Benefits of the Hero engine

Good developers admit when they **** up, for example, David Jaffe with the recent Twisted Metal network issues, he flat out said

"We're sorry guys, we ****ed up, i know it's crap but we're doing our best to fix the issues and won't stop until it's fixed, if you want to return the game feel free to do so, i would be pissed too if i bought a 60 dollar game and it wasn't working properly for me."

That is a real developer in my eyes, the rest can go screw themselves.

Meanwhile they've created a very successful mmo and you're posting on a forum. Yea, they're clearly the losers

Then of course there is the other side who harp all over the downside of things refusing to even acknowledge that there may have been good reasons why they went with this system. And ignoring the good points of the engine.

I think they're being overly careful when they do updates.

They CAN do hotfixes as we saw with one of the recent patches, 1.1.3a if I recall. They implemented that without taking the servers offline.

But I presume the standard routine of upgrading involves something like the following:

1) Take down the servers to the public and boot all players.

2) If necessary, prep servers for update.

3) Begin database backups for all server states.

4) Begin server/database update process.
a) Any hardware updates and maintenance first.
b) Any software updates and maintenance second.

5) If necessary, reboot servers or restart software.

6) QA team accesses game automatically to test the new patch with pre-set tests.

7) QA team accesses game to test new functions in new patch.

8) Final verification and check-offs on patch and databases before servers up.

9) Servers restored to public players.

I might be missing a few, and maybe added a few, but something like that. If something goes wrong, say at step 6 or 7, they may shunt back to the Dev team to fix what's wrong and take care of any live bugs that present themselves, then repeat 4-7 again until step 8 is a success.

They've had maintenance time as low as 2 hours before, and some 7+ hours. I suspect some patches are more accurate than others.

If they have to replace or update some server hardware it could get more complex, as the new server has to be brought online to replace the old one before the updates to the code can be performed, etc.

I can't wait to see some of the really cool special stuff they can do with the engine. I'm not expecting it within the next few months, but I suspect within a year or two there will be some awesome events that can occur, like Imperials invading the Galactic Market on Coruscant, or the Republic invading Kaas City.

I agree, especially considering it's won "Best Engine" for nearly a decade.

Yes; but that also means that licensing will be expensive.

The feature he is talking about is with the newest of HeroEngine releases. SWTOR uses a highly modified older version, so I doubt it is capable of the feature being discussed.

Blah! deleted comment.

http://www.heroengine.com/heroengine/why-heroengine/

There are nice features here.

So, BW didn't buy licensing rights to SW upgrades to the Hero Engine? Or are you saying that their infrastructure may be so customized that they don't support core engine upgrade??

That's horrible design decision.

It's like saying that I wrote my software for Windows XP and there's no way for me to upgrade it to support Win 7.

Because nobody else has ever done this in game design amirite? Regardless of your opinion of this. It is a fairly common practice for game developers.