Above and Beyond Technologies today released a statement informing The Repopulation community that the game could soon be finding itself in hot water as problems with the developers of the games engine, the Hero Engine, are suffering from financial problems.
The development team today took the time to inform their community of the problems, warning that the game may suffer possible outages as the team search for alternatives should the problems not get resolved. They also mentioned that they have not ruled out rebuilding the game from scratch.
[quote cite=”J.C Smith Community Manager, The Repopulation”]Unfortunately at the time when we started out here the only viable options were Hero, Bigworld, or Torque 3D, with the first of those two having restrictive license agreements, and the third being a good renderering engine that lacked in MMO specific features. We weren’t ever to fully be able to get out of the agreement.
The risk of downtime is very real at this point, though there is still also some reason for hope that this will resolve itself in a positive way. We have already begun some early work on the most likely contingency plan, so that we aren’t just sitting idly. But we are limited still in what we can do as a result of being in money preservation mode while this plays out, so currently it’s mostly prep work and experimentation.[/quote]
Since the original post the Chairman of Idea Fabrik PLC has also taken the time to issue a statement on the current financial difficulties surrounding the Hero Engine, citing that the problems stem from 3rd party related issues.
[quote cite=”Alex, Chairman of the Board at Idea Fabrik PLC”]As some of you have learned already, we are facing difficult times at Idea Fabrik PLC. Because of outside 3rd party related issues, we may be facing some down time to all our HeroEngine and HeroCloud services.
Though we are confident that Idea Fabrik is not going out of business and the HeroEngine and HeroCloud services will be restored, the issues we face right now mean a possible black out (or interruption) of all services. This will include all HeroBlade services as well as all web services.
It has been speculated that funding is the primary issue. And this is partially true. Due to forces outside of the company, at this time we are legally and morally bound in what information we are able to give regarding the causes. However I can say that it does not involve any of our middleware partners.
We are working hard to prevent any outages, however, if one does occur, rest assured that we will work twice as hard to get all survives back up and running.
Idea Fabrik PLC is a public company that relies on third party financing. We are currently in negotiations to secure our funding for the present and the future. This however does take time, and sadly, could result in a possible downtime of services. Since we were not given adequate time to make any adjustments, we are working very hard towards this goal.
While I realize this information may seem vague, we sincerely apologize for not being able to say more at this time. Please rest assured that we are doing everything to either prevent this or make it as painless and short as possible. [/quote]
We’ll keep you posted should any additional details emerge.
Source: Official Forums