New Game Engine - Hero

Deuce

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I don't know anything about game engines, but they've switched from Unity to Hero.

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Anyone know anything about this that can give some insight to this being a good move or not? It's sounding like it is but I would prefer to hear from someone here that is non-partial.
 

Zynn

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Based on what I know, they made a huge mistake. Unity is a solid engine, with a lot of support, and is very flexible. You can choose from 5-6 different languages and scripting languages to do the code with and you can mix and match, and not have to stick with one language. Unity has a much more powerful and update rendering engine. It has a very extensive shader library. It has also been used in many published titles.

Hero, has very dated graphics, your options for expansion and improvement are limited, you have to learn their scripting language to do anything. The shadows are terrible and trying to improve anything causes a very bad performance drop. Hero is used by people, who want to throw together their own backyard MMO and sucker people into paying to play it before it finally goes under and disappears. It is a turnkey package that handles networking, billing, etc, and is terrible at anything else.

Those of you, who invested money into this game, I urge you to contact the devs immediately and petition to get back onto the Unity engine. You invested in a Unity game, not this Hero crap.

Is it a good move? It is for them, so why wouldn't they promote it? It is for someone, who wants a cheap-ass engine to toss something together that already includes billing, so they can all get paid and sail away into the sunset never to be heard from again, with all of your money and investments.

I may sound dramatic, but it has happened many times.
 
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Dsan

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I thought Hero sounded familiar. That's the engine Bioware used for SW:TOR at some point. I don't much about it on a technical level but there do seem to be quite a number of complaints on the internet (when isn't there? lol).

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/159057-Unity-vs.-Hero


What few forums I've browsed seems to suggest most people will eventually switch to Unity...
 
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Trekkan

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What little I know about Unity is that it isn't cheap. I'd guess that GM started off on it and then realized what it'd cost them to pay for the engine, then scrambled to look for something else they could afford. I'm not sure how the licensing works, but I think I've read of companies paying 100k or so for Unity... no idea what that entails, but... that's more than GM raised. So... yeah.
 

Ronus

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Yea, after I posted above I did some more reading and this appears to be one of the main reasons for the switch. Unity was going to be costly, but from what else I read it seams that Hero should be fine for what they are doing. Mind you I didn't spend A LOT of time looking too deep into it, so I still have not a clue :D
 

Dsan

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Well, the important thing is that they're able to make the game. Anything is better than nothing, kinda... As long as they put in a proper effort before they launch the game it should be good. And between now and then Hero might get some improvements that they can incorporate.
 

Deuce

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Jason said he's turned away $20,000 in additional pledges from people that have wanted to buy parcels since the KS campaign ended, so it seems there is still a lot of growing interest. If that is true anyway.
 
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