HeroEngine Interview

After learning that BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic was being built with the HeroEngine, WarCry had a quick chat with Simutronics’ Neil Harris to find out what makes their engine so likeable.

Now, that’s hardly noteworthy on its own, but HeroEngine’s real innovation – what makes it uniquely suited for MMO development – is that it’s an internet-based engine, where all the development is done on a central server that “can be shared by people in the same building, or over the world.” In fact, Harris compares developing a MMO with the engine to actually playing an MMO.

“Imagine you’re online playing your favorite MMO,” says Harris, “you’re logged in and players are wandering around and, you can interact with each other. Development is like that.” He went on to elaborate on the actual process. “Once you boot up HeroEngine on your PC as a developer… you can walk around the game world – at first, an empty grid like in Tron – you can add terrain, or pull things in from other tools like 3D Studio Max: there could be 50 people in that empty world. When we do a demo, we have people in front of the crowd and people in the office, and we’ll build an entire playable world, with quests and monsters, in a matter of hours.”