So I searched around and this is what Chris Roberts said about the choice of engine (source):
I do remember those voices, going, “Really, CryEngine?” but they were lost in a chorus of “OMG NEW CHRIS ROBERTS SPACE GAME”, of which I was sadly a part of at the time.
I was one of those worried about the engine choice. It didn’t seem flexible enough for a project like this. I’d say that about it even now, with all the improvements that have happened in the 4 years since.
Funny that now, as of 4.11, UE4 can actually do fairly realistic rendering stuff, almost comparable to CryEngine, minus many of the engine limitations and tinkery nature of something like CE. From what i’ve heard, CE has held them back even more than feared in many regards, networking being one of the bigger hurdles.
I think you misunderstood his answer. Here’s a (paraphrased) transcript from INN:
In the beginning we’ll see social clothing like trousers, jackets and t-shirts and we’ll also see armour. The legacy armour that we already have will remain for just now though they aren’t final and won’t be in SQ42 or the final game. You’ll be able to buy those in the meantime with Alpha UEC in Port Olisar or ArcCorp in the first release. Armour will give you protection – other effects will come with Item System 2.0 like life support, warmth or damage absorption.
The better looking armor models and better shaders are unrelated to Item System 2.0, which affects how items communicate with one another and is unrelated to graphics.
Also, where did you read that Item 2.0 involves a rewrite of CryEngine rather than a rewrite of their own codebase?
In the Old System ships would of had 1 Shield Slot for a Size 3 Shield, in Item System 2.0 it could have 3x Light Shields. This is true for Power Plants too. Cooler’s are now available in loadouts too.
http://www.redacted.tv/item-system-2-0-what-does-it-mean-for-star-citizen/
Does this have anything to do with CryEngine at all?
They’ve been gradually switching item types over to Item System 2.0 since Alpha 2.2. It started with Coolers, then Powerplants. From what I understand, these components used to have “baked in” attributes rather than being fully simulated and interactive as they are in Item System 2.0.
When he says “we’ve got a whole new character pipeline” isn’t he referring to a product pipeline, as in how their employees’ time is organized? Why do you think the assets are currently incompatible? He’s saying that some assets in Squadron 42 haven’t made their way to the PU because they aren’t finished.
Here: http://scqa.info/?show=10FTC&episode=81&qid=6 (quoted below)
He’s very specific in saying that the item system was based on the way the (old) CryEngine handles items by default, and they’re now building their own system over CryEngine.
Reading the transcript, yes, it seems you’re right and I understood it wrong. So what he’s really saying is that they have a new pipeline for both SQ42 and the new PU with the item 2.0 system, so those new fancy stuff won’t be available for a while in the normal PU, which is why they’ll sell old stuff (that will be discarded later) in the next PU release (which will add persistence and shopping, and I suppose microtransactions as well). That, of course, means that they made a “fork” of the code - there’s one version with the new item v2.0 system and all, and they added the shopping stuff to the version without the system. Two, possibly three different codebases for the PU alone. Right?
Thank you for that link. It seems like Item System 2.0 encompasses changes made on multiple levels, to the point where it’s quite nebulous.
They have a new character art pipeline at Cloud Imperium Games which has produced armor that looks better than what’s currently in the game as well as new shaders. They’re using those assets in their internal build for Squadron 42. He says that they’re “not ready yet” for the PU, which I assume means they aren’t completely finished. They’re probably using the same art pipeline when creating assets for Squadron 42 and the PU.
I’m not sure what you mean by “new PU” and “normal PU”. They say there’s an internal codebase with lots of features in development, and every month or so they choose which features are ready to go into the next Alpha version for the players. I’m not sure what the status is of the engine rewrite portion of Item System 2.0, but for the last couple versions they have been refactoring components one at a time to be compatible with the new Item System.
Shopping in Alpha 2.4 will involve in-game currency earned by completing missions.
That’s what I mean. If they use a modern version control system like Git or Perforce, they probably have at least two “branches” for the PU - the development, internal one, and the one deployed for backers. They probably have a third one for Squadron 42, and I suppose they’ll do merges and backports between those branches occasionally. The thing is that, the more those branches diverge, the bigger the work they’d have to “synchronize” them. If you add too many backports, then it can get really messy. But it’s conjecture (to a point) - I don’t have any particular knowledge of how they organize their code and asset production pipelines internally, or how their build systems work - I’m just making educated guesses.
“Guns? Lasers? Missiles? Nah, I don’t need any of that.”
Ha! That’s the first video that’s made me interested in this game.
Regarding the engine choice, here is a good article why guys at Warhorse chose Cryengine back in 2012 for Kingdom Come
http://warhorsestudios.cz/index.php?page=blog&entry=blog_009&lang=en
We were looking for a complete package which included engine with good tools, especially for the terrain editing and scripting, AI, some pretty lighting and a sophisticated animation system. Some engines offer all of this in one package (Cryengine) and some rely on 3rd party solutions (Havok Vision). Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. In the first example, you have everything under one roof for one price, but you might end up paying for something you don’t need. You also don’t have the choice to select the component that suits your game best if you’re not happy with the built-in one. In the second example, the initial price is lower and there is much more choice, but when you need everything anyway you may end up with a higher price, than the one for the complete package and lots of solutions from various providers may not work as well together. Even then there is a possibility that the option to choose different components to your liking will be more important than the final price.
