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Star Citizen Leaves Cryengine for Amazon Lumberyard

This massive change casts doubts to the future of Crytek and its technology. Sad news.

One of the biggest crowdfunding projects of our time, Star Citizen, is going through a massive technological change. A number of sources, including the official blog of Chris Roberts, report that from now on the game will be powered by Amazon’s Lumberyard. See UPD!

“We’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year, as we have been looking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Lumberyard provides groundbreaking technology features for online games. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard.”

Chris Roberts, Cloud Imperium Games

It is a big change, but we sort of expected something like that. There are a number of reasons to change the engine for Star Citizen. First of all, Crytek is going through a lot of changes right now. The company closed a number of studios, Crytek’s developers complain about horrible delays with salary payments. This doesn’t make it sound very reliable, and for a game, as massive as Star Citizen you do want to have a reliable partner. Secondly, Lumberyard’s render is actually Cryengine, because the company bought this technology a while back. It’s only natural to make the switch to this tech. And last but not least, Lumberyard comes packed with a ton of great cloud-based services from Amazon. This is an essential for Star Citizen, which promises access to a wide variety of virtual worlds for thousands of players online.

Star Citizen is a one of the biggest and most ambitious projects in game industry today. 350 people are working on it and we were fortunate to feature some of the great minds, which are creating the content for this massive beast. We really hope, that this game will make it and will be release sometime in the future.

UPD:

Looks like there was a mixup. The game runs on a modified engine of Cryengine, Lumberyard is there to make networking stuff work. Thx Thomas Ray.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team). 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.

Join discussion

Comments 3

  • Anonymous user

    ShikukuWabe, this sounds very much true. agreed.

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·8 years ago·
  • Richard Wulf

    Switching engines 4 years into the project?  Sounds like it's fubar at this point. Looks like that Derek Smart guy was right.

    0

    Richard Wulf

    ·8 years ago·
  • ShikukuWabe

    Its far less substantial than it sounds, SC has been using its own engine for over a year now (nicknamed StarEngine) which is pretty much a reworked cryengine, all they did is partner with amazon to get the networking modules of their cryengine fork and the capabilities and advantages that comes with it due to AWS

    0

    ShikukuWabe

    ·8 years ago·

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