WGE MAG: 33
We’ve heard from studios that the time to develop a game is significantly cut. We had an MMO ship recently on the engine in 15 months. People are telling us they are saving 25%, 50%, or more on time and cost. In a rapidly changing industry this is mission critical.
It appears that contributors to the game build can work remotely, this obviously has huge benefits to studios and developers.
Everyone, regardless of their geographic location, can work online and live on the server. Your team can be in the same office, at home, or around the world. This keeps cost down, obviously. We built in systems for promoting communication – for example, you can diagram information on a virtual whiteboard and share it with other team members inside the engine – you can tie the whiteboard to a specific location in the game world, so you can create notes that point right to the area. There are many features like this to make it easier to keep your team coordinated.
“People are telling us they are saving 25%, 50%, or more on time and cost. In a rapidly changing industry this is mission critical.”
What kind of tools does it come with?
The toolset is huge – the tools (called HeroBlade in our engine) include everything the entire team needs for development, except for the 3D modeling systems like Max or Maya. There are many tools for world sculpting, particle effects, scripting, team management, and many, many more. We include tools for monitoring performance and tracking down issues – for example, we make it easy to see if there are uncompressed textures in a scene, which could lead to degradation in frame rates. When you are building a game that could have millions of users you need to be able to build fast and make things perform to the maximum degree possible. I’ve never seen a game development system with anything close to the comprehensive tool set that comes with HeroEngine.
To streamline operations we include features for streaming and pushing content.
Streaming means that players can receive updated content – sections of the world, creatures, and even new game systems – without waiting for long downloads – the new content streams down to them. Streaming management is intelligent and can be controlled by the game developer to make sure you are managing resources well.
Pushing content works from server to server. Typically, a team will have a world for development, then a world for quality assurance, and live worlds for players. You can push any set or subset of content from world to world, which facilitates an approach where game content is easy to build, test, and deploy.
Aside from our own tools, we have acquired licenses to industry leading middleware that is bundled with HeroEngine – we include the FMod sound system, SpeedTrees, Umbra to optimize occlusion and high frame rates, animation system technologies from RAD Game Tools, the FaceGen system for building high quality character faces, and more.
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