President and COO of HeroEngine comments on SWTOR coding!

[djprada]

In his recent blog Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine blames Bioware for poor coding trying to defend his Engine!

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/he...eets-starwars/

Regarding SW:TOR, we have no way to know how they are handling graphics detail, shading, or other factors that impact frame rate. An engine is the first step, and then it’s up to the engineers and art directors to manage the technical steps necessary to implement their game design.

So, we can’t really give you any insight on how their game is performing in that way, and I’m sure they are working hard at improving any specific issues they are seeing. BioWare is responsible for their own game, we gave them the tools.

"I am sure that BioWare had rooms full of engineers who customized the engine for their needs. That is normal for projects of that scale. Because of the way they chose to convey combat and the graphical style, they clearly had to highly tailor the renderer for their own needs. I don’t have much contact with their engineers any more (the last code drop they took from us was about 3 years ago) so I can’t really speak to how much of our rendering technology is left in SW:TOR but I honestly don’t think there would be much."

Who to blame and why we got such a broken game is up to you to decide. But this explains why the game has been released with Anti Aliasing disabled, high resolution textures disabled, uniform colouring disabled, shadows with edges the size of pool table triangles and animations that cause major conflicts with actual ability use.

Discuss

Getting out in front of this. Keep this discussion on topic and avoid flaming or game bashing. You have been warned ~ Dakia

[Vertual]

Link doesn't appear to work but i'm assuming you quoted the general gist of it?

[Deleted]

For one thing, your link doesn't work. It just gives a page cannot be found error. Secondly, I think "blame" is too strong, at least reading the quotes you pasted. Your title "Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine blames Bioware for poor coding trying to defend his Engine!" is pretty darn misleading. All he says is that Bioware has done some major changes to the engine, which is even acknowledges to be very common in this type of projects.

All and all, not saying a whole lot of anything else. Just blown up and to made look scandalous.

[djprada]

Link doesn't appear to work but i'm assuming you quoted the general gist of it?

Fixed link, can you try again please and let me know if it works.

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/he...eets-starwars/

[Nirawen]

Good job you didnt try and overly dramatize the title of the thread.. oh wait.

He's defending his companies engine and explaining why the faults are there, not 'blaming Bioware'.

[shadowkras]

OP should work for Times, he knows how to twist people's words.

[djprada]

For one thing, your link doesn't work. It just gives a page cannot be found error. Secondly, I think "blame" is too strong, at least reading the quotes you pasted. Your title "Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine blames Bioware for poor coding trying to defend his Engine!" is pretty darn misleading. All he says is that Bioware has done some major changes to the engine, which is even acknowledges to be very common in this type of projects.

All and all, not saying a whole lot of anything else. Just blown up and to made look scandalous.

Its clearly to me at least that he is defending it. If you read comments to his blog a lot of Swtor players are trying to blame his Engine for poor Ilum and PvP performance. Just read thru his replies.

[Fannyd]

In his recent blog Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine blames Bioware for poor coding trying to defend his Engine!

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/he...eets-starwars/





Who to blame and why we got such a broken game is up to you to decide. But this explains why the game has been released with Anti Aliasing disabled, high resolution textures disabled, uniform colouring disabled, shadows with edges the size of pool table triangles and animations that cause major conflicts with actual ability use.

Discuss

Getting out in front of this. Keep this discussion on topic and avoid flaming or game bashing. You have been warned ~ Dakia

What "blame" is there? He's just explaining what we all already knew anyway...

[Toccs]

Its clearly to me at least that he is defending it. If you read comments to his blog a lot of Swtor players are trying to blame his Engine for poor Ilum and PvP performance. Just read thru his replies.

If you are going to create a topic about it, you could at least provide all the information.

[Fannyd]

One of his replies...
"I think the game is awesome and I am sure that BioWare will release patches that address the issues that people are reporting. They are a solid developer with an amazing track record for making great games that work well."

[soulcrusher]

im not having any problems with swtor, it runs well and looks pretty good, i dont get these threads at all.

[Nirawen]

If you are going to create a topic about it, you could at least provide all the information.

