Licensing game engines may be common, but launching an MMORPG on what is basically a trial version of a game engine that doesn't let you touch the source code? Have any games done that and succeeded, ever?
No one has succeeded that way because no one does that. However, starting with a trial engine and reaching a point where you say "Ok, this is doable. Let's move forward" and licensing the engine isn't all that uncommon. It's actually a rather sound approach for an indie.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Licensing game engines may be common, but launching an MMORPG on what is basically a trial version of a game engine that doesn't let you touch the source code? Have any games done that and succeeded, ever?
No one has succeeded that way because no one does that. However, starting with a trial engine and reaching a point where you say "Ok, this is doable. Let's move forward" and licensing the engine isn't all that uncommon. It's actually a rather sound approach for an indie.
Fine, fine, but if you're planning on going that route, you'd better have the budget to license the full engine and get access to the source code. And in that case, it doesn't particularly matter whether the trial version was $99/year or $999/year or $9999/year.
Autodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.)
Its really the last part that kills the idea.
Technically, you don't need that. you could purchase art assets to import into it if you really wanted. But yeah, like the other guy said, where do you think that stuff would come from?
blender is reasonable free alternative to maya/3dsmax. you are probs going to need to buy photoshop for textures.
but honestly if you are making a mmorpg and having difficulty coughing up a couple of thousands for software you probably shouldnt be making an mmorpg.
Originally posted by bishbosh blender is reasonable free alternative to maya/3dsmax. you are probs going to need to buy photoshop for textures.
Paint.net Is an excellent substitute for Photoshop.
Have to agree tho, If you don't have a couple of thousand reserved for development you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Maybe you can make your textures that way. How about your vertex data? You do want characters that are a little more complex than a 2D rectangle floating around in space, don't you?
And how about a graphical interface that lets you see what textures look like on your models as you're creating them? Can paint.net do that? Can Photoshop?
Heavy use of tessellation makes it practical to type out your little bit of vertex data as source code without needing any sort of graphical interface. But that's not an option with Hero Engine 2, so your vertex data needs to come from somewhere.
Originally posted by bishbosh blender is reasonable free alternative to maya/3dsmax. you are probs going to need to buy photoshop for textures.
Paint.net Is an excellent substitute for Photoshop.Have to agree tho, If you don't have a couple of thousand reserved for development you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Maybe you can make your textures that way. How about your vertex data? You do want characters that are a little more complex than a 2D rectangle floating around in space, don't you?
And how about a graphical interface that lets you see what textures look like on your models as you're creating them? Can paint.net do that? Can Photoshop?
Heavy use of tessellation makes it practical to type out your little bit of vertex data as source code without needing any sort of graphical interface. But that's not an option with Hero Engine 2, so your vertex data needs to come from somewhere.
Now, I just commented on a free alternative to photoshop...i didnt really comment on the feasibility of using just the hero engine for $99...
Correct me if i'm wrong but vertex data is created by the modeling program then read into the vertex buffer array as vertices?
I would speculate that using something like blender in conjunction with paint dot net would be more then enough to create working, highly desirable models. There both open sourced, With many, many plugins.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Originally posted by bishbosh blender is reasonable free alternative to maya/3dsmax. you are probs going to need to buy photoshop for textures.
Paint.net Is an excellent substitute for Photoshop.Have to agree tho, If you don't have a couple of thousand reserved for development you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Maybe you can make your textures that way. How about your vertex data? You do want characters that are a little more complex than a 2D rectangle floating around in space, don't you?
And how about a graphical interface that lets you see what textures look like on your models as you're creating them? Can paint.net do that? Can Photoshop?
Heavy use of tessellation makes it practical to type out your little bit of vertex data as source code without needing any sort of graphical interface. But that's not an option with Hero Engine 2, so your vertex data needs to come from somewhere.
Now, I just commented on a free alternative to photoshop...i didnt really comment on the feasibility of using just the hero engine for $99...
Correct me if i'm wrong but vertex data is created by the modeling program then read into the vertex buffer array as vertices?
Maybe paint.net is a perfectly good alternative to Photoshop. I have no idea. But it's not a perfectly good alternative to Maya, because neither is Photoshop. If you want to do 3D graphics the way that it's traditionally been done, then you need a modeling program to create your vertex data. Such as Maya.
Blender, on the other hand, might be able to. I don't know. I'm not an artist. But it sure sounds like Hero Engine is set up to work with Maya and not Blender.
Of course, one of the reasons I like tessellation is that it lets you skip that. But I haven't tried animating stuff yet, so I might run into problems later.
peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.
Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.
Originally posted by night_gamer peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.
Of course your right, You either have to:
A: Put alot of Time into production or B: put alot of Cash into production or C: Both.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Originally posted by night_gamer peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.
Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.
Of course your right, You either have to:
A: Put alot of Time into production or B: put alot of Cash into production or C: Both.
lets comment variant A: if you have nothing else to do in next 5-10 years go for it. But is wrong from the start. You need to do games for today market. If you plan to develop everything low costs and keep the step with new hardware and stuff.. you probable never finish a game.
Autodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.)
Its really the last part that kills the idea.
Where did you think the art assets were going to come from? Microsoft Paint?
Not my point.
But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.
If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.
Originally posted by hfztt Originally posted by QuizzicalOriginally posted by hfztt$99 / yearANDAutodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.)Its really the last part that kills the idea.
Where did you think the art assets were going to come from? Microsoft Paint?Not my point.
But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.
If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.
What about the open source Blender application? It seems functional at least.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by hfztt$99 / yearANDAutodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.)Its really the last part that kills the idea.
Where did you think the art assets were going to come from? Microsoft Paint?
Not my point.
But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.
If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.
What about the open source Blender application? It seems functional at least.
Originally posted by hfztt$99 / yearANDAutodesk Max or Maya 2011 or later, x32 or x64 (According to thier own minimum specs.)Its really the last part that kills the idea.
Where did you think the art assets were going to come from? Microsoft Paint?
Not my point.
But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.
If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.
What about the open source Blender application? It seems functional at least.
It is, he's just overreacting.
A game engine inevitably wants vertex data set up a particular way. Can Blender set up the vertex data in exactly the way that the Hero Engine wants it? If not, then at an absolute minimum, you're going to have to do some low level meddling to reformat whatever vertex data it outputs if you don't have the full source code for the Hero Engine. If licensing a game engine was a sensible decision for you in the first place, then having to do that low level meddling probably isn't a better idea than buying Maya.
Worse, without the full source code, do you necessarily even know how the Hero Engine wants its vertex data formatted? Checking a little bit of sample code doesn't necessarily help, as different vertex shaders could easily want the data formatted differently. In my own game, for example, some vertex shaders want the position in 2D coordinates, while others want it in 3D coordinates.
Can Blender even produce all of the vertex data that the Hero Engine needs? If it can't, then it's worthless for creating art assets for the Hero Engine.
Don't think of vertex data as just coordinates of points. A "vertex" as used in 3D graphics is an arbitrary collection of data that usually includes spatial position coordinates, commonly includes normal vectors and texture coordinates, and could include anything else that the game engine designer thinks that the vertex shaders should make use of on a per-vertex basis, such as colors or shininess.
Maybe Blender can do everything that you'd need for the Hero Engine. I don't know. But just because it can do some animation doesn't mean it can readily be made to work with the Hero Engine. There are probably reasons why Simutronics listed the engine as requiring Autodesk Max or Maya 2011, but didn't list Blender as an option.
Maya/3Ds max uses a proprietary format. You typically have to use a free format to import/export between them.
Such as using .obj ( will have to tweak y and z coordinates though iirc)
You can not save maya format from blender.
IIRC maya uses NURBS and not just regular vertex data.
''/\/\'' Posted using Iphone bunni ( o.o) (")(") **This bunny was cloned from bunnies belonging to Gobla and is part of the Quizzical Fanclub and the The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club**
I used Blender just fine with it. Maya or 3DS Max are listed as requirements because their art pipelines interface with them to upload your assets to the repository. You can actually do it manually as well using the repository browser, as long as you have your loca folder structure setup to mirror theirs.
I used both Maya and Blender and they work fine. The majority of the work was done in Blender, because I'm much more familiar with it, and then just imported it into Maya for the art pipeline, but even that got a little tedious and I started uploading it all manually without any real problems.
Anyway, if you have a small team of, say, 4 or 5 people looking to build something, all you need is one of you to be in some kind of school (high school, college, etc) and you can qualify for the student licenses, which are basically free for non-commercial use. By the time your game is anywhere near ready to be released for sale, you should have secured enough funding to pay for a commercial license.
I don't know how many times I have to say this, but Hero Cloud is NOT designed to be the end-all-be-all AAA MMO dev solution. It's meant for very small indie teams looking for an affordable way to get started very quickly on building whatever game they want (it doesn't just do MMO) without having to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars first, with the flexibility of upgrading the license to full source if needed.
Comments
No one has succeeded that way because no one does that. However, starting with a trial engine and reaching a point where you say "Ok, this is doable. Let's move forward" and licensing the engine isn't all that uncommon. It's actually a rather sound approach for an indie.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Fine, fine, but if you're planning on going that route, you'd better have the budget to license the full engine and get access to the source code. And in that case, it doesn't particularly matter whether the trial version was $99/year or $999/year or $9999/year.
Technically, you don't need that. you could purchase art assets to import into it if you really wanted. But yeah, like the other guy said, where do you think that stuff would come from?
You make me like charity
blender is reasonable free alternative to maya/3dsmax. you are probs going to need to buy photoshop for textures.
but honestly if you are making a mmorpg and having difficulty coughing up a couple of thousands for software you probably shouldnt be making an mmorpg.
Paint.net Is an excellent substitute for Photoshop.
Have to agree tho, If you don't have a couple of thousand reserved for development you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Maybe you can make your textures that way. How about your vertex data? You do want characters that are a little more complex than a 2D rectangle floating around in space, don't you?
