Lets talk Lumberyard > Cryengine?

[Montoya]

From Chris Roberts:

There is one other big announcement we would like to make with the release of 2.6. We are now basing Star Citizen and our custom technology development on Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine. Since the beginning of the project, we’ve had to make a huge number of changes to the CryENGINE code and tech to enable us to deliver Star Citizen. While the original CryENGINE had great strengths in many areas like rendering and cinematics the needs of our game were well beyond what came ‘out of the box’. So we have, over time, changed significant parts of the engine for our technology, such that only a baseline of the original engine truly remains. In the future we will continue to make significant changes to AI, Animation and Network code and systems.

When Amazon announced Lumberyard back in February 2016, we were immediately interested. While based on the same baseline technology as Star Citizen, Lumberyard is specifically designed for online games, utilizing the power of Amazon’s AWS Cloud Services and their Twitch streaming platform. Amazon’s focus aligns perfectly to ours as we’ve been making significant engineering investments into next generation online networking and cloud based servers. Making the transition to Lumberyard and AWS has been very easy and has not delayed any of our work, as broadly, the technology switch was a ‘like-for-like’ change, which is now complete.

As an added benefit Amazon AWS data centers are spread around the world from North America to South America, Europe to China to Asia Pacific, which will allow us to better support the many backers across the globe as we scale up Star Citizen.

Finally, Amazon has made Lumberyard freely available for anyone building their own game. That means that technically-inclined members of the community can have a better view 'under the hood' of our game than ever before. It's also a great path for anyone interested in game development professionally; I fully anticipate that in the coming year we will be hiring programmers who have taught themselves using Amazon's Lumberyard resources!

As we move forwards, we are confident you will see great benefits from our partnership. Amazon will bring new features to Lumberyard to assist in creating online persistent games, adding great support for their products like Twitch (which we use extensively) and of course investing heavily in engine research and development for years to come. We could not find a more stable and reliable engine partner than Amazon, so with this partnership we are sure we have secured the future development and continuing technical innovation for Star Citizen.

With that I would like encourage everyone to download and play Alpha 2.6. It is a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing you in the ‘verse!

Happy Holidays!

-- Chris Roberts

 

[Thugari]

This is what I am curious about.

There is one other big announcement we would like to make with the release of 2.6. We are now basing Star Citizen and our custom technology development on Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine.

does this mean they are already using Lumberyard live? because to me it sounds like they are. Personally I think this will be a complete win for both CIG and Lumberyard.

 

[Bigcracker]

Switching engines takes a lot of time and effort. I honestly don't know how they're going to spin this because they brought so many people who are CryENGINE experts like Sean Tracy and pretty much the entire Foundry 42 team. This is huge news and should of had a ten for the chairman or something and not just thrown in on a 2.6 release email right before Christmas break. This gives the internet a ton of time to speculate and bring in the apocalypse which should of been held back imo until after they got back.

2016 went from the year of getting a SQ42 release date to a possible complete game engine change. Just speculation until we find out if a complete overhaul or merging both a possibility? Idk... Im drunk and now all I can remember is Duke Nukem forever changing engines.

 

[Thugari]

Switching engines takes a lot of time and effort. I honestly don't know how they're going to spin this because they brought so many people who are CryENGINE experts like Sean Tracy and pretty much the entire Foundry 42 team. This is huge news and should of had a ten for the chairman or something and not just thrown in on a 2.6 release email right before Christmas break. This gives the internet a ton of time to speculate and bring in the apocalypse which should of been held back imo until after they got back.

2016 went from the year of getting a SQ42 release date to a possible complete game engine change. Just speculation until we find out if a complete overhaul or merging both a possibility? Idk... Im drunk and now all I can remember is Duke Nukem forever changing engines.

after reading about this on the SC forums, it looks like Lumberyard is a variation of the cryengine code. if so then porting would be fairly easy. and as I said above, with their wording it sounds like 2.6 is already using lumberjack.

 

[Black Sunder]

Lumberyard was a fork of Cryengine that Amazon took and redid the networking for the most part. Should be a simple integration/switch.

 

[Mich Angel]

Lumberyard is already in use now, look to your right when starting up game in new loading screen ;)
And it is so far a big difference from my poit of view alot smother gameplay :D

 

[EpilepticCricket]

Switching engines takes a lot of time and effort. I honestly don't know how they're going to spin this because they brought so many people who are CryENGINE experts like Sean Tracy and pretty much the entire Foundry 42 team. This is huge news and should of had a ten for the chairman or something and not just thrown in on a 2.6 release email right before Christmas break. This gives the internet a ton of time to speculate and bring in the apocalypse which should of been held back imo until after they got back.

