SBG bought an engine this time!

[MerekTheMad]

http://www.warcry.com/news/view/69303-Virgin-Games-Stray-Bullet-and-Colony-Studios-Select-HeroEngine

SBG has licensed HeroEngine! WOOHOO! Do you all know what this means? Do you? THEY ACTUALLY LEARNED FROM SB! HUZZAH THERE IS HOPE!

Yes, totally stolen from Ashen's site. OWNED SIR, OWNED!

[Soulein]

This is HeroEngine's site. Looks promising, but no one can tell at this point.

http://www.play.net/playdotnet/platform/

[Ramsie]

There is much more than hope Merek :)

[SinijS]

Ashen started updating his blog again? I have to go plague it again with my presence.

Anybody knows anything about Hero engine? What can it do?

[MerekTheMad]

There is much more than hope Merek :)

Pics or I call shens

[KayleeM]

There is much more than hope Merek :)

Ramsie, I am very curious about this Development package. Obviously its along the lines of BigWorld and others, but what kinda network transport options does it come with? Additionally, without giving an exact number, what did the single title liscense cost? $10k's, $100k's..?

[SoliTear]

Time to do some research and reading!

[WyvernWulf]

Nice engine choice! If it's good enough for Bioware, it's good enough for us! :)

[alexCore]

Does that mean if you got problems with the engine you'll just walk a few blocks, ring at Biowares door and ask Ubiq for help? =D

[KayleeM]

Does that mean if you got problems with the engine you'll just walk a few blocks, ring at Biowares door and ask Ubiq for help? =D

I was wondering if there was an 'agreement' much like this in the works :)
It all filters down to a better game for the players!

[Salohcin]

Oh thank god, that is what sucked big time about SB is the engine.

[SoliTear]

After briefly reading the brochure for the engine. It looks really good! Appears there are quite a few nice tools and/or features to pick from.

WOW!

[SoulShade]

Hero's Journey (www.play.net/hj/) Check out some of the screen shots. Its developed with the HeroEngine. Screenshots look excellent, but I can't say I am a fan of some of the movie gameplay.

[SinijS]

Hero's Journey was in development since before Shadowbane...

So what exactly Hero engine can do? Deformable terrain and destructible items? Physics? Impassible terrain? Collision? Support 100+ people at once?

[SoliTear]

If you go to the site for the engine, there are two downloadable pdf brochures. It just appears that they have some good tools and features to pick from. How and what is built depends upon the team, but the engine seems pretty good and from what little the brochure tells, this engine can be taken in quite a few directions. Site for the engine: http://www.heroengine.com

[KayleeM]

All I can say is: Better code for clusters / SMP or I will Bane SBG HQ.

[halethrain]

I'm kinda glad to hear they dropped the idea of unreal 3. According to Mr. Thokk, the network architecture has to be completely rewritten on the U3 engine to support MMO's. At least here the devs have a proper network to adapt.

[LeddZeppelin]

from what ive seen on the hero engine website's brochure the graphics are very well done... think slighty better then guildwars without the ridiculous haze effects

[iScout]

It looks like they neglected their own game to develop the tools, at least that's my guess.

But it seems that they're still developing it. There's screenshots of in on mmorpg.com, and they look promising.

[waltzie]

Only 1 thing ... it's integrate AGEIA PhysX (http://www.ageia.com/physx/videos.html).. i think will be integratedin all video adapter on next 2 years. Anyway now, have a price of about 160-200$ ....

[CrawlingChaos]

Nice engine choice! If it's good enough for Bioware, it's good enough for us! :)

Felt the same way.

[AshenTemper]

Well, I can't say too much on the subject (yet) but I will tell you that I LOVE having a toolset to use to do things. I work on both "Project O" (as I like to call it) and Shadowbane daily and its amazing the difference in the amount of work I can get done in an hour on Project O compared to what takes me hours and hours in Shadowbane.

[KayleeM]

*cough* *cough* Rework SB in HeroEngine *cough* *cough*

[AshenTemper]

haha, believe me, we've talked about porting Shadowbane to other engines for a few years now (such as HE and Unreal). Since the acquisition back in 2003, that decision has been out of our hands.

[KayleeM]

In your personal opinion, what do you think UBI is going to/has the potential to do with SB? I mean, I love the game, but all wells eventually run dry.

[AshenTemper]

In my personal opinion, I like working in this industry and know better than to answer such questions in an open forum ;)

[KayleeM]

Damn. Had to try. Pm me then!

