Star Citizen – and its SP counterpart, Squadron 42 – has been in development for five years. The game is powered by CRYENGINE and is among the most ambitious projects we’ve ever seen. However, the game appears to be nowhere near to completion. Not only that, but Cloud Imperium had to rewrite entire whole sections of the engine so that it could support the specific needs of Star Citizen. Still, Chris Roberts defended CRYENGINE, claiming that these changes had to be made, and that things would not have been better if the team chose Unreal Engine 4 or Unity.
As Roberts told Kotaku, the reason Cloud Imperium decided to use CRYENGINE – instead of Unreal Engine 4 – was because CRYENGINE was a more mature engine back then:
“I was judging both and playing with both of them and ultimately decided on CryEngine because Unreal 4 back then was very early. It had all sorts of power and flexibility, and it’s used a lot – but at that point, they were still refactoring even fundamental systems. It still had time to mature and the CryEngine was just a bit more mature.”
As said, though, a lot sections of the engine had to be rewritten. For example, Roberts wanted the game to feature the same quality of animations in both first-person and third-person perspectives. He also wanted the engine to offer the ability to switch between first-person and third-person modes at will. The team also had to move CRYENGINE from 32-bit calculations to 64-bit.
“There isn’t an engine that can do what we’re doing. If there was then we’d have licensed it. We had to refactor it to scale. […] You can have millions of kilometres you can travel. Draw distances are hundreds of thousands of kilometres. You can’t do that in a 32-bit engine. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Unreal or CryEngine or Unity. We would always have had to do that refactoring. Yes, you can get into CryEngine and do things simply and you can do the same in Unreal and Unity, but it won’t work for what we need at all.”
Roberts concluded that he does not regret his decision to use CRYENGINE in Star Citizen.
“I don’t believe that if we’d picked Unreal 4 that we’d be in any better a position. I can see how [adapting the engine from 32-bit to 64-bit] would be frustrating for some people, but I don’t look back and say ‘I wish I’d gone with Unreal’. We would have had this no matter what. People in the industry, even internally here, our designers and artists aren’t technically [informed]… they just know their tools.
I think it’s easy for people to scapegoat CryEngine, or any other engine choice. If we were doing a simple FPS shooter, we wouldn’t have had the same issues or challenges, but we aren’t doing that, and we didn’t raise the money that we raised because we were doing something simple. We raised it because we wanted to push the boundaries.”
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Greta decision. Star Citizen wouldn’t look anywhere near as good as it does were it not for CryEngine. No other engine even comes close to what it offers graphically.
I think that’s beside the point (although I tend to agree with you, Unreal 4 also can give an amazing graphic quality). Of course they wanted a visually astounding game but their thing was that they want this to be a Jack-of-all-trades, master-at-EVERYTHING (space sim, FPS, TPS, open-world, RPG, MMO), and there’s just no engine capable of doing all that at the same time with the same level of versatility. As he said, CryEngine was more mature. Unreal 4 got a very important update a year ago but this game has been on development for 5 years so, for me, it’s a no-brainer.
That last part, in particular. Unreal 4.0 was released in May 2012, & their Kickstarter Campaign started in October 2012, so Unreal 4 was barely functional at the time. If they’d actually gone with that, they probably wouldn’t even be able to call it Unreal 4 today anymore, what with all the modifications they’d have had to do to it.
Yes it’s true that game has more going for it than just the graphics, but considering how good it looks it’s hard not to appreciate the capabilities of CryEngine.
Totally agreed there.
have you seen Batman Arkham Knight? and that’s Unreal 3
Modified Unreal 3, to be fair. Heavily modified Unreal 3, even, to the point where Rocksteady’s Arkham SDK was no longer even compatible with Epic’s Unreal SDK updates, IIRC.
Regardless, yes, Unreal 3 did have serious potential (see the Samaritan Demo, for example), but it doesn’t change the fact that, at its core, it was a – by that point in time (2012) – ancient piece of tech which was being dragged down by its 2004-era core coding (lighting, for example, never moved on from the now completely antiquated “bake it in” system. CryEngine 3, on the other hand, didn’t have that particular restriction, etc. etc. etc.).
As a result, it would have taken RSI even more effort to bring it into the 2010’s as a fully functional, viable, (relatively) cutting edge, long-term usable engine that fit their requirements than it already took them just to mould CryEngine 3.4/3.5 to their requirements.
Yes AK does look very good. But it’s a very heavily modified version of UE3. And even if Star Citizen runs a heavily modified version of CryEngine as well, if we compared the latest vanilla versions of CE and UE side by side, I think CE would still edge out UE in terms of sheer realism. To me Unreal Engine always had that sort of flat look to it, if you know what I mean. Not sure if it’s due to CE having a better tessellation solution or not, but still.
