If the Hero Engine is so bad.....

[Hellfury]

WOW is built to run on every machine so they went for a middleground, also wow areas are bigger than swtor

[Edge-]

Again i do not get the hate the hero engine gets. I know the version bioware used was not the full, release candidate. So the issues TOR had were because they were using a beta version of the engine. I also know that if the engine was absolutely atrocious no other games would be released with it. We know that's not a fact because Zenimax is using the engine for Elder Scrolls Online.

I really think this engine hate is being driven by gamer snobs, who have particular axes they want to grind.

No, Zenimax Online is using an in-house engine for ESO. They used the Hero Engine as a "white board" to test out ideas.

[Hostagecat]

No, Zenimax Online is using an in-house engine for ESO. They used the Hero Engine as a "white board" to test out ideas.

I could of swore when i launched the game i saw a screen for the heroengine, and went to there site and saw they had Bioware and Zenimax on their promotional information. But thanks for the link. Again I don't think the Heroengine is as bad as everybody seems to like to make it out as.

[edmorte]

Even with the risk of nobody reading, the truth is Hero Engine in the beginning of SWTOR was crappy.

Bioware putted a LOT of manpower there to fix it.

I was on day 1 of SWTOR, Hero Engine was pure crap. WoW engine is a crap because other motives, like age.

[Lagwin]

Such a shame they removed the whole world PvP aspect from ilium, it absolutely destroyed frame rates, even occasionally when you were not close to the action.

[Lumineus]

What's wrong with the Hero Engine is that the AMD support sucks. It runs just fine on nVidia cards, which leads me to believe that it makes extensive use of PhysX and has to translate all those instructions to vanilla DirectX (which still doesn't have stellar AMD support) or OpenGL to run on Radeons, and does so in a very inefficient manner.

[Edge-]

WoW engine is a crap because other motives, like age.

The WoW engine is actually super impressive. The fact that they've been able to expand it with so many new tools and features over the years is insane. Not to mention how insanely optimized it is compared to many other engines out there. You can still pretty much run WoW on a toaster. Its age shows compared to the capabilities of some newer engines, but it's still impressive nonetheless.

[GoldNSilence]

I joined SWTOR from the beginning and aside from some minor lag issues and the stories drying up around level 30, I had a lot of fun. Mostly because I played with friends which I found the questing experience with friends to be far more rewarding than WoW's. Went back to it now during this dead period of WoW and having a blast again, Bioware really improved their game.

[Kurve1776]

My thing about the hero engine is that to me the animations (such as running, walking, etc) look very, very clunky, even after they updated the engine.

In the first ESO beta I immediately noticed those same clunky animations that turned me off of SWTOR.

[Barnabas]

Even my wife's older laptop with a 550m in it runs SWTOR better. With SWTOR, it can run high settings with some things turned down at a constant 40fps and look pretty good . To get 40fps on WoW she's running medium settings with a few things turned down and it looks horrible. Again, I dont' know, I was just curious what all the hate was towards the Hero engine since I had never had problems with it.

Try running wow in dx9 and see if your frame rate improves. Your wife's laptop should run dx11 suite better. I know it sounds weird but you can test the same suite to see with your own eyes. 760m wasn't a popular chip so I don't think many developers optimized for it. Shadows kill your frame rate in WoW. So the higher that slider goes up the bigger performance hit you take.

[Deleted]

Why can I play SWTOR on max settings easily with pretty much constant 60fps, never dipping below 40fps, even in groups, but on WoW, just questing I constantly dip into the high 20's when on High settings with a few options turned down?

I'm no tech expert so I dont' understand it all, but it just made me curious. I just started playing WoW again because my wife wanted to play so I'm playing with her. Otherwise I've always had my SWTOR sub. But anyways, I noticed this when we started playing WoW a few nights ago that it just didn't run as well as SWTOR. I'm not on an awesome rig, just a gaming laptop since I travel a lot. Spec's are:

Win 8.1 64bit
i7-4700hq
8 gigs ram
Geforce 765m GTX

i dont dwell around these forums, but im a performance geek when it comes to computers, anything that dips below 60 fps in instanced content is failure with a above average system, if you are getting below 60 fps, to around 40 in a instance, thats baddddddddd.

let me tell you a game with a fantastic engine, FF14, 24 man raids, ROCK SOLID 60 FPS, NO DIPS, not even 1 fps below 60.

wow is running on a 10 plus old engine, its constantly retrofitted, but not good enough, and yes, its crap for the current day and age, no one has denied its performance in 25 man raids, but its the most responsive game of the lot.

you really need to define where your FPS numbers are coming from in more detail, i can say i can reach 250 fps in wow, in a blank empty space, my freakin VRAM can cope to do this.

i5 3470 k clocked to 4.4 GHZ
8 GB 1600 mhz ram
7970 GHZ card with 3 GB of dedicated VRAM
this is the heart of my system.

any game that drops my system below 60 fps, i notch the settings down, if a game has erratic optimisations where no matter the settings it just dips a lot (RIFT LOL), bar wow, ive discarded every game in this case, esp if its a badly made one, to me, the game needs to run well first.

[Edge-]

My thing about the hero engine is that to me the animations (such as running, walking, etc) look very, very clunky, even after they updated the engine.

In the first ESO beta I immediately noticed those same clunky animations that turned me off of SWTOR.