It's hard to paraphrase when everyone has the same information .

[djprada]

If you are going to create a topic about it, you could at least provide all the information.

Looks like they disabled comments for his blog so this is the only place we can discuss it now.

Neil says:
January 24, 2012 at 6:32 am

We’ve received a lot of comments to this article. They fall into two main categories:

1. It’s our fault, and
2. It’s not our fault.

It’s clear that there is a lot of passion around this issue! We’re going to refrain from allowing more comments playing the blame game here and let’s see how the game goes as time passes.

[Spaceshaman]

Wow, wow, wow ... [ten pages of more wow]. Great article.

[Deleted]

OP should work for Times, he knows how to twist people's words.

He also knows how to copypasta a thread from the official forums.

[Deleted]

Its clearly to me at least that he is defending it. If you read comments to his blog a lot of Swtor players are trying to blame his Engine for poor Ilum and PvP performance. Just read thru his replies.

Ofc he is defending it but he is not blaming Bioware for anything. I read the entire article, as well as all the comments on the page and nowhere in them does Niel Harris blame Bioware. Let me continue the quote, from a comment, that you started on your OP:

"I think the game is awesome and I am sure that BioWare will release patches that address the issues that people are reporting. They are a solid developer with an amazing track record for making great games that work well."

So in fact they are praising Bioware. That's far from "blaming" Bioware for "poor coding" like you chose to misrepresent it in your OP.

[Verth Aeyta]

im not having any problems with swtor, it runs well and looks pretty good, i dont get these threads at all.

You will always get those people that find things unacceptable and those that don't mind a little bug here and there. The blame game always happens to new games when something breaks or bugs appear or a whole bunch of people cry about something being broken, SWTOR could look better but I think it looks good the way it is, they'll tweak and fix things as time goes on and so I just sit back and watch the progression go on.

[cabreil]

Getting out in front of this. Keep this discussion on topic and avoid flaming or game bashing. You have been warned ~ Dakia

Must I really be warned every time I look at ANY thread...


OP seems to have exaggerated a great deal.

[Runintowalls]

doesn't sound to me like the article you linked is blaming star wars. sounds like Hero Engine president wants credit for developing the engine, and because there's a lot of criticism about MMO engines, like wow and rift because people don't like something in the game, they blame the engine.

sounds like Neil Harris is making a point that 1) his company invented the engine and swtor needed them, 2) don't blame the engine for every little thing you don't like in the game. the engine is like a hammer, if you bend a nail or slam your finger, its not the hammer's fault. there's a great deal to be said about how you use the tool and implementing it for what you want to do. two games can use the same engine (and often do) while one feels great, runs smoothly, the other is clunky and not user friendly.

it sounds like you already have a stance about star wars, and a perspective that you think its not well designed or that it is worthy of blame, whether its the engine to blame (the flip side of the engine developer "blaming" the game, sounds like you're blaming the engine developer in defense of the game) and why should there be any blame? how is the game development broken in the first place?

a lot of people say they like the design of swtor, therefore no cause to blame or defend a game engine or swtor, have a nice day

[logobola]

Was it not fully polished as the engine could be; sure. Was it fully completely and horribly ugly looking to play; no. The true test of the longevity of the engine and the game will continue to come at the ability of Bioware to further enhance and fine tune the game and game technology.

Offtopicsh:
This sorta of reminds me of a personal experience much along the same lines as this. ie: A company getting use of a third party system/software and not fully understanding or using it correctly resulting in many bugs and customer issues. This came about few years ago with a major U.S. cellular carrier as they switch their MMSC (mms, picture messaging) platform from one vendor to another. The engineers literally did the switch in a week (completely reckless) without fully understanding the new platform. This course bought havoc to their platform and ability to service their customers. For countless weeks and months I sat on calls with them as they figure out what to fix; later in talking with them they literally had the manuals open trying to figure it out. End result after much tweaking and adapting they were able to get it to perform and it literally blew the circuits off their old platform.

Hopefully Bioware is able to continue and adapt quickly and smartly enough to fine tune it for their specific needs and goals.