Hero Engine: why?

The Hero Engine used is a highly modified version Bioware developed. It is not the "off the shelf" Hero Engine software. You guys should also stop trashing Hero Engine when you have absolutely no reason to. There's nothing bad about the basic design. It's no more buggy than any other gaming engine.

If any of you ever worked in software you'd know this is quit common. Get over it. It's not the excuse for bugs you think it is. Bugs happen in the most robust software.

I am in my 16th year as a Web Application Developer for a large Aerospace company. I do know what I am talking about.

That's a lie.

Is there any reason to be acting like a jerk and outright lying? You know that's not true.

How can BW legally modify the game engine if the engine does not belong to them?

And where are you getting all your inside info from?

If it isn't open source (can't be bothered to check) then they will be able to buy commercial rights to the source code for distribution and modification.

And to the OP, I agree, I remember looking at this game on Wikipedia and seeing the Hero Engine and thinking "Oh here we go.".

For me, it's not about the bugs that make this engine disappointing. I can't really pinpoint what bugs are engine related, and I'm not going to try and blame any bugs on the engine.

From a hardware support standpoint however, the engine is quite embarrassing though. We're in 2011. Simultaneous multi-threading debuted in consumer processors in 2002. Dual cores have been around in consumer products since 2005. Either way you look at it, 9 years or 6, it's just plain bad. That's a terribly long time in the tech world. Unfortunately, it's a giant plague in the software industry, and gaming industry in particular.

DirectX 10 has been around since 2006. There's no support for taking advantage of the aforementioned API, which happens to be more efficient. DirectX 11, which offers around a 50% performance improvement over DX9 at the same graphical settings, has been around 2009. Now, I believe Bioware has talked about potentially adding support for these in the future, and I very, very much would like it if they did. But right now, it's not here. There are performance issues abound, and a lot of these would be alleviated if the HeroEngine was remotely compliant with industry standards that have been around for years.

Now, I'm not blaming Bioware for this. I'm simply saying from a technical standpoint, this engine sucks. When the HeroEngine gets multithreading support in the future, I hope it makes its way to TOR in a timely manner.

I love the fact that people make ridiculousness claims about the Heroengine.

Some for example,

Out dated
Its crap
No Multithreading

When in fact the Heroengine is one of the better more sophisticated engines I have seen.

And I'm an astronaut! :-D Hur hur

I think the general issue people are raising is, in most cases Bioware are restricted in what they can do with this game because they haven't made the engine themselves.

World of Warcraft uses a modified version of an existing Blizzard engine so they know the limitation and the ins and outs of it.

I can see that, but in every game there are limitations. Even if you build the engine yourself you will still hit limitations.

If they use a modified version (which they most likely do) then I see no problem.

The difference being they know the limitations in advance, at the moment we are at the stage of working around them as they arise.