Comments on: HeroEngine licensed again, but where is Hero’s Journey?

By: Sisca

Sisca — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:33:55 +0000

Having worked as a game master on Hero’s Journey for awhile – before life caught up with me – I can tell you that the Hero Engine is amazingly powerful and still easy to use. They’ve done a ton of work on the whole development pipeline as well making it easy to get models and such into the game so that world builders can just drag and drop them.

I also have a few ideas about why the game itself is delayed and when we’ll see it but I don’t think I’ll air those in such a public forum :)

By: Sente

Sente — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:50:12 +0000

Perpetual’s platform was for handling things around the game itself (support, billing etc), not dealing with graphics rendering.

Since there are many different bits an pieces to an MMO solution, you will probably have a number of players claiming to be market leaders, defined by some scope that is beneficial to them.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:08:51 +0000

He’s correct in that middleware is increasingly and incredibly important. Why spend years developing a rendering engine when you can license one and and just get busy making your game? UE3 is a decent rendering engine with an incredible toolkit. BW seems to be a great networking system, so studios are licensing that. Vivox makes a killer VOIP system, why not license that instead of being Blizzard and making your own inferior proprietary one?

If that pissed off ex-VG dev last year was correct, McQuaid had their guys completely re-work UE so none of Epic’s code remained, which goes quite a way in explaining VG’s performance issues. Still… the engine itself was designed around smaller maps, and I can’t help being unconvinced of its viability in an MMO with much larger environments. VG and L2 both use it, and both perform rather clunky and sluggish. 38Studios or Cheyenne Mountain is welcome to prove it can be done, though.