Hero Engine: why?

Hero Engine was originally made for a MMO called Hero's Journey that was supposed to release in 2004-2005...however the development company ran out of cash and decided to start selling the engine instead.

Thats why the engine feels so outdated.

Wow... we sure have alot of professional programmers here. You really are programmers yes? Because otherwise theres no way you can tell what can and cant be done with this engine.

From the year i studied programming i learned that everything is possible and theres always a way to make your code more eficient. Maybe its the engine, or maybe its just a design choice they chose to rectify? We cant really tell until bioware tells us.

At least they can be fixed.

Well, I certainly hope you're right. But so far there hasn't been any indication of that.

I think there's plenty of indication, seeing as how they've acknowledged a bulk of the combat responsiveness complaints and are sorting it out.

It's not easy as flipping a switch and calling it a day.

I'm confident that they wouldn't build an MMO on a shoddy engine they couldn't modify.

I actually do programming as a profession. The issue really isn't so much the engine, it's that we really have no idea the terms of the engine licensing. Does Bioware have the right to modify the engines source code, or do they need the original developers to provide them updated code to fix "engine" issues (graphics, response time, etc.). Another thing any professional programmer will agree upon is trying to modify and work with someone elses source code more often then not is a royal pain. You run into issues such as lack of documentation, poor code quality, having to figure out someone else's train of thought (why is there a triple embedded for loop here...).

From some quick Googling, the makers of the HeroEngine never actually put out a game using their own engine. The company actually folded and then were acquired by Idea Fabrik in 2010 (this is well into star wars development). Considering the turmoil an acquisition typically is, Bioware is probably using a very old version of the HeroEngine which is probably barely supported. Now it makes sense why there's no high resolution textures, antialiasing, DX10/11 support, or any other remotely modern graphics feature.

I have had no problems with the engine, it feels just like any other engine I have used in mmo's though perhaps a little better in places..

what are the issues with it? Ability delay does not affect me, nor fps loss that others are having (running on max settings myself).

I would much rather bioware spent the money on plot and character development / content etc.. than on building a new engine from scratch.

cant really think of anything missing from it that needs to be there, someone enlighten me?

/sigh

Once again they aren't using an old commercial version. They are using there very own version of the engine that no one but Bioware has. Only Bioware has it because Bioware is the one that Modified the base Hero engine into what it is today. I actually asked Georg Zoller at SDCC if having a good deal of experience with the Hero engine would help a potential applicant; his response was "Not really since we have altered the engine so much ...it really isn't the Hero Engine anymore."

The reason most people are upset is because chances are that fixing the most brutal issues atm (combat delay/fps issues/textures settings) will take MONTHS and lets face it, we are paying for a broken game atm which in all honesty is pissing me off.