Yesterday, we informed you about Cloud Imperium’s decision to ditch CRYENGINE in favour of Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine. And today, Cloud Imperium’s Chris Roberts explained why the team decided to switch engines.
As Chris Roberts said, and while Cloud Imperium stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015, the switch was painless. Furthermore, both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are powered by StarEngine; a heavily modified version of CRYENGINE. The only difference here is that this custom engine is now based on Lumberyard instead of CRYENGINE.
“What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for like 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 so on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen.”
Furthermore, Amazon was investing in the areas Cloud Imperium was most interested in, and that’s precisely why the team decided to go with Amazon and not with Crytek.
“Going forward we will utilize the features of Lumberyard that make sense for Star Citizen. We made this choice as Amazon’s and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilize the power of cloud computing to deliver a richer online experience than would be possible with an old fashioned single server architecture (which is what CryNetwork is).
Looking at Crytek’s roadmap and Amazon’s we 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 next generation online gaming. Crytek doesn’t have 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 be the best partner going forward for the future of Star Citizen.”
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
You seem to ignore the parts that state that Lumberyard IS CryEngine, albeit with some added features. The change was so effortless because StarEngine and Lumberyard were both based on the same version of CryEngine.
He seems to ignore this in every article he posts about it.
Who is ignoring what? :v
Ignore him.
No plz 🙁 i like him.
I like you… but not as much as Zatara.
Rip me ;(
He doesn’t like me 🙁
Zatara means driftwood.
You mentioned that already 😛
John
Lumberyard/cryengine is the same more or less
Yeah, yeah, we’re all bugging John about the “ditched” thing, where as a simple change of words would do the job.
“Star Citizen implemented Lumberyard features” or “SC is using Lumberyad as base” or anything similar.
Now, this news, is Roberts itself explaining what they’ve done right? Apart from another “ditched” thrown there, there’s nothing more that Robert words there.
And they modified so much that if we say “It is the same as CryEngine” when CryEngine doesn’t have the same features that is also a disservice.
Okay. Yes. But still, they never DITCHED the cryengine. Poor choice of words. This is the point everybody is pissed at. Im pretty sure john knows about it and doesn’t change it out of what pride ? I mean why make the same mistake.
Wtf.
They kind-of did, though.
I mean, sure, they’ve been modifying CryEngine’s base coding for years, but as Robert said himself, they stopped applying Crytek’s CryEngine builds to StarEngine towards the end of 2015, & the engine is at this point so heavily modified, it’s even got its own name.
Now, they took it one step further by dropping another remaining portion of CryEngine – CryNetwork in favour of AWS. In a way, that does constitute “ditching”, since only a portion of CryEngine’s coding remains, at this point.
Yes, it’s not exactly the best phrase to use, but it is nevertheless accurate, to a point.
Hey, I just washed. >:(
Oh well. I guess you’re right. I just find that the information given here leads to confusion amongs the community base. Instead of giving the full story and details (which should be what journalism is) we get glimpses and we end up searching the information elsewhere. So this article made me search somehwere else for the information. Next time i’ll look at “that somewhere else” first and won’t come here.
And happy holidays too buddy!
“it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team” lol
^^^ this does not sell ads 😀
Because while they may be “the same”, they’re also, technically, officially, two completely separate products at this point in time, managed, updated, owned, & otherwise handled by two completely separate entities (companies).
Yes, that first paragraph is a bit misleading, but regardless of what Lumberyard’s coding base is &/or is not, it’s now officially a completely separate entity from CryEngine, & in a way, John is right – they did “ditch” CryEngine’s networking features in favour of Lumberyard’s AWS features, so….. “engine switch.”
First, last night i tried Star Marine and PU. Gotta say, PU was MUCH smoother! Meaning that in 2.5 my gpu usage would be at 40-50% because of the heavy netcode/backend. With that quick lumberyard addon/change, it has helped, and it is VERY noticeable. Now, i’m hovering between 70-80% gpu usage! Plus the feeling is much more responsive. Mind you, it is still alpha and not perfect but the progress made by that decision, is visible the first 5 seconds you move.
Second, Star Marine, it is a good testing ground for the fps part of the PU. It is far from developped and smooth but i can see that it is very useful for the devs to test new festures and also give a little more to backers. Gfx, looks good.
All in all,
Progress!
“online games that utilise the power of the cloud computing…”
Echoes of Microsoft’s hyperbole when launching Xbone.
MMO =/= RPG, RTS, FPS, etc. etc. etc.
Actually, an MMO can be all of it, an RPG, RTS, FPS, etc. Those genres’ definitions don’t impose they can be single-player only. In fact, Start Citizen will be MMO FPS, maybe MMO RPG and probably a bunch of others.
Major difference. Microsoft made “the power of the cloud” sound like it was something that was going to improve the console’s performance by supplementing what the internal hardware could do. They had tech demos where they blew up buildings and told the crowd the physics was being calculated on the cloud. It was total BS.
That isn’t what is going on with Star Citizen. Right now the main issue is the so-called netcode. Everything everyone on the server can see is being rendered. Even with only 24 players per server right now, that is a huge amount of information that has to go to a server and be distributed to every player.
MMO’s do this as their bread and butter. An MMO engine would be perfect for solving Star Citizen’s netcode problems.
Don’t really love the idea of cloud computing and streaming anything tbh.
I like my *multiplayer games*, but single player cloud computing and streaming is a huge no for me.
But even then, having to resort to using supercomputers to run a game for you, just proves that they cannot make a game run entirely on your machine.
I’m talking about streaming textures in general here.
I hate textures in general. Not trying to bring politics into the conversation, but, yeah, I could live without textures.
politics? Where do they fit into talk of gaming and streaming?.
When in Rome…
Yeah but adding pol where it doesn’t belong though.
I love lamp.
so you admit you dun goofed then?, glad to know we’re on the same page.
The f#ck are you talking about weirdo? Quit spamming my feed. Blocked.
lmao. You are the random spaz who kept going off on some random trip.
It’s just about hosting. Amazon figured out they could compete on another market, while promoting and making developers host servers using their web services.
By the time this game comes out… AMD’s Navi and Nvidia’s Volta cards will be out.
Good. Those GPUs will run the game better.
“which we have dubbed StarEngine,”
Not ChriRobEngine? I am disappointed.
2 days ago they had a news title “SC is changing game engine after 4 years….”
And people were THE END IS NEAR !!!!!!!!1111ONEONE