“Star Citizen” & “Squadron 42” Move to Amazon Lumberyard Game Engine

star citizen

Roberts Space Industries, the company behind famous crowdfunded game, Star Citizen, announced last Friday that the game, along with Squadron 42, will now be using Amazon Lumberyard game engine.

star citizenOriginally, the video game studio revealed it was using Crytek’s game engine, CryEngine. Unfortunately, Crytek has reportedly been struggling with financial issues and was forced to shut down five studios. Sharing more details about the game engine move, Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts, stated:

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.”

Roberts then noted he and the rest of his team would utilize Lumberyard features that make sense for Star Citizen going forward. He also explained:

Chris Roberts -Max Photography for GDC Online GDC Online 2012 (Wed, 10:10) Roberts Space Industries Press Event Chris RobertsLooking 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.

Roberts also noted there is currently not an ulterior motive in the timing of the Amazon Lumberyard and the deal wasn’t fully finalized until after the release of Star Citizen 2.5 at the beginning of December. He then added:

I hope this clears up some of the speculation I have seen. We are very excited to be partnered with Amazon and feel this move is a big win for Star Citizen and by extension everyone that has backed the project.”


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