Hero Cloud

[Chyren]

Anyone out there using Hero Cloud of late? I know its relatively new but what I'm reading about it is that it may be the software to beat. Thoughts?

[SpiritWebb]

Do you have a link for it? I tried looking it up and I cannot find it...though me being tired after hosting a dinner party might have something to do with it.

[Jackolantern]

Right here! Sorry, I didn't realize that some people here hadn't heard about it since we have been talking about it for a while at MMORPGMaker, or I would have posted something about Hero Engine Indie aka HeroCloud. It is pretty much the fully-featured Hero Engine on a cloud service for $5000 plus a yearly upkeep cost.

[Noctrine]

So for 5k and the yearly cost of running a dedicated server you can deploy HE. Thats quite a good deal, I wish someone would license me to make a MMO.

[Jackolantern]

I think there may have been a couple of other fees as well, but it still seems like a good deal to me.

[Chyren]

How does this program stack up to say Unity?

[hallsofvallhalla]

Unity is technically not a MMO engine. Hero has features that Unity cannot go against. Real time in game updating and world building, capable of thousands of players out of the box, millions possibly. Unity though has it's own features that Hero would be hard strung to do.

[Jackolantern]

Unity is technically not a MMO engine. Hero has features that Unity cannot go against. Real time in game updating and world building, capable of thousands of players out of the box, millions possibly. Unity though has it's own features that Hero would be hard strung to do.

This pretty much sums it up. Unity is not an MMORPG engine per se. People are hooking it up to be an MMO engine, but it is not one out of the box. HE also has many more advanced features that would be extremely difficult to do in Unity. Unity is pretty much a general purpose game engine capable of making FPS, RTS, adventure games, puzzle games, etc. HE is also going to have a dedicated billing model where they deal with payments for you and you just collect the checks (very nice, since payments can get you sued in a heartbeat if you don't know what you are doing), whereas any MMO made in Unity would be up to you to make a billing system and maintain it. However, HE is much more restrictive than Unity from a licensing standpoint. You must pay royalties, the engine stays on their server and you work on it over the internet, and other license items are rather strict. You also have to pay a pretty decent payment every year to keep working with it. With Unity, you simply buy it, download it and it is yours. Hero Cloud is not really in the realm of most hobbyists. It is more of a small-to-medium-indie MMORPG engine due to its price ($5,000 + other fees), its yearly costs (~$2,000), and the tools needed to make art assets for it (3DStudio Max or Maya, which cost $1,500+). Hobbyists may be better off with T3D + the MMOKit, Big World Tech Indie, or Unity if you have the technical prowess for a do-it-yourselfer.

[Noctrine]

They really like 995.

Hosting: 995 a year till commerical release
Training: 995 a week per person.
Updates Free first year, 995 after that.

[hallsofvallhalla]

9 + 9 - 5 = 13!!!

nooo its a price that will bring you bad luck!!

hehe, that is weird that they are so affectionate to that number.