CryEngine was the best choice and is still the best choice. The only other engine that comes close is Frostbite.
Agreed. I have to wonder if EA is open to licensing it outside their own studios though.
I think it’s too much trouble, as far as they’re concerned, so no.
Besides, it gives them a visual & technological edge over the competition not to let it out of their hands, so in a way it makes sense not to license it.
Sort-of.
Yeah, you’re right. Frostbyte is so versatile that they would be actually helping competition if they start licensing it.
Cryengine not only supports all modern visual technology but it’s also open source for the developers. Unreal engine isn’t but they can create modules to change aspects of it but that isn’t as efficient since the modules essentially work like middle ware which require function calls outside the core engine which add a small amount of latency.
Wrong post?
Otherwise, good post.
Hmm. Definitely in the wrong thread. Dunno how, I can’t even find the post I was replying to originally.
none of the engines had what they needed for the game… And they could not make a new engine with 500.000$ (all these millions took 3 and half years to gather)
$500,000 is what they asked for from Kickstarter, but they already had multi-million dollar backers lined up to fund the project itself, they just need to confirm to them there was interest in it.
Besides, they got a hell of a lot more than $500K from Kickstarter, anyway ($2.1 million).
Wasn’t kickstarter $78+ million or was that there own funding project?
Kickstarter got them their first $2.1 million in the 30 days allotted to them. After that they kept the page going all the way to $6 million, at which point they moved it over to the Stretch Goals page on the RSI Website completely.
All of you are wrong. SC started raising money, directly, and had raised $2M (Million) before any Kickstarter, which was only started with backer’s urging, as the KickStarter hype was in full blast back then.
After 30 days of the KickStarter the Grand Total was at $6M, and as they never stopped direct funding, not all of the extra was from it.
Direct funding continued long after the KickStarter, and when it reached full crowdfunding goal for original plan of $26M, a backer vote was held on whether to make the original plan or, the expanded project we have now.
88% of the backers wanted to get the best game possible,and fundraising continued.
I only back Fully Crowdfunded games, and did so at $40 million.
Having researched these facts, in detail at the time.
Latest Total
$124,267,907 from 1,534,624 Star Citizens for an Average of $81 each, though some individuals invest big, most don’t.
My own is above the average at, $145, for a single ship reward.
I lost that money the day I invested it, and whatever the final outcome, will not complain.
CIG are pushing the boundaries of what PC gaming can do, that takes time, and far from being impatient, I want it done right not fast.
5 years to build both an 3 part SPG and MPG, at the cutting edge, is not slow, but we don’t normally get to see the entire process.
When CIG announce Squardron 42, at Citizen con, it’s like the Fallout 4 announcement, last year. That had many years of hidden development, before that point, and that was an established and fully working dev team, working on one SPG.
They also polled the backers and asked if they wanted the game promised in the Kickstarter or if they would prefer a delay for the additional features.
80%+ of the community voted for the delay.
You’re just repeating part of what I already said in my post.
This part.
“Direct funding continued long after the KickStarter, and when it
reached full crowdfunding goal for original plan of $26M, a backer vote
was held on whether to make the original plan or, the expanded project
we have now.
88% of the backers wanted to get the best game possible,and fundraising continued.”
Sorry bud, I was just skimming through the comments, saw what was above yours, went through yours quick and there you go.
Good to see another person who knows the truth on why it was delayed. That’s pretty rare out in the wild.
Apparently this guy was right on the mark, as it turns out. I found a direct quote from Roberts himself;
Roberts was building his prototype to show off to potential investors at GDC in Cologne in August, 2012. But in February, another industry-changing thing happened: the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter. Kickstarter had been around for a while, but this was when it grabbed the games industry’s attention.
“I’d originally planned to go out and show the demo to investors to raise a little money,” Roberts said. “But then the Double Fine Adventure had launched. I thought ‘Maybe if I can do some crowdfunding I can establish some demand.’ It doesn’t matter if I go gushing to investors. They always go ‘This is great, but who wants to play it? I know you sold lots of copies back then, but that was back then. Does anyone care now?’ So I was like, if I can raise some money with crowdfunding, that will help me with the investors and prove there’s a demand.”
Direct quotes from http://www.kotaku-co-uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen
As for development time; MMO’s generally take 5-6 years, including time invested into making an engine for it, so yeah, considering the current size, scope, & scale of the Star Citizen project, ~5 years really isn’t that bad.
thats mainly down to the netcode issues. its sending ALL of the data that everyone is doing in the entire instance your in, plus the server side can only use 4 cores per instance. So the rewrite is to change all of that and v1 will be in alpha 3
From watching Roberts interviews and such it sounds like they have a good grasp of CryEngine. They’ve already heavily modified it to where even when vanilla CryEngine does support it, it more than likely wouldn’t be as easy as an upgrade path. They’re doing it themselves, and they have mentioned they want to make sure its done properly. I honestly don’t expect them to have it done by the time Vanilla cryengine supports it.
