Star Citizen Switching To Amazon's Lumberyard Game Engine

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Chris Roberts has announced that both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 have been moved over to Amazon's Lumberyard game engine. Hopefully this doesn't set the game back even further than it already is.

“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,” said Chris Roberts, CIG’s CEO and creative director. “Lumberyard provides ground breaking technology features for online games, including deep back-end cloud integration on AWS and its social component with Twitch that enables us to easily and instantly connect to millions of global gamers. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard. In fact, we are excited to announce that our just released 2.6 Alpha update for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS."
 
I am not surprised since there is no saying how much longer Cryengine will be a possible option.
 
I'm still keeping track of this game. Been a backer since 2013 and have had plenty of other stuff to play since then. A game of this magnitude will take time to develop not to mention Chris Roberts had to build CIG from scratch.

It took Rockstar 4 years to develop GTA 5 with an already established studio, and what was it another year for them to release it on PC?
 
dR.Jester said:
I'm still keeping track of this game. Been a backer since 2013 and have had plenty of other stuff to play since then. A game of this magnitude will take time to develop not to mention Chris Roberts had to build CIG from scratch.
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Good thing they took that into account when they planned their crowdfunding. Oh wait they didn't, please give them more money.
 
Nexus6 said:
Let's hold off on the pitchforks for now eh?

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/364217/lumberyard-for-those-interested/p1

"the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team)."

"None of our work was thrown away or modified."

Etc.
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That actually makes more sense and allows the integration of using the AWS services as well. That seems to be perfect match for this type of game and could actually speed up the completion if they stop the feature creep. Not holding my breath but that seems to be a very wise move.
 
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Here's the thing. Back in the day we'd have heard about this game as a sentence in a magazine article/interview ("working on something really neat," etc.). There would've been rumors for months to years and eventually a full page ad buy and then an article. And then it would've come out. Instead we follow the entire process every step of the way and we are enabled to know and criticize everything. It's a complete paradigm shift and it's hard because people are so damned impatient.
 
phobos512 said:
Here's the thing. Back in the day we'd have heard about this game as a sentence in a magazine article/interview ("working on something really neat," etc.). There would've been rumors for months to years and eventually a full page ad buy and then an article. And then it would've come out. Instead we follow the entire process every step of the way and we are enabled to know and criticize everything. It's a complete paradigm shift and it's hard because people are so damned impatient.
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It's even better when the most vocal critics either have no understanding or in some cases even refuse to understand how much work can go into something highly technical and can only think of it akin to building a treehouse.
 
phobos512 said:
Here's the thing. Back in the day we'd have heard about this game as a sentence in a magazine article/interview ("working on something really neat," etc.). There would've been rumors for months to years and eventually a full page ad buy and then an article. And then it would've come out. Instead we follow the entire process every step of the way and we are enabled to know and criticize everything. It's a complete paradigm shift and it's hard because people are so damned impatient.
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I don't have a dog in the fight, but I have to say...

You ignore that they gave release dates, no matter how "approximate" they were. By now there would be articles in PC Gamer, CGW, etc. about where Star Citizen is and why it isn't released yet. Back when journalists were journalists, and not news aggregators, every gaming mag would be trying to get the exclusive take on why it was so far behind...
 
phobos512 said:
Here's the thing. Back in the day we'd have heard about this game as a sentence in a magazine article/interview ("working on something really neat," etc.). There would've been rumors for months to years and eventually a full page ad buy and then an article. And then it would've come out. Instead we follow the entire process every step of the way and we are enabled to know and criticize everything. It's a complete paradigm shift and it's hard because people are so damned impatient.
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Back in the day the ones investing would have set some hard limits and held megalomaniacs in check and there would be an actual game released.
 
Well if we're going by "back in the day" standards that forced release would have been a buggy mess. *Really* back in the day those bugs would have become unfixed exploits and game breakers. *Current* back in the day those bugs become 0day release patches. Regardless, it's an undeserved appreciation for the suits declaring devs need to ship up and ship out on X day regardless.
 
mope54 said:
Yeah, it's difficult to understand how anyone is seeing this as negative news.
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A bunch of people see all news about Star Citizen as negative news no matter what it is. Its basically politics to them. And even politics didn't used to be that way.

