Lumberyard replaces Cry Engine

[TeaLeaf]

I suspect many might not have noticed that Star Citizen over time has moved from what we originally thought was plain vanilla Cry Engine, to a heavily modded version of Cry Engine and now with 2.6 we've moved to Amazon's game engine, Lumberyard.  But it's not quite that simple, as Lumberyard is itself based on some of the original core of Cry Engine, but is much more hooked into Amazon's cloud services (AWS and Twitch).  

You can read more about Lumberyard here:

https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/

Why?   If you've been keeping up with things then you'll know that Crytek almost went bust this past month and released this press release:

http://www.crytek.com/news/crytek-outlines-future-plans-and-focuses-on-return-to-core-competencies

....in which they announced "a series of changes to its future business plans that will see the company refocus on its core strengths of developing innovative games and game-development technology".  In non-BS language that is roughly translated as 'we're shutting all but two of our worldwide offices as we've run out of money and need to slash costs'.  

The co-founder of Creytek, Avni Yerli, then said “Undergoing such transitions is far from easy, and we’d like to sincerely thank each and every staff member â€" past and present â€" for their hard work and commitment to Crytek".   I would have thought that their 'sincere thanks' might be better targeted at efforts to pay their staff on time?

https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/20/crytek-is-closing-studios-and-slow-paying-employees-again/

So, Crytek stumbles, but Lumberyard is evolving into the areas where Crytek struggled and better matches SC's development path.  Chris Robert's said:

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

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.

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.

The proof will be in the pudding I guess.   Non-believers prepare to flame and flagelate Chris Roberts and the whole SC thing.   Believers prepare to have your belief wobble a bit but then settle, just like your christmas dinner did.  

I can see the scalability and netcode benefits, I just hope that the end result doesn't end up like my christmas dinner, in the Thomas Crapper.

[albert]

Star Citizen never quite got past CryEngine 3 I believe which is a shame because 5.3 is supposed to be way more powerful and flexible. Perhaps if they did then it would have shown the support for Crytek enough to keep working with them.
I personally believe they made a lot of work for themselves using CryEngine in the first place for project like this. In the time they have had they could have developed their own engine and used it, licensed it out and tailored it for SC and not be restricted in lack of features.
I dunno what Amazon know about game development and scalability, they do storage ok, but not exactly well.

[smilodon]

CrytEngine was a choice made way back in the very early days of Star Citizen when they were still just hoping to get a few million in funding, so building their own engine from scratch was obviously a non starter. By the time they realised they were a massively funded game it was probably too late to chuck all their work away and start again. Personally the further away Cloud Imperium can get from the car crash that is Crytek  the better. Throwing in with Amazon doesn't seem to be much of a risk as I doubt Amazon are going to fold anytime soon

I imagine discovering the a behemoth like Amazon was building a platform based on the CryEngine that they could seamlessly transition over to as Crytek spiraled down the tubes was like all their Christmases coming at once. They also now seem to have AWS to boot. I know Chris Roberts was uncertain as to exactly what server set up he was going to run the full Star Citizen on (Amazon, Google, some other system) I guess that decisions been made then.

[Obsydian]

What is also worth bearing in mind is that several of the ex-CryTek engineers that now work for CIG are the original DESIGNERS of the CryEngine!

These guys have gone on record as having said that there were many things they wanted to do with the engine but were never allowed to, but now they are working for Chris, he has pretty much removed all their shackles and given them free reign to do things the way they had originally wanted, hence why they now have the 64-bit world space and procedural planets, to name just two, that are now embedded in the engine, and lend it its new name: StarEngine.

[TeaLeaf]

I absolutely agree with the comments re Crytek folks now working for CIG (and there are a lot of good hires in there), however my reading on StarEngine is that it forks from 3.6 Cry Engine, which is exactly where Lumberyard also forked from.   So the switch to LY is a change, but not a huge one as both StarEngine and LY forked from the same source code.  

Whether or not they continue to call it StarEngine I don't know, but StarEngine has had to change a little to work with LY (and it already has changed, as evidenced by the fact we are playing 2.6).  We've already got a 'this product was developed using the Amazon Lumberyard engine' and the Lumberyard logo at the bottom right of the loading screen.

[smilodon]

Yep Sean Tracy was a Crytek guy and he's been CIG Technical Director since 2014. Ironically maybe CIG poaching some/all of Crytek's top guys just helped to speed up their demise.