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star-citizen

On Dec 23, Star Citizen announced its 2.6 Alpha, with Star Marine (the FPS counterpart to Squadron 42, Star Citizen's space-gainsay storyline), updates to Arena Commander, and a variety of other improvements and tweaks. The press release also stated that Star Citizen would shift from CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard engine. The news, and its timing, set off a flurry of business organisation in the Star Denizen customs. About companies never denote good news practically on pinnacle of Christmas — y'all drop news on Dec 23 if y'all don't want it picked up. Engine changes, meanwhile, usually hateful a pregnant delay as assets and resources are ported from ane engine to the other.

star-citizen-18

Shots from Star Denizen show a gorgeous game.

With Lumberyard, however, the situation is more than complex. Lumberyard is heavily based on CryEngine, with additional technology integrated aslope it. Amazon has an FAQ that gives the specifics, but information technology looks as if nigh of the changes and additions Amazon has made boil down to feature improvements and new tools for building games as opposed to fundamental alterations to the game'south engine. This should speed the porting process, since we know Deject Imperium Games (aka CIG, the developers of Star Citizen) has done a slap-up deal of work to customize CryEngine in the first identify. Now, Chris Roberts, the head of CIG and famed Wing Commander designer, has issued an update on the engine porting state of affairs.

He writes:

Lumberyard and StarEngine are both forks from exactly the SAME build of CryEngine.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the finish of 2022. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon employ and the switch was painless (I think information technology took u.s.a. a day or and then of two engineers on the engine squad). What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which nosotros take dubbed StarEngine, merely now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our piece of work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for similar parts of the engine from CryEngine to Lumberyard. All of our bespoke work from 64 bit precision, new rendering and planet tech, Item / Entity 2.0, Local Physics Grids, Zone System, Object Containers and then on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen.

Going forward nosotros will apply the features of Lumberyard that brand sense for Star Citizen. We fabricated this selection as Amazon's and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilize the ability of cloud computing to deliver a richer online experience than would be possible with an one-time fashioned unmarried server architecture (which is what CryNetwork is).

Looking at Crytek's roadmap and Amazon'due south nosotros determined that Amazon was investing in the areas we were most interested in. They are a massive company that is making serious investments into Lumberyard and AWS to support adjacent generation online gaming. Crytek doesn't take the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are. Because of this combined with the fact we weren't taking new builds of CryEngine we decided that Amazon would exist the best partner going forward for the future of Star Citizen.

Star Denizen has been criticized before for its scope, the enormous difficulty of developing and launching the project, and the need to reshape CryEngine to do something it was never intended to reach. Merely based on what Roberts has laid out here, the shift to Lumberyard really shouldn't be a problem. I'm still non certain CIG can pull Star Denizen into a shape that delivers everything the game promised, just I don't think the Lumberyard shift is whatever reason to exist concerned. If anything, it may assist with later development stages if the superior tools and netcode outweigh the annoyance of moving whatever code needed to be moved (and if Roberts is existence honest, information technology sounds like it volition).