Considering they're using different engines in both games, no clue why you'd make that comparison.

[Noomz]

Why can I play SWTOR on max settings easily with pretty much constant 60fps, never dipping below 40fps, even in groups, but on WoW, just questing I constantly dip into the high 20's when on High settings with a few options turned down?

I'm no tech expert so I dont' understand it all, but it just made me curious. I just started playing WoW again because my wife wanted to play so I'm playing with her. Otherwise I've always had my SWTOR sub. But anyways, I noticed this when we started playing WoW a few nights ago that it just didn't run as well as SWTOR. I'm not on an awesome rig, just a gaming laptop since I travel a lot. Spec's are:

Win 8.1 64bit
i7-4700hq
8 gigs ram
Geforce 765m GTX

Because WoW's engine is from a game released in 2004.
SWTOR's engine is from a game released in 2011.
That's why you can run SWTOR better. I thought that'd be really obvious to anyone.

Ontop of this, most of the world in WoW is open, not instanced like in SWTOR. That effects performance.

[Waylander]

Considering the framerates, the HERO engines does an OK job. Back then I updated my computer for SWTOR (i5/rd6870) and framerates were pretty smooth for what was on the screen. The loading times between planets/fleets/any other generic hub however were a bad joke (4 to 8 minutes on my machine). They ruined the game for me because they killed the "jump in the game and play a bit" comfort - but this has been discussed to death in other threads already.

There is also this "stiffness" to everything in SWTOR; do not know whether its a engine related problem though. For example, I find it a lot easier to click on things in Blizzard games + their mouse movement / look is a lot smoother and just feels right.

If SWTOR had a better engine I would have played it a lot longer.

[kail]

The frames have definitely improved since launch. I don't think I've experienced a lagfest like Illum though, it was like 1 frame every 5 seconds.

The animation though, it doesn't feel as reactive to commands when your doing things in quick succession. My character in TOR doesn't have the articulate fluidity that my WoW characters have. Hero Engine got a bad rap because of TOR.

P.S. Somethings going on with ur set-up if you can't run WoW smoothly. This is going by ur specs.

[Tekkommo]

Do some world PVP, with say 25 people, let me know how your FPS is then.

With your laptop, you should be running WoW no problem at max settings, I have a worse laptop and it runs it high with lots of addons no problem, even in raids.

[Fkiolaris]

I can't believe people are comparing WoW's engine with SWTOR's engine. On my lame Dell laptop (i5 second gen, 4gb RAM and NVIDIA 525M 1gb) I get 200fps in WoW out in the open, 100-150fps in Orgrimar and rarely less than 50fps in any 25man raid (barring the occasional excessive use of 3D models on certain encounters). I have also done numerous AV bgs that ended up as massive brawls (60+ people) in the middle of the map and I could do those just fine without an issue. On SWTOR on the other hand, the fleets are a lagfest, I still need to go through 6 loading screens between the fleet and a planet and if on occasion there is a massive brawl in any WZ then the fps really drops to the point it deters the gaming experience.

Knock WoW all you want and for many things you are correct, but the performance of the engine cannot be one of them.

[glowpipe]

In the first weeks of Swtor. On the high pop servers. illum made servers crash EVERY day. more than 30-40 players and the engine started to kill itself slowly. That is why the engine got its reputation. Its been tweaked a lot now after what ive heard. And the same problems isnt alive anymore. But then again. You wont have a 50 vs 50 player battle on illum anymore- Not enough players, Sadly

[ldev]

Even with the risk of nobody reading, the truth is Hero Engine in the beginning of SWTOR was crappy.

Bioware putted a LOT of manpower there to fix it.

I was on day 1 of SWTOR, Hero Engine was pure crap. WoW engine is a crap because other motives, like age.

Oh yeah, skill lag was amazing. And if you played Jugg and had OFF GCD skill like Retaliation -good luck using it.

[AlphaandOmega]

Why can I play SWTOR on max settings easily with pretty much constant 60fps, never dipping below 40fps, even in groups, but on WoW, just questing I constantly dip into the high 20's when on High settings with a few options turned down?

I'm no tech expert so I dont' understand it all, but it just made me curious. I just started playing WoW again because my wife wanted to play so I'm playing with her. Otherwise I've always had my SWTOR sub. But anyways, I noticed this when we started playing WoW a few nights ago that it just didn't run as well as SWTOR. I'm not on an awesome rig, just a gaming laptop since I travel a lot.

Different games and different files, not only that but WoW's game engine is over 10 years old and put together over the years with mismatched, patched together files. Even I get really low frames at times with my settings on low, the only ones I bump up are textures, water and particles.

The game engine it's self truly needs an overhaul. even the texture files .BLPs eat a ton of memory, compared to some games that just use .tga or .pcx files, etc.
Even the file conversion process causes blocks and discoloration in your textures, which really hurts WoW's graphics and is an insult to the WoW artists.

Not to forget most games run smoother models, most console games all use the same file name but WoW is the only game to use .M2 model files. which is not ideal in the long run of performance. Even most models can handle greater detail, bump maps and a wide range of textures.

Funny how I can get 25-75 fps with wow up and down, but with a graphics heavy game like starcraft & skyrim with a solid state fps of 75+

If anything, Blizzard has it backwards as far as WoW goes.