2016 went from the year of getting a SQ42 release date to a possible complete game engine change. Just speculation until we find out if a complete overhaul or merging both a possibility? Idk... Im drunk and now all I can remember is Duke Nukem forever changing engines.

I would be extremely surprised if a large part of the netcode rewrite didn't include prepping the engine explicitly for this transition. Amazon made the announcement, and Chris was on the phone with Jeff Bezos the next day saying "let's make a deal". I'm not worried at all about them doing an engine change since when they started the engine was already hacked to pieces and the changes that have been made have already warped everything into a completely different beast.

Duke Nukem is no comparison because they had to keep redoing the sculpt since they were basing him on @Montoya and he kept getting buffer and sexier at the gym.

 

[Huegpaynis]

What's there to talk about? They're announcing that they're working with AWS for interbutts stuff and that they're going to pillage the lumberyard for the choicest cuts of lumber to build their glorious (space)chalet. I see nothing amiss, and outside of the occasional hiccup that comes with integrating new stuff into your own stuff, I don't forsee any real issues. ABoutthe only real [CONCERN] I've seen raised is that AWS has fewer/worse service in europe compared to google. On the flip side, the aussies/kiwis should see better service, as AWS actually has data centers over there.

 

[Stevetank]

Since CIG already rewrote all of CryEngine for Star Citizen, it's not like they are using CryEngine anymore. I don't think switching to Lumberyard would be that hard, just time consuming. The 2.6 loading screen already says Lumberyard.

 

[Lythan]

Good move, Amazon will be around for a long time... Crytek... well... you know... It makes sense and I was relieved to read this, as it seems to provide some much needed stability (and a shush to all the "SC should never have chosen Cryengine" debates/cryfests)

 

[EpilepticCricket]

Good move, Amazon will be around for a long time... Crytek... well... you know... It makes sense and I was relieved to read this, as it seems to provide some much needed stability (and a shush to all the "SC should never have chosen Cryengine" debates/cryfests)

Yeah, it's sad news about Crytek. Hopefully they'll get their heads on straight and sort themselves out. Partnering with Amazon for server power is very smart, long term thinking.

 

[ThunderKraken]

It's not really open for debate since it's already been decided. If anything it fuels more mistrust in that backers were not pre informed.

 

[maynard]

...If anything it fuels more mistrust in that backers were not pre informed.

Who cares? Did you skip over the part where CR said,
"Making the transition to Lumberyard and AWS has been very easy and has not delayed any of our work, as broadly, the technology switch was a ‘like-for-like’ change, which is now complete."

 

[AntiSqueaker]

Maybe this is what delayed 2.6 and 3.0?

I mean STAR CITIZEN SWITCHES ENGINES 4 YEARS INTO DEVELOPMENT. MORE LIKE BAIT AND SWITCH ENGINE PANIC PANIC PANIC.

 

[ThunderKraken]

Who cares? Did you skip over the part where CR said,
"Making the transition to Lumberyard and AWS has been very easy and has not delayed any of our work, as broadly, the technology switch was a ‘like-for-like’ change, which is now complete."

It is convenient that everything is "on time" when the schedule itself is always being changed and switched. God forbid using the word DELAY is suicide.

 

[supitza]

I think it's great they switched to Lumberyard!

 

[AstroSam]

Amazon bought the rights of the CryEngine. Problem is: since Lumberyard is a fork from CryEngine 3.8.1, hence won't get updates and/or bug fixes after that version, Lumberyard is missing all new features like, I quote this "NoMaps, Heightmap-Based Ambient Occlusion, Designer Tool UV Mapping, Character Attachment Merging, New Depth-of-Field Implementation, Improved Motion Blur and Volumetric Fog Quality, Improved SVOGI."

So I think this coin has two sides, as always: Lumberyard is based on a good engine, but already out-of-date. Plus it needs a lot of love and polish to become a powerful engine. But with aunt Ama in its back no doubt there will be substantial amounts of financial reserves pushing it into a more powerful engine that a CryEngine probably never could become.

Perhaps this also explaines the delay we are currently facing within the Star Citizen project. I always was a little bit afraid by all this customizing of the CryEngine. But hand-in-hand with Amazon - what deal they made, I wonder? - and developing a new game AND a new engine, hence developing the engine according to the needs of the game, I suddenly feeling good again, looking to a SC release in a nearby future, like 2018 ;)

 

[CosmicTrader]

Lets talk Lumberyard > Cryengine?

Must we????????

 

[DragonHeart]

We Aus players may get a better connection =)

 

[Krystal LeChuck]

The switch to Lumberyard has been done for months now. I was already having talks about this with the devs during CitizenCon. Lumberyard is essentially CryEngine with better networking facilities. No major rewrites required, nothing of the sort.