I think I know what's causing poor FPS for some users (no fix yet)

HeroEngine Meets StarWars

November 28, 2011


Hero’s Journey

Long ago in a company far far away, we were building a game called Hero’s Journey. It was an ambitious game with many wonderful features. We had our own special way of building games based on a unique process that we had developed while building pioneering online games like GemStone and DragonRealms. Our goal was to build a modern graphical MMO RPG that allowed our team of designers to continually add new content into the game – new areas, new spells, whatever they could think of.

We took an early version of our game to the legendary 2005 E3 show. We rented a small room in the back of a small hall, very far away from the giant multimedia extravaganza exhibits of EA, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and the rest of the empires. We set up meetings with people we knew, members of the press, friends in the industry, and publishers. We hoped to build enough interest to get a publisher to provide enough funding to expand the team and finish the game.

A few people got very excited, but not the way we planned.

“I need this.”

We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton. We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor. Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places. He knows games, especially online games.

Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package.

“I need this,” said Gordon. “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.” Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing. “This is just what I need! I want to license your engine.”

We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine.

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

BioWare Licenses HeroEngine For…

A few months after the show we heard from Gordon again. He was now the co-head of a new online game studio in Austin as part of BioWare. This was very impressive. Not only was Gordon a solid guy but BioWare was (and still is!) at the very top tier of game developers, the kind of company that made games that were always great. Soon the deal was done – soon meaning after months of painful negotiations and many weeks of meetings with teams of engineers who examined every line of our source code and interrogated our engineers. We were concerned over their making major changes to our engine, but we loved the size of the check that came with the deal.

A year or so later, it became clear to us that BioWare was building a Star Wars MMO. We had to keep the secret for another couple of years but it was incredibly exciting. If you watch some of the videos of BioWare developing SW:TOR, you can see HeroEngine and its unique tools and process being used by the massive team on this incredible project.

Our role began and ended long ago, in a company far far away, but we’re still excited over the part we have played in helping BioWare (now part of EA, of course) bring its vision to life.

by Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine



"The growth of the RPG/MMO Group as part of Electronic Arts in 2008+ has resulted in three additional studios being added to the BioWare Group outside BioWare's original home base in Edmonton. The first, located in Austin, Texas and headed by industry veterans Gordon Walton and Richard Vogel, was created to work on the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG project. Both the studio and the project were announced on March 13, 2006". Wikipedia (Bioware)


So, Gordon Walton is punting around at E3 in 2005, and he leaves with an Engine in his back pocket.

Gorden Walton then turns up in Texas, working for the big boys in a new Online Department, "Hey look guys, I just found this in my back pocket"

They then spend 6 years working on this, SIX YEARS !!!

Gordon Walton then leaves Bioware before the product even hits the shops.

Hmmmmm.

Six years is a long time, now I should point out, I am not a dev, and I dont work in the games industry, but I really do think six years is more than enough time to just build your own Engine, from the ground up.

SIX YEARS, OMG

Yes, they issued a video statement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E5XK...eature=related

Check this out for TERA:

TERA will be playable on any gaming computer assembled in the last four years.

The recommended system requirements:
• OS: Windows XP, VISTA or 7 (Latest Service Pack)
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ or Intel Core2 Duo E6750 2.66G
• RAM: 2 GB or greater
• GPU: AMD Radeon HD 3870 or Geforce 8800GT
• HDD: 30 GB of hard drive space
• DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Drive
• Internet Connection


Now, if you haven't seen TERA running yet, YouTube it. It's effing gorgeous; light years ahead of TOR aesthetically and it has those specs? BioWare fails at coding.

Check this out for TERA:

TERA will be playable on any gaming computer assembled in the last four years.

The recommended system requirements:
• OS: Windows XP, VISTA or 7 (Latest Service Pack)
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ or Intel Core2 Duo E6750 2.66G
• RAM: 2 GB or greater
• GPU: AMD Radeon HD 3870 or Geforce 8800GT
• HDD: 30 GB of hard drive space
• DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Drive
• Internet Connection


Now, if you haven't seen TERA running yet, YouTube it. It's effing gorgeous; light years ahead of TOR aesthetically and it has those specs? BioWare fails at coding.

Yes, TERA's engine looks amazing
Yes, TERA runs super smooth
Yes, TERA's game play only consists of "Fight mobs, then move, fight more mobs, repeat" and nothing more.

Id like to stick with TOR. Bioware is just making that a challenge for me because I cant play the game well if im getting 15 fps. If they had spent half as much time on the games engine that they had with the voice acting, it might actually be running decently.