The core piece that makes this engine exciting and unique to developers is that all of the development is done online and live as if you were within the game itself. It's highly collaborative, your entire team can be logged in and there are tools for the programmers, tools for the artists, tools for the game designers and even tools for the management team, and it's all done within the one environment. So development becomes very rapid, and you're able to be creative and test while creating, which really enables the team to get better results; you don't have to wait for six months to see if what you've done worked out.

Previous generations of online and offline game development were built around individual tools for individual developers, so each person in your team would have a tool that wouldn't necessarily talk to another person's. So each night you'd have to put it all together in what is called a "build cycle" and the next day you'd see how everyone's stuff worked with everyone else's.

We think that that's incredibly inefficient, especially when working with an online world, so we've created an engine that works in an online fashion.

How do you make that work?

NH: Well, that's the way we've always done it. We've been building online games since the time when online games were mainly text based, in the early nineties. We were the number one game provider on AOL and prodigy with games like Gemstone and Dragonrealms. Those games were built on a much older engine, but it worked in much the same way. Everything was live online.

When we started building HeroEngine, we built it from day one with the understanding that everything had to be done this way. There were a lot of very challenging issues we had to work with to do it this way—it took us five years before we were able to show this to the public and license it to the developer—and it would be very hard to take an engine that was built the traditional way and make it work in this online, real-time fashion. We built it from the ground up; we had to solve issues like - if you have five people working on a script, what does "undo" mean?

How do you solve an issue like that?

NH: If you're writing scripts, you have a complete history of all the changes that have ever been made. So on one screen you can be working across multiple versions of a script and comparing them, so that you can undo your own work or someone else's—you are completely in control of how that script works for you while you work on it. In the game works itself, there is a three dimensional analogue for that kind of idea; if you want to roll back on some changes someone has made, say an area that has been changed and is now broken, you can selectively choose the areas to roll back to the way they were in a previous version at whatever stage of development.

You can build in permission systems, also, but that's something we consider tailored to the individual team's requirements.

What makes this system so suited to The Old Republic?

NH: First of all they wanted to be able to start prototyping straight away. Usually in a project like this for the first two years your engineers are busy building the technology and you can't really do anything that you can see. With HeroEngine, you really can be building assets and coding in how they work from the first day. That was one of the key ideas for this team who was about to embark on a multi-year project and needed to be productive very quickly.

What possibilities can it allow?

NH: Some of the things that HeroEngine enables include the ability to update and modify games essentially instantly. You don't have to offer a large patch that needs to be downloaded. You can simply add content and it streamed in on an as-needed basis to the player. So for some online games, when they add a new area, you have to download it, even if you're not going to play it. With HeroEngine, it can tell when you're going to need it.

In addition, you can have a team of people who are not only building annual or semi-annual expansions, but who can be adding new content as frequently as you want—daily, weekly...

You can monitor the game's performance and make tweaks whenever the players manage to outsmart the designers, too. It's something that goes way beyond just fixing problems, and it's something we've been doing at Simultronics for a long time. As an example we had an sewer area in one of our games where players could kill giant rats to gain experience, but when the sewers became too crowded it became very hard to kill a rat without someone else getting the kill first. So some players decided to go to the in-game shops to buy cheese, take it to a quiet area of the dungeon and leave it to try and draw the rats out. Now the rats weren't programmed that way, but when our staff started to find large quantities of cheese in the dungeon, we added some programming to attract rats to the cheese.

This great idea from the players which improved the game and the experience was able to be added to the game in a matter of a few days. Those are the kind of things that it's simple to do with HeroEngine that are very hard to do with other technology. You don't have to write C code to do this, either. It can be done graphically very quickly.

Who else has licensed Hero Engine?

NH: Zenimax Online, the sister company of Bethesda Softworks is using us for an MMO that we're not allowed to talk about, and we're working on a major project with Sega Japan that we're again not allowed to talk about. Just last week we announced our relationship with Mindfuse, who are working on a more casually orientated MMO... there are several more relationships that we're not able to talk about, but right now we have about a dozen licensees.