There are also some risks. Smaller companies might offer great solutions at even greater prices, but since the games industry is quite a risky business you must take into account the possibility that they will go out of business and trust me, it sucks when you’re working on a game for several years and the technology provider goes bankrupt, or stops supporting its product one year before release. I’ve seen it happen once and it really is bad.
We ended up with six different engines for evaluation and several middleware solutions for lighting, animations and AI. We were testing everything for two months (not long enough) and the final decision was not easy. I would have loved to work with the new younger developers like Unigine or Bitsquid, since one could easily see that they have a lot of talent and enthusiasm and what they provide looks great, but on the other hand we had to play it safe. Our game is going to be huge and we need proven and advanced tools from day one. I also liked the combo of Unreal + Enlighten lighting middleware which looks totally awesome (Enlighten was used in Battlefield 3), but it has its shortcomings when you have a game with realtime time of day changes and huge (huuuuge) environments.
In the end, we decided to go with CryEngine 3, because it has a little bit of everything we need. It has great tools for building large worlds, very impressive real-time lighting, great looking foliage, supports all the platforms we’re interested in, plus our lead artist worked at Crytek before leaving to come work with us, which is also a great advantage. For a game of our size and scope, CryEngine was (hopefully) the best choice. If we were developing a different game or had a different budget, our choice might have been different because all of the tech we tested had their strong points.
I bet if they were starting the project today, they would have gone with Unreal 4, but thems the breaks.
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Yeah, some folks at RSI had mentioned Cryengine having some nice toolsets that came along with it. The biggest deficiency with the CryEngine, from folks I’ve talked to, was that its netcode was pretty piss poor.
But at this point, RSI’s already basically finished re-writing all that, so while it can be argued that it was a mistake for them to make that choice, it’s already done, and the biggest pain points are seemingly already dealt with.
So patch 2.4.0 just arrived on the “test under NDA” PTU servers, and someone leaked the patch notes.
New shopping experience? Is that like shopping for ship parts, or trade goods, or is it an in-game microtransaction shop?
As far as I know, buying in-game stuff with in-game credits that you get by playing certain missions and such. It’s described in the patch notes somewhere.
I seem to recall they will be selling credits as well. I don’t see how this thing can’t be microtransation hell. In theory, they’ve already sold the bulk of copies of the game.
How are they going to keep the company afloat post-release? Plus they have more fancy doors to buy.
Graphics programmer Ben Parry answers questions about using CryEngine vs. making a new engine from scratch:
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/6646568/#Comment_6646568
With the disclaimer that I’ve never worked on a team that built an engine from scratch, it would probably have been a terrible idea. Certainly if you’d wanted the current scope, but even suppose you reined it in to something much more restrictive consider how much wouldn’t have been possible to even start for months or years of work.
Random example, there’s a lot of talk about gutting the network serialisation to make it better, but working from scratch would just mean no network at all until that kind of work had been done. Worse, you’d probably have to build a rough-cut version of it first just so you could get people moving on the systems that had to talk to it. Along with that, no editor, no designer whiteboxing, no ability for artists to see what their work would look like in-game, or any really honest estimates of its performance.
In a previous post he implied that CIG would have used Unreal 4 had the project begun later. An interesting note is that Parry used to be the lead for the render programming team on Elite: Dangerous.
He’s a quote from a later post by him:
Speaking entirely as an individual, CryEngine has unlocked previously undiscovered reserves of rage and hate in my body tissues. There are decisions in there that, if I knew who made them, I’d have to challenge them to a boxing match. I’d lose, horribly, but it would be a matter of honour.
So yeah, it’s not all roses, far from it. ;)
That’s an earlier post. And you left out the end:
As it is, things worked out nicely. There’s is a lot of nice stuff in there, we’ve got a load of ex-CryTek staff who can point out where it is, and they’ve clearly been making quiet plans against the parts that need to be rewritten for years.
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I was doing a presentation of an IMF paper to a former ECB(Fed) economist. It was a truly awful paper, and I reflected that in my presentation. I concluded 5 minutes of disparagement only to have the economist say “but you liked it”. I was very confused, but he smiled and said that you always end on a positive note because you don’t know who’s listening, who you might have a relationship in the future, or who might be reviewing your work.
It seems that culture exists in GameDev, if Ben Parry is anything to go by.
‘It was thoroughly unmitigated shit…but I liked it’
I’m a software developer. The rage he describes? I’ve been there. Regardless of the things he likes in CryEngine, it’s quite clear that it was and is a problem. A problem that they’re solving with the help of Crytek staff, but a problem nonetheless.
