What's Wrong with the Hero Engine?

[namelessone]

I guess the problem is that the game looks only marginally better than competition, but eats a lot more resources and has weird issues on top of that, like million load screens in weird places and magic grass that always grows only 20 feet away from your character, even on highest settings.

[Alanar]

Oh yeah, and the load times are still absolutely atrocious if you're running off of a HDD and not a SSD. Like, between the decision to sometimes require 3-4 loading screens just to get onto a planet, and the extreme length of some of the loading screens, it gets to be pretty painful : /

Most painfull thing for me was the terrible DELAY in abilities.. such hype was created on the forums of fluid play specially for pvp.. grinded all the way up to 50 with full (bad rng loot) pvp gear to feel horrible i wasn't able to intterupt a target cus this fucking delay accured. No this was not my internet/computer or what ever.. horrible experience.

[RoninaThorstone]

Most painfull thing for me was the terrible DELAY in abilities.. such hype was created on the forums of fluid play specially for pvp.. grinded all the way up to 50 with full (bad rng loot) pvp gear to feel horrible i wasn't able to intterupt a target cus this fucking delay accured. No this was not my internet/computer or what ever.. horrible experience.

When did you play?

They delinked most abilities from their cast animation, removing the delay, a while back.

[Valeron]

When did you play?

They delinked most abilities from their cast animation, removing the delay, a while back.

which makes sense in a dice roll combat game (even though I find the animations in SWTOR fantastic, the delay was awful at times)

[Raysz]

I assume the long loading times are related to the engine and the fact that the engine can't handle a lot of chars in the same screen very well.
You can't just go to another planet in a fluid manner; go to ship, loading screen, go to planet, loading screen. When you're entering the fleet from the ship bay, loading screen, etc.
Loading the game takes a while (way longer than other mmo's), from char selection to entering the game takes way too long as well.

It sometimes feels like 'Star Wars, the Loading Republic'. SSD's do help a bit, but they shouldn't be necessary when contemporary games perform very well without them (Rift, GW2).

[Wilian]

My biggest miff to-date is that there's still some delay with all actions you do vs. when you press the key. Like when I press "w" to move on, there's like this 0.3-0.5 second delay before actual movement happens and then same thing when you release the button and stopping. It's not really that visible per se due to quick timeframe but it's truly felt and extremely distracting. Especially with camera when it feels like "sticky" and that you have to draw the cursor a bit before actual movement happens.

[Trix]

Don't blame the Hero Engine, blame Bioware for taking an early version of it and butchering it.

SWTOR could of been a great game if it played as well as TESO does on the Hero Engine, but instead, SWTOR is stuck with an engine that can't handle more than 8 people in the same area without running into problems.

PVE raids were horrible because combat was clunky as hell and today, there is still that awful delay and gcd bugs.

The engine is unfixable, they should do what FF14 did.

[Ham on Rye]

At launch MAN ooohhh MAN Every tues morning was a BLAST hanging out on Ilum. about 200 pubbies and imps mid field just nuking it out for control.

I believe by "200 pubbies and imps" you mean "2 pubbies and 198 imps"

[Valeron]

Don't blame the Hero Engine, blame Bioware for taking an early version of it and butchering it.

SWTOR could of been a great game if it played as well as TESO does on the Hero Engine,

TESO doesn't use the HeroEngine

[Kelimbror]

TESO doesn't use the HeroEngine

Sorta. Live game doesn't use it, but they did license it to use for development purposes and still currently use it.

[Valeron]

Sorta. Live game doesn't use it, but they did license it to use for development purposes and still currently use it.

right, they used it to prototype the game

what the players play on won't be the hero engine though

[WoWGoneBad]

I believe by "200 pubbies and imps" you mean "2 pubbies and 198 imps"

Nah back on Canderous Ordo there was plenty of pubbies it was really great to be in mid fighting back and forth for control. I mean you could really get your weekl done in bout 2 hrs. That was real pvp for me not the WZs we now have.

[Anubisblack]

My biggest miff to-date is that there's still some delay with all actions you do vs. when you press the key. Like when I press "w" to move on, there's like this 0.3-0.5 second delay before actual movement happens and then same thing when you release the button and stopping. It's not really that visible per se due to quick timeframe but it's truly felt and extremely distracting. Especially with camera when it feels like "sticky" and that you have to draw the cursor a bit before actual movement happens.

This is the actual bane of SWTOR. The performance across different machines has been improved and other flaws have been worked on, but the ability delay has never been truly fixed and possibly never will be.

I've written about it in this thread.

The best example is getting dismounted even though the cast has finished but the animation of actually mounting the vehicle hasn't played yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azzv3DTQgyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfDTbmd7vTw

Additionally, I experienced every possible negative effect of the ability delay while attempting to optimise my DPS output. I haven't been on the forums in a while, but I remember seeing a thread about ability delay every week.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...03#post4921303
http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...92#post5334092
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=227621

The videos are a bit old, but there is no evidence this has been corrected in any way. And the threads do not have a clear indication of this issue ever being addressed.

[nyyr]

Additionally, I experienced every possible negative effect of the ability delay while attempting to optimise my DPS output. I haven't been on the forums in a while, but I remember seeing a thread about ability delay every week.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...03#post4921303

One of the recent 2.5.x patches addressed some of those cases where the GCD is triggered w/o firing the spell:

Instances where the global cooldown would activate without triggering the selected ability have been reduced.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...92#post5334092

Queuing works, spamming is certainly still bad. Since the GCD is quite long, this leads IMO to a relaxed play style.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=227621

The videos are a bit old, but there is no evidence this has been corrected in any way. And the threads do not have a clear indication of this issue ever being addressed.

They definitely have addressed a lot of those issues. Having had more than a year break, it is quite noticable. One thing that comes into mind is that spell animations and spell damaged is decoupled. Sometimes, they really get out of sync, but priority seems to be on the damage done, so only animations get lost. Which is still annoying, but bearable (it doesn't happen that often anyway).

Best is if you just give it a try again and judge for yourself.

[glowpipe]

The main issue was at release. If there was more than 15 players on screen at a given time. The fps dropped by over 70% And that was the engine. Not computer. In the biggest battles on ilum in the start. The servers crashed because of the hero engine

[Deleted]

Swtor is a horrible mess on both core lvl and any other lvl, attempting to even make a decent bot for the game is totaly out of question since the horrible clusterfuck of code this game is made off makes any stability both for the game or the bot nigh impossible.

[Davemetalhead]

Swtor is a horrible mess on both core lvl and any other lvl, attempting to even make a decent bot for the game is totaly out of question since the horrible clusterfuck of code this game is made off makes any stability both for the game or the bot nigh impossible.

That strikes me as the first good thing I've heard about this version of the game engine. Anything that screws over bots should be lauded.