functional at least.

 

It is, he's just overreacting.

A game engine inevitably wants vertex data set up a particular way.  Can Blender set up the vertex data in exactly the way that the Hero Engine wants it?  If not, then at an absolute minimum, you're going to have to do some low level meddling to reformat whatever vertex data it outputs if you don't have the full source code for the Hero Engine.  If licensing a game engine was a sensible decision for you in the first place, then having to do that low level meddling probably isn't a better idea than buying Maya.

Worse, without the full source code, do you necessarily even know how the Hero Engine wants its vertex data formatted?  Checking a little bit of sample code doesn't necessarily help, as different vertex shaders could easily want the data formatted differently.  In my own game, for example, some vertex shaders want the position in 2D coordinates, while others want it in 3D coordinates.

Can Blender even produce all of the vertex data that the Hero Engine needs?  If it can't, then it's worthless for creating art assets for the Hero Engine.

Don't think of vertex data as just coordinates of points.  A "vertex" as used in 3D graphics is an arbitrary collection of data that usually includes spatial position coordinates, commonly includes normal vectors and texture coordinates, and could include anything else that the game engine designer thinks that the vertex shaders should make use of on a per-vertex basis, such as colors or shininess.

Maybe Blender can do everything that you'd need for the Hero Engine.  I don't know.  But just because it can do some animation doesn't mean it can readily be made to work with the Hero Engine.  There are probably reasons why Simutronics listed the engine as requiring Autodesk Max or Maya 2011, but didn't list Blender as an option.

Maya/3Ds max uses a proprietary format.  You typically have to use a free format to import/export between them. 

Such as using .obj ( will have to tweak y and z coordinates though iirc)

You can not save maya format from blender.

IIRC maya uses NURBS and not just regular vertex data.

I used Blender just fine with it.  Maya or 3DS Max are listed as requirements because their art pipelines interface with them to upload your assets to the repository.  You can actually do it manually as well using the repository browser, as long as you have your loca folder structure setup to mirror theirs.

I used both Maya and Blender and they work fine.  The majority of the work was done in Blender, because I'm much more familiar with it, and then just imported it into Maya for the art pipeline, but even that got a little tedious and I started uploading it all manually without any real problems.

Anyway, if you have a small team of, say, 4 or 5 people looking to build something, all you need is one of you to be in some kind of school (high school, college, etc) and you can qualify for the student licenses, which are basically free for non-commercial use.  By the time your game is anywhere near ready to be released for sale, you should have secured enough funding to pay for a commercial license.

I don't know how many times I have to say this, but Hero Cloud is NOT designed to be the end-all-be-all AAA MMO dev solution.  It's meant for very small indie teams looking for an affordable way to get started very quickly on building whatever game they want (it doesn't just do MMO) without having to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars first, with the flexibility of upgrading the license to full source if needed.