Hero Engine: An Overview

To start this round of blogging, I will begin with a quick look into an engine several classmates and I have been working with over the summer break.  A group of us have been working on a multiplayer game called They Stole My Sheep.  It has been designed to not take itself too seriously while tuning the game play to promote a competitive atmosphere.  We chose to use Hero Engine because of its relatively easy to use interface and multiplayer capabilities.

Hero Engine features a full graphical UI as well as a script editor, similar to how Unity is displayed.  The Engine comes with several pre-loaded base scripts which the user must adapt to work with the game they are creating.  The game world itself is constructed through the use of a height map editor and various terrain tools such as Speed Tree.  These features combined with importing custom characters and models, you are able to build a fully functioning game with prominent multiplayer features.  One such example is the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic which was released at the end of 2011 with positive reviews.

HeroBlade program showing a small portion of our game world.

The engine contains two main programs: Hero Blade, which runs the scripts and houses the game world, and the Repository Browser, which enables easy transferring of files from your computer or shared network storage over to the server-side storage of Hero Engine.  Both of these systems form the basis of Hero Engine and creates an efficient pipeline to gets assets into the developer's game world.

Within Hero Blade, several key systems provide the functionality of the engine.  These include: Terrain Editor, HeroScript Editor, physics tools, and editors for lighting, GUI, post-processing, water, and particles.  In addition it provides helpful error messages in the chat panel to accelerate the bug fixing process.  The Repository Browser primarily syncs files to and from the client and server.

Repository Browser has synced three files to the Hero Engine server.

After learning more about the nuances of Hero Engine, we have come across many of its pros and cons.  While it does boast many different networking capabilities, we have found that some of its functions are tricky to use effectively, let alone find them.  This steep learning curve is also hindered by the low level of documentation for Hero Engine.  There is a wiki for the engine but it is not very comprehensive and the forums often don't have the concrete answers we are looking for.

With all that said, Hero Engine has provided us with handy world editing tools with which we rapidly set up a full game level.  The process to set up the art pipeline takes a few minutes, but after that the artists can sync files to the server with ease.  The asset pipeline has also been very beneficial for the artists, as any model can be transferred and updated in real-time while the engine is running, allowing for immediate feedback in the game world. 

Though our team has been presented with many challenges, we are determined to unlock the potential of Hero Engine and fully utilize all its built-in features.  I will continue to add updates of our progress as we continually build on the game world we created.  Hopefully we will soon have a game play video to showcase and let everyone see what you can accomplish with Hero Engine.