And how about a graphical interface that lets you see what textures look like on your models as you're creating them? Can paint.net do that? Can Photoshop?
Heavy use of tessellation makes it practical to type out your little bit of vertex data as source code without needing any sort of graphical interface. But that's not an option with Hero Engine 2, so your vertex data needs to come from somewhere.
Now, I just commented on a free alternative to photoshop...i didnt really comment on the feasibility of using just the hero engine for $99...
Correct me if i'm wrong but vertex data is created by the modeling program then read into the vertex buffer array as vertices?
I would speculate that using something like blender in conjunction with paint dot net would be more then enough to create working, highly desirable models. There both open sourced, With many, many plugins.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Maybe paint.net is a perfectly good alternative to Photoshop. I have no idea. But it's not a perfectly good alternative to Maya, because neither is Photoshop. If you want to do 3D graphics the way that it's traditionally been done, then you need a modeling program to create your vertex data. Such as Maya.
Blender, on the other hand, might be able to. I don't know. I'm not an artist. But it sure sounds like Hero Engine is set up to work with Maya and not Blender.
Of course, one of the reasons I like tessellation is that it lets you skip that. But I haven't tried animating stuff yet, so I might run into problems later.
peoples.. dont be naive.. making an mmo require much more that hero license.. much much more.
Before dreaming nice, think about how much CASH you can put in.. CASH($$$) not dreams. Then try to put on paper all the cost. ALL THE COSTS. And see if you can cover. Then try to make a good game.
Of course your right, You either have to:
A: Put alot of Time into production
or
B: put alot of Cash into production
or
C: Both.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
lets comment variant A: if you have nothing else to do in next 5-10 years go for it. But is wrong from the start. You need to do games for today market. If you plan to develop everything low costs and keep the step with new hardware and stuff.. you probable never finish a game.
Not my point.
But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.
If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.
Not my point.
But a $99/year licens dont really make any difference when you have an added cost of at least $5000 to be able to use it for anything.
If you got a library of standard assets to make prototypes in for that price, yeah, then I think the $99 price tag would actually help in getting some real home grown MMO stuff going.
What about the open source Blender application? It seems functional at least.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
It is, he's just overreacting.
You make me like charity
A game engine inevitably wants vertex data set up a particular way. Can Blender set up the vertex data in exactly the way that the Hero Engine wants it? If not, then at an absolute minimum, you're going to have to do some low level meddling to reformat whatever vertex data it outputs if you don't have the full source code for the Hero Engine. If licensing a game engine was a sensible decision for you in the first place, then having to do that low level meddling probably isn't a better idea than buying Maya.
Worse, without the full source code, do you necessarily even know how the Hero Engine wants its vertex data formatted? Checking a little bit of sample code doesn't necessarily help, as different vertex shaders could easily want the data formatted differently. In my own game, for example, some vertex shaders want the position in 2D coordinates, while others want it in 3D coordinates.
Can Blender even produce all of the vertex data that the Hero Engine needs? If it can't, then it's worthless for creating art assets for the Hero Engine.
Don't think of vertex data as just coordinates of points. A "vertex" as used in 3D graphics is an arbitrary collection of data that usually includes spatial position coordinates, commonly includes normal vectors and texture coordinates, and could include anything else that the game engine designer thinks that the vertex shaders should make use of on a per-vertex basis, such as colors or shininess.
Maybe Blender can do everything that you'd need for the Hero Engine. I don't know. But just because it can do some animation doesn't mean it can readily be made to work with the Hero Engine. There are probably reasons why Simutronics listed the engine as requiring Autodesk Max or Maya 2011, but didn't list Blender as an option.
Maya/3Ds max uses a proprietary format. You typically have to use a free format to import/export between them.
Such as using .obj ( will have to tweak y and z coordinates though iirc)
You can not save maya format from blender.
IIRC maya uses NURBS and not just regular vertex data.
''/\/\'' Posted using Iphone bunni
( o.o)
(")(")
**This bunny was cloned from bunnies belonging to Gobla and is part of the Quizzical Fanclub and the The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club**
I used Blender just fine with it. Maya or 3DS Max are listed as requirements because their art pipelines interface with them to upload your assets to the repository. You can actually do it manually as well using the repository browser, as long as you have your loca folder structure setup to mirror theirs.
I used both Maya and Blender and they work fine. The majority of the work was done in Blender, because I'm much more familiar with it, and then just imported it into Maya for the art pipeline, but even that got a little tedious and I started uploading it all manually without any real problems.
Anyway, if you have a small team of, say, 4 or 5 people looking to build something, all you need is one of you to be in some kind of school (high school, college, etc) and you can qualify for the student licenses, which are basically free for non-commercial use. By the time your game is anywhere near ready to be released for sale, you should have secured enough funding to pay for a commercial license.
I don't know how many times I have to say this, but Hero Cloud is NOT designed to be the end-all-be-all AAA MMO dev solution. It's meant for very small indie teams looking for an affordable way to get started very quickly on building whatever game they want (it doesn't just do MMO) without having to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars first, with the flexibility of upgrading the license to full source if needed.
You make me like charity