Hero Engine is an engine designed from the ground up to support MMOs. Those other engines are not. There are many things that Hero Engine does out of the box that are beneficial for MMO developers, things like seamless, instancing, a very configurable spatial awareness system, it's well fitted to extend, scripts can be compiled and have the changes running in a matter of seconds (as opposed to restarting servers, and then uploading that is used in most every other engine), etc. Unreal and Cryengine were made with first person shooters in mind. Their networking is focused more on that type of design, collaberative editing, small areas less players. They are of course configurable, but your talking about a ton of extra time spent to implement things that Hero Engine already does and does well. Of course those engines are better rendering engines than Hero. They have better graphical features. But that's just a small part of an MMO.
FYI Repop was originally written in T3D. Before all of these engines became available for cheap (and then free), all of these engines were $500,000+ licenses, which is out of our price range.
Publié par psychonewb
Also I just hate the ugly cartoony look the thing superimposes.
That actually has nothing to do with Hero Engine. Those were shaders that Bioware elected to go with in TOR. Same goes for all of TORs mechanics. Love them or hate them, they were developer decisions. I think all too often people mistake how much is the engine, and how much is actual code. Hero Engine (similar to most every other engine) is just a core. When you start with Hero Engine you basically have an empty shell that has a faked ability bar (preset abilities, not tied to characters), a compass and an example of character selection. From there its up to the developers to create the rest.
TORs gameplay (good or bad) is the result of their design decisions. Their design called for a theme park style game, and they elected to go with higher polygon counts than most MMOs. You may not be able to notice that when you play it because of the shaders, but they have pretty hefty polygon counts. They also are using much more complex shaders and texture counts than many of the other MMOs out there, and many more clothing/texture options. The game is designed to look the way it does, and run pretty well in most cases. However, when you get a ton of people in a small area, all wearing different clothing types, it's going to chug. That's completely a design decision. They went for what would work in most cases, and got crucified by some users for how it performs in the other situations (primarily Ilum).
Many in the general public they assume the engine is the game, and you just theme it how you want it. But that's not quite true. Hero Engine could be used in an FPS, a space simulator, an RPG, RTS, whatever you want to create with it. It could be action based or RPG based. It could be optimized to run well on poor machines, or it could be optimized to look great but have performance issues on those same boxes.
We've tried the other MMO middleware available, and we choose Hero Engine. We're completely happy with that decision. That's not to say it's a perfect engine. Every engine on the market has it's own strengths and weaknesses. But as the entire package, I think it's your best bet for developing MMOs in a timely manner.