Can someone please share with us newbies what the Hero Engine / Hero Cloud is all about? How do you take use of it and what else do you need to do outside of it, in order to make a complete game? I'm assuming it comes with a separate and fully functional editing program? But does it have it's own IDE?

Maybe I'm asking redundantly, but meh. Discuss.

HeroCloud basically is a service that hosts and manages all your server and accounting issues for you. It is completely free up to the point you get the game released(keep in mind that beta is free), after which it gets 30% of your net income you earn from subscriptions.

Ive been toying around with HeroEngine(using HeroCloud) for a bit now and I can say that it is extremely powerful, in addition to that, you can make MMO with it. You can literally make anything from FPS to RPG to online racer and so on, thats how flexible it is.

You still have to make all of your art and write all of the game logic by yourself, using HeroScript Language. The game manages all the connections, networking and so on in a way to not tie you down to using some game mechanic that you do not want.

You dont have to learn SQL or any other data managing language with HeroEngine. Everything is handled by engine itself and you can query the data using HSL.

I have to warn you, I have used many frameworks and engines in the past but HeroEngine is by far the most complex of them all. You literally learn something and by doing that you learn that you are only scratching the surface, but that is expected from a flexible engine that is made to the professionals.

Browse around in the wiki (http://hewiki.heroen.../wiki/Main_Page) and also register an account and request a server, theres nothing to loose.

Awesome. But about the HeroScript language, I assume it's very object-heavy? What other language would you compare it to? Thanks.

It is something of its own kind. It is OOP language and syntax is somewhat similar to Visual Basic.

What makes HE interesting is that you do not define(create the blueprints) the classes in the code using HSL but you make them with an DOM Editor, I quess its made that way so it automatically creates all the nessecary database fields. After that, you can instantiate the needed classes with HSL and also access the instantiated classes and nodes(groups of classes) done previously by the engine.

I can not compare it to any other programming language that I know(C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby) and once you learn it, you see that it is specifically tailored for problems encountered in HeroEngine.

It is not very complex language to learn by itself but the complexity comes from the framework the HE has set up, not very well documented and the wiki has somewhat wrong info so I haven't really pieced everything whats happening together after many dozens of hours of learning.

Ok, cool. I guess I can wait a little with it, though and just focus on my Java and later C++/C#. I can't imagine HeroEngine going away anytime soon, so I may just revisit the contemporary version a couple of years from now.

Thanks again for your answer.