This is a huge boon for Star Citizen and will be clutch for the netcode to work well. Amazon just happened to pick the same exact CryEngine build Star Citizen was already using to make Lumberyard... I bet in reality they targeted Star Citizen as the AAA game they wanted to launch it and give it the most visibility, so they chose the same build Star Citizen was using.

Also, this means it'll be a lot easier for CIG to sell Star Engine to other developers once they're done with Star Citizen. Imagine a future Battletech or Robotech game using Star Citizen's technology... very bad ass! No longer would we need to separate the mech part of Mechwarrior from the Aerotech part of the dropships, it can all be part of the same game. Just asking to be done.
 
Lemme get this straight. They ported an entire open universe MMO and FPS from a completely different engine in a couple days. But they cant get a demo running for their convention after 5 years? Look I hope it works out for all the superfans. A failure of this magnitude would hurt the gaming industry for everyone. Personally I have little hope he can pull it off.
 
Nexus6 said:
Let's hold off on the pitchforks for now eh?

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/364217/lumberyard-for-those-interested/p1

"the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team)."

"None of our work was thrown away or modified."

Etc.
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As someone who has worked with graphics engines before my only reaction is: Bull fucking shit. Even going from one minor version of the same engine to the next isn't completely painless. Unless Amazon created a tool for them, that auto translated every api and function and procedure call to match their engine. And even then there can be skeletons lurking in the code. Someone used a hack, or a workaround, there's no way to migrate that painlessly. Unless their programming team is the tidiest in the world, all by the book, that used absolutely no hacks, this is quite impossible I have to say. And mind you in this case not using hacks is not a good thing. You want the most efficient code, not the cleanest one in a game. 20 man hours my ass. In other news they're still lying trough their teeth. Nothing new under the sun.


There needs to be a very good reason for an engine switch to happen, and it needs to happen very early in development to make sense. So that leaves two options. Either Star citizen is still very early in development, or CI is completely nuts, sadly both cases are very plausible here, in fact I'd wager that this is an effect of both of those factors.
 
Is this game still not out yet?

I am interested in play it. Once it is finished anyway. Until then it is just a bit of drama to be entertained by.
It does seem like they are pulling a DNF with this game though. We will see when it launches, if it ever launches.
 
Switched an entire engine in a couple days.... OK.


On another related note, I'm going to buy a bunch of lottery tickets. I'm pretty certain the odds of winning that are the same as that statement being true.
 
Lumberyard is effectively a forked build of Cryengine 4 so it's not really a surprise since Crytek is slowly kicking the bucket and support will be harder to come by.
 
For anyone who followed Star Citizen closely, this is not anything to worry about nor really, any surprise. To put it succintly, Star Citizen was originally built on CryEngine, but as time went on they bought the rights to it and expanded it into something way beyond its original intent, but still has some CryEngine "DNA" to some extent. Lumberyard is basically Amazon taking CryEngine another way, with the huge resources of Amazon behind it; both deep pockets for investment in development and the huge AWS platform already a favored element of Amazon. Thus, Amazon made Lumberyard into a massively extended fork of CryEngine themselves, and allow it to be freely used for all kinds of game development (even the code! Though its "not quite" open source in that you can't redistribute the code the way you could compared to the GPL or MPL licenses etc), including single player offline titles. The only limitation is that pretty much you have to use AWS for your game if it requires any AWS-platform-kinda-stuff and this is of course how they intend to profit. Unless they do something underhanded, it actually seems like a good system because AWS is a great distributed server platform ready made and integrated into the engine, so it makes it easier to bring those assets to your player base, so ideally everyone wins.

When it comes to Star Citizen, especially with the kind of content planned for the public universe it has become obvious they're going to need a huge AWS-kinda presence for the kind of universe they plan. From the post from CEO Chris Roberts listed here - https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/364217/lumberyard-for-those-interested/p1 - it seems that it just became fortuitous that Lumberyard was available and was very accessible and compatible with their own CryEngine mods. They are not going to have to limit their existing designs or platform and apparently can merge these changes without issue. Many things they don't even need to change, continuing to use their modded "StarEngine" in its entirety, but just replacing the old CryEngine underpinnings with enhanced Lumberyard ones, as well as picking some new features (ie en masse server presence/rollout ) that Lumberyard brings to the table.