Oh, anyone know if there is a chance that Simutronics will be releasing Trial/Education/Royalty liscence versions of HE?

[AshenTemper]

Probably a better question for Simutronics ;) You can click here to ask them (http://www.play.net/playdotnet/platform/contact.asp).

[KayleeM]

Yeah I already zipped them an email a few days ago, but if you look at the form it consists of the following elements:

Who are you?
How much Money do you have?
Who told you about us (so we can go see how much money they have) ?

Hrm, kind of a turn off. They seriously need to up the content on their site.

[MerekTheMad]

So how long til we see this game? They claim to cut time to market down to 12-18 months, and we are a solid 10 months in ATM. Beta soon? Shall I start spamming Xanther for an invite?

[SinijS]

I work on both "Project O"

Proper term is GorillaBane, too late to change it.

[SinijS]

In my personal opinion its not going anywhere but I can't really tell you that outright
LOL!

Ashen Temper: Just pointing out that this is a doctored "quote" ;)

[Xanther]

You spam me...you die.

[chimpy]

Several things in the brochure I like:

-A part about DOM where rapid access to queries to scan inventories...thst would be nice for clearing up a certain problem with duping.

-The graphics looked top end

-The company is very professional in what they are trying to sell which means that it is probably very good and that means....Xanther I will be expecting a Beta invite any day now.

[SinijS]

Dibs on Drizzit, Merlin and Gandalf names for beta.

[Nogrim]

with all these bells and whistles what llevel of lag can be expected?
what level of home pc does the engine require?
are things like modeling etc within the engine or are third party programs still needed?
do they have educational licenses for people wanting to learn the the software (since im trying to get into MMO development im excited by this)

[Avarix]

From the Hero's Journey page on system requirements.

Q. What are the system requirements to play HJ?
A. At this time we do not know what the minimum system requirements will be, however, we are making an effort to make them as low as possible without affecting the quality of the game environment. We will provide more information on this as it is available.

So i would assume high end specs by todays standards, mid level in about a year when it comes out.

[Nogrim]

From the Hero's Journey page on system requirements.



So i would assume high end specs by todays standards, mid level in about a year when it comes out.

i know some of it will be base don the individual games since alot of things change from game to game on an engine like this, but more or less wanted a ball park of what SBG planned to aim for

[waltzie]

...
-The company is very professional in what they are trying to sell which means that it is probably very good and that means....Xanther I will be expecting a Beta invite any day now...


Fully Agree, but w8ing for Alpha 0 invite :eek:

[cornholio]

they will probably aim for min specs of DX9, SM3.0, 2.5 ghz single core, 512M main / 128M gpu memory, NV76XX or better video card.

2 years from now a good target spec would be DX9, SM3.0, 2.4 ghz dual core Conroe/K10 uA (or 3.2GHz Pentium D), 1GB main / 256M gpu memory, NV86XX or better video card, dual core min, quad core rec'd.

The key thing to remember is that 2 years from now, XP will still require support, so DX9 will also require support.

[BenSBG]

MS support doesn't imply SBG support.

[peerless]

Proper term is GorillaBane, too late to change it.

lol so true. Thank you again fugger for addressing my question, thus leading to the community name gorillabane :D

Project O phhhttt

[cornholio]

MS support doesn't imply SBG support.

It would be madness to make a PC game that doesnt support XP!

unless you're making a console game and not a pc game!

[Chadwick]

I'm no techie, but what sort of effect is using HE going to have on gameplay? Does it effectively constrain GorillaBane to certain styles of combat/interaction? Or is it basically open ended? I understood about half of the terms in the brochure, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to how much freedom SBG will have.

[LeddZeppelin]

defenitly shoulda used DX 10 with the cryteck 2 engine http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/directx-9-vs-directx-10-picture-comparison

[Nogrim]

defenitly shoulda used DX 10 with the cryteck 2 engine http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/directx-9-vs-directx-10-picture-comparison


cause thats definitly feasible with a 100 characters on the screen at once! Crysis is great for a single player or small multiplayer but unless youve got some alien technology youll never have the power to run crysis with an mmo structure
at least not for 3-4 years imho MMOs generally lag behind fps in the graphics department we still dont have source engine level graphics in MMO's and prob wont for another year or so imho

[Cookiemonster]

Thing is, its all good to have a good engine and stuff, but can the common user with a common pc play the game without having to turn down all the graphics and tweak settings etc etc, you want to install the CD and start playing instead of wasting a few days trying to make it work without lagging or without crashing or without seeing funny things on your screen that you defo know shouldn't be there even though you know you have the right specs.