CryEngine V is getting DX12 & Vulkan this year, whereas, IIRC, RSI said they might not even have DX12 in at launch, so yeah, Crytek is definitely getting there first.
Oh yea without question. Chances are dx12 and or vulkan support is something that will come after launch. Roberts has already said the game will “ship” before it’s feature complete so it’s reasonable to assume it will also get support for those apis later. It would be to everyone’s advantage for them to add support because it’s going to be a very demanding game so any way they can squeeze extra performance out will only help sales
CRYENGINE is getting Vulkan support in November of 2016, so that will come quickly.
CryEngine is junk, it has bad workflows and moves extremely slowly partly because nobody is using it because it is junk.
What????????
Word!!!!!!!!
Bad workflows? Do tell…what exactly you mean.
Everything I’ve seen from cryengine has been fantastic and I’ve also seen plenty of indie games using it since they changed their licensing prices. I’ve also never heard a bad word spoken about it aside from its netcode which is easily replaced in 99% of cases.
The best engine would have been the latest version of idtech but Bethesda has already said they won’t license the engine.
Ea also won’t license frostbite unless they are the publisher.
Chris Roberts is the new Gaben. Hail our lord and savior CR
Chris Roberts was Gaben before Gaben.
impressive!!
CIG is like the good old crytek (2004-2007).
You mean kind-of like Crysis vs. Warhead? 😛
Unity!
Never ever mention that abomination of an engine.
The only thing Unity did was bringing amateurs into game making without having to buy a license, now both Unreal and Cryengine offer this, so yeah, it sucks.
of course, if he say, “cryengine suck we need to use another engine. so please give us more money” the backers will come to his house with pitchfork
Not that he even needs to, or even needs more money at this point.
He definitely has far more development funds than he knows what to do with by now. They even stopped announcing stretch goals when they hit $65 million because they ran out of ideas, & they’re currently at $124 million.
Hm. Well, that would be another reason why they stopped doing stretch goals, I suppose – they need the money for the existing ones.
Either way, never heard that rumour before, interesting.
They stopped stretch goals because they were feature locking. They didn’t want to add any more content, instead focus on achieving the content already promised to a high fidelity.
Well, either way, they’d have run out of ideas at some point, but yeah, not getting overwhelmed by everything was definitely also important to them. There’s no point in having 500 half-finished semi-laid out features only partially implemented, after all.
“Star Citizen – and its SP counterpart, Squadron 42 – has been in development for five years.”
Uhhhhhhhh, ok. I guess you could make that statement, but if you are talking about REAL FULL DEVELOPMENT instead of the pre-kickstarter concept phase then there has actually only been 3 years and 10 months of development.
Also, it is kind of hard to even call what they use the same Cryengine anymore. It has been so heavily modified for their specific needs, as well as so many of the Cryengine team now works at CiG that i would call it more the Star Citizen engine at this point.
Middle-path; from the moment they picked an Engine & started fiddling with it, even if that’s technically considered pre-development?
IIRC it’s already unofficially called the Star Engine, or the Star Citizen Engine, or some such, but they just haven’t officially called it that yet, btw.
I’m honestly glad they didn’t go with UE4. UE4 has so much backlogged that they have to do in order to truly modernize it. CryEngine has been impressing me lately.
Game looks crazy good a you can see the time and money invested. I just can’5 wait to play the full game.
I hope this gets proper VR support. It seems like the time it will come out, likely 2018-2019 will fall right within 2nd-gen VR headsets coming out along with 7nm GPUs. I’ll buy in then.
Ser Davos? Is that you?
No matter engine they went with they would have had to rewrite alot of code because they are doing things that have never been done before…and that’s not fanboy talk that’s legitimate.
Also the game hasn’t been in active development for 5 years. They had to build a company to build the game. Then you have a year of concepting and prototyping then you have a year solid of active engine development, it’s also going to take artists at least 2 years for a project this massive and they can’t start until they have a target to hit which means the ARTISTS started in full force about 2 years ago.
Your average AAA game that isn’t made by ubi soft takes 4-5 years of development time. The difference here is you don’t generally know the game exists until year 3 or 4 but since star citizen was crowd funded we have known about it all along.
Also remember that RSI put out a poll for backers a year after the Kickstarter asking them if they wanted the game they backed or if they wanted RSI to make what we now know as star citizen and the FANS voted 80% in favor of the delay and expansion of the game.
So if you want to blame anyone for the perceived “delay” blame the fans. As far as I’m concerned we are looking at a 6 year development cycle for this game at minimum which is only a year more than mankind divided…and this game is about 1000x the size and scope of dues ex.
Star citizen is the no man’s sky everyone actually wanted.