Until we see major evidence there is something to worry about, I think this should be heralded as a benefit. Lets not forget that in the "grand scheme" of things Star Citizen is still in the earlier stages of development and there is a lot to go, despite progress being made at a good pace. Lumberyard seems to show forethought in terms of their infrastructure needed to take the game universe from the mini, localized play we have in the pre-alpha, to the grand scale rollout planned for the full experience.
 
EODetroit said:
Imagine a future Battletech or Robotech game using Star Citizen's technology... very bad ass! No longer would we need to separate the mech part of Mechwarrior from the Aerotech part of the dropships, it can all be part of the same game. Just asking to be done.
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Not going to happen, Harmony Gold is intent on sitting on that IP doing nothing good with it for eternity. Besides, I much prefer the Macross story. Although all the sequels got weirder and weirder and modern anime is annoying as hell, a game of the original series would be nice. But, I doubt CIG will license their version of Cryengine anyways.

All that being said, even switching to another of Cryengine seems like it would take a lot longer than a few days. I'd think weeks would be excellent time.
 
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Some quotes from cryengine forum moderators.
Lumberyard is 99.8% stock CRYENGINE 3.8 tech. They removed Scaleform and replaced it with some basic UI thingie. The stock netcode is gone and replaced with something else. Lumberjack is also bound into Amazon Cloud.

NETWORK: Lumber has new network sys, ce has stock cryengine one. According to tevans from miscreated lumber network isn't too great though.
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It makes sense to have the easy scalability and integration of AWS for a game like this, compared to managing different dedicated server contracts and trying to add or remove servers in different countries as needed.
 
tetris42 said:
It's even better when the most vocal critics either have no understanding or in some cases even refuse to understand how much work can go into something highly technical and can only think of it akin to building a treehouse.
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Yeah, but they said it would be out years ago and they're still in ALPHA.

Sorry, but this doesn't make me think I'm ever going to get to buy this game. Virtually every announcement seems to push the release date further out. As always, I hope I'm wrong, because like many others, I'm really interested in this game (really I'd be happy with Privateer 3 or WC 6), but there's no way I'd give him money for a game that may never be finished.
 
From the 2.6 release all cryengine logo's have been replaced with lumberyard.

Move makes sense to me, with crytech circling the drain they are going to need support from somewhere.
 
Wake me when there is a playable SQ42, beta even let alone the SC universe sim. One thing that has bugged me for a couple years now is, they have fan conventions for this game. Its pure marketing nonsense at this stage. A fan convention for a game that isn't out of alpha. How does that not scare the backers?
 
Rev Lemmon said:
Why don't we just face the facts. This is DNF for the next generation. Even when it is finally released it will flop like DNF for the same reason.
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Because neither of those things are facts? They're vague, arguably uninformed opinions. Seems like you should educate yourself on what constitutes a fact before insisting people accept your claims as such.
 
I don't remember DNF being playable before release yet people can and do regularly play on SC servers. Do the detractors in this thread know there are major playable sections of this game or do you guys think it's all just screenshots and models still?
 
Xaeos said:
For anyone who followed Star Citizen closely, this is not anything to worry about nor really, any surprise.
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BaghdadBob.jpg
 
Ocellaris said:
Good thing they took that into account when they planned their crowdfunding. Oh wait they didn't, please give them more money.
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Come on now they have investors waiting for the PC gaming masses to commit their $ any moment now they will swoop in and fund the rest of the game.... any second now.....

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Roberts isn't a visionary.
 
dR.Jester said:
It took Rockstar 4 years to develop GTA 5 with an already established studio, and what was it another year for them to release it on PC?
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Don't try to compare Star Ponzi with an actual video game, nevermind a blockbuster AAA that had something called a project manager and things called milestones and deadlines.
 
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