New HeroEngine w/ a tease of future HJ news....

Ripert

Cadet
Updated HeroEngine Now Supports 100,000 Players

Posted on Tuesday, March 24 @ 08:26:11 PDT
Simutronics announced the release of HeroEngine 2009 Vol. 1, the only realtime collaborative development platform for massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds, making it support more than 100,000 concurrent players in a single shard.




As the premiere integrated platform for full life-cycle development, deployment, and maintenance of MMO games and virtual worlds, HeroEngine provides creative teams with the tools and technology they require in order to fulfill their exacting vision while reducing time to market and lowering costs.

"Creative visionaries are no longer bound by arbitrary limits on the size of their virtual worlds or how areas in those worlds can connect together”, said Simutronics CEO and HeroEngine Architect David Whatley. “And, they can choose to run their virtual worlds on Windows or Linux, or any combination, in order to meet their cost and performance goals.”

Now HeroEngine supports more than 100,000 concurrent players in a single shard. Utilizing HeroEngine’s new Seamless World technology, developers can create virtual areas that transparently connect together to build single seamless worlds as large as they require in order to achieve their vision. There is no limit on how large a single seamless world can be, and seamless worlds themselves can even be instanced as needed to meet specific gameplay or product requirements. The maximum capacity per shard will grow even larger as the HeroEngine team continues development of inter-world scalability.

With new Linux server support, HeroEngine extends its backend server capabilities to a whole new class of server hardware. The choice of Microsoft Windows Server or Linux allows development teams to choose the operating system and hardware combination that meets their needs. And, both Windows and Linux servers are fully interoperable in the same environment. Other additions include: support for Autodesk Maya 2009 and named content packages for atomic publishing via LivePush that will allow you to deploy new content without booting your players offline.

Available immediately, HeroEngine continues to lead the way in providing creative teams with the best in class collaborative tools, technology, and platform they require in order to execute their vision.

Simutronics executives will be demonstrating HeroEngine and the forthcoming Hero’s Journey MMO game built on HeroEngine at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco from March 25-27, 2009. You can check out HeroEngine for yourself at North Hall, Booth 5538.

More on the HeroEngine stuff here: Simutronics' HeroEngine Adds Large Single-Shard Capabilities
 
Strange.
I still visit both this Forum and the official Site every single Day, and half a Year ago that kind of News would have made me all jumpy. But now... now i'm just thinking "Oh well, we'll see."
 
I'm the same way Performer. Not so strange though- do or watch anything long enough and you will become numbed. Both the highs and lows even out.
 
I have no confidence in games anymore. If a game comes out, I'm waiting to see how it is before I play it. I haven't played a good game since DAoC in 2001-mid 2004. If HJ came out today, I would be like "Cool." and not play it, but watch more closely.
 
I don't know what's with games lately but you're right. I'm stuck playing the same old games because nothing good has come out for so long. Nothing against the old games but eventually I get bored of playing the same games all the time.
 
I used to be a contributor on this website; a friend of the guy who created it. The goal was to create the premier source for HJ information on the internet. I guess in that regard we partially succeeded...

I came back here after I went looking for information about Nvidia's "PhysX" developments. I found a video at "
" and was kind of surprised to see the caption at the end: "3d models courtesy of Hero's Journey - Simutronics Corporation."

I am absolutely shocked to see that people are still hoping for a commercial release of HJ. Years ago, I posted on these forums that the game will never come out and I gave reasons why. It was rejected by the population of heroshall and I quietly left. I'm not going to sit here and say "told you so, haha!" but I will say that Hero's Journey, after all it's development and all of the hype amounted to nothing more than a technical demo.

It really is very well done, and the people who worked on it did a fantastic job with the 3d rendering (just check out the youtube video.) All Hero's Journey is, though, is a demonstration of the HeroEngine's capabilities. HJ was dead in 2006 when Simutronics decided to focus on leasing their engine. Any subsequent development of the game went toward furthering that corporate goal - not toward a release of HJ.

I read that Simutronics had to lay off a percentage of it's workforce, and that a move to a new corporate HQ was cancelled due to the recession. Looking at the next post down confirms that this actually is happening. It's too bad - there are a lot of people still playing and enjoying the games Simutronics actually operates. I was a long time Simu customer, and I've always seen them as a horribly run company with terrible business practices. They cater to a niche market and it's kept them going...but I guess things are finally starting to catch up.

I'll be back in another couple of years, or when there's big news of anything related to HJ.
 
I have a small glimmer of hope for HJ, and I'll continue to work on and visit this site until it is 100% official vaporware. However, maybe this comment is better left for another topic... but "will HJ be superior when (or if) it is finally released?" Remember 1999, the birth of the original HJ. It's been 10 years. They ditched it, wrote HeroEngine, and now a new HJ, and a new version/update of HeroEngine.

The thing that makes me think of this, is that my BF and I stopped playing WoW quite so much, and my BF's brother came over and was playing EQ2. Then a quibble started regarding graphics. EQ2's graphics are more "realistic" but the argument made against it is that the characters and armors look "made of play-dough", even plastic and shiny. WoW is "too cartoony and blocky"... so now, where will HJ be? PhysX is gone, NVidia took 'em over (iirc), and soon, the graphics and play for HJ will be like any of the dozen Asian games that Acclaim pops out of its unseen nether regions.

I have a small glimmer, of hope for HJ. I want it to come out, but it would have been amazing in 2005, maybe even in 2006. Now it's 2009, what will make HJ be the game I've always wanted to play? Right now... I feel that most if not all of us folks on this forum that have a speck of sarcastic hesitance regarding HJ. We hang on to that glimmer, waiting for "vaporware" to be stamped across the frontpage news of HJ site.

</soapbox>
 
I have a small glimmer of hope for HJ, and I'll continue to work on and visit this site until it is 100% official vaporware. ...
We hang on to that glimmer, waiting for "vaporware" to be stamped across the frontpage news of HJ site.

They have free labor willing to put time into it. It will never be labeled vaporware.

If you had slaves, and they were building a factory for you. Even if you run out of money and have to send home the designers, architects, and electricians, are you going to stop the slaves from slowly doing it for free? You'd just let them pound away at it all day and night.
 
They have free labor willing to put time into it. It will never be labeled vaporware.

And the thing about those people who are working on it for free is that they are delusional when they tell the people on these forums that their work on HJ is progressing into a commercially released MMO video game.

I have no problem with the fact that people are still working on the Hero's Journey project. People are passionate about different stuff, and if game design/game art/world creation is what you enjoy doing then I've got no right to say anything negative in regards to that.

I DO have a problem when someone posts on here stating that a release is imminent, or that all the work they're doing on HJ is amounting to something more than a technical demo for the HeroEngine. If you are one of these people, and you truly believe that you're working on what will finally end up as an MMORPG, then you are lying to yourself. I really don't think anyone fits this category at this point though, do they?

Simutronics made a business decision to market the HeroEngine and to devote their (now limited) resources to licensing it. It was a good decision from a business standpoint - better than launching and maintaining an MMO, at least. It's definately more than a little shady to keep people working on a project under the the guise of an eventual release, but then again this is Simutronics we're talking about...
 
and having a video card that can support it being set it to "highest quality" ...

EQ2 doesn't used video cards much although they are finally adding GPU shadows. It's important to have a fast processor either single or dual core. Mainly it only can use one core but the other is used a bit and can take care of anything running in the background.
 
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