3565

I would have thought they would have learned from experience not to do the same.

3566

I’m also assuming that CIG is getting some money out of this either in direct cash or through a very sweet deal on AWS services in general. Amazon certainly was keen on having some sort of flagship title in the Lumberyard portfolio. And it’s not like they simply switched and mentioned it in a minor note - nope, with a press release singing the praise of Lumberyard and Amazon in which the CryEngine does not get mentioned with a single word. Pure advertising an typical of such arrangements.

[quote]Star Citizen and Squadron 42 Utilize Amazon Lumberyard Game Engine

Highly-anticipated space sim games will take advantage of Lumberyard’s deep integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Twitch

Los Angeles, December 23, 2016 — Cloud Imperium™ Games (CIG) announced today the company is using the Amazon Lumberyard game engine to create its ground-breaking space sim games, Star Citizen™ and Squadron 42™. Both games are currently in development and are backed by a record-breaking $139 million crowd funded effort.

Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA, cross-platform, 3D game engine that empowers game developers to create the highest-quality experiences, connect their games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch.

“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.”

“Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are incredibly ambitious projects which are only possible with great engine technology paired with the transformative power of the cloud. We love how CIG’s bold vision has already inspired a massive community, and we’re thrilled to see what they create with Lumberyard, AWS, and the Twitch community,” said Dan Winters, head of business development for Amazon Games. “We’re excited that they’ve chosen Lumberyard and AWS to provide the performance and scalability they need to bring their games to a massive audience.”

Added Roberts, “We are delighted to be working with a partner with the strength, vision, and resources of Amazon Web Services. We are looking forward to developing our relationship with AWS and the Lumberyard community in the future.”

Star Citizen is 100% crowd funded and was officially announced on October 10, 2012. The money raised pays for the development of the game including the Roberts Space Industries platform where fans and backers can interact with the team, view multiple weekly webcasts about Star Citizen, learn about the story behind the game, read constant updates on the game’s progress and much more. Star Citizen is recognized by Guinness World Records as the top crowd funded project and game in the world. People interested in backing the project can do so at http://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge.[/quote]

3567

I’m waiting for the announcement in 2018 when Chris Roberts says he has to redo all the motion capture for a new platform.

3568

The commercial ships will have Amazon paint job and free delivery anywhere in the universe (by space drones).

And wow a new source of revenue selling corporate paint jobs! Will be like the Jetsons with space billboards all over the place!

3569

New trailer for Space Marine in 2.6:

Not the part of the game I’m interested in. But I have to say the character and weapon models as well as the environments are pretty cool.

Wendelius

3570

When I worked at Auran on Fury we had some massive performance issues in UE3. The problem stemmed that when we originally started using UE3 it only had optimizations for the 360 (due to how young it was at the time we adopted it, which was after the GOW that used it). By the time Epic had done a lot of work to make it work well on PCs we had already done enough modifications to the engine that backporting any of Epic’s updates would have been extremely time consuming and non-trivial.

And I am pretty sure that all the updates to the engine our programmers did was no where near the complexity CIG had to do (things like the 64-bit update for example).

EDIT: Point being, even though the engines started from the same base doesn’t mean it’s trivial to backport changes from one fork to another. It can be very very hard depending how much the forks diverged, and CIG made it sound like they spent a lot of money to do massive divergence in their fork.

3571

This is more my type of trailer:

Those ships…

I’m so tempted to pull the plug and upgrade my PC so I can finally really jump in soon.

Don’t know what they were thinking with the final “shot” though. That’s advertising something people might not exactly be looking forward to…

Wendelius

3572

No one should really invest money in this unless they are thinking of it as a Kickstarter donation, because that’s really what it is. You are paying to fund this crazy scheme by Roberts.

If you just want to buy a game, then just chill out and wait until it’s in a state you want to play it. There’s no reason to contribute money at this stage unless you believe in the cause.

3573

Totally agree. I’m a backer because I wanted to support the project whatever the outcome. But nobody should put in money now if they want a finished game. You’ll have plenty of time for that much later (At the very least, I’d wait and see when and how 3.0 pans out, but likely even longer if what you want is SQ42).

For those of us who backed it though, there is constantly more stuff to play with and more refined systems. That’s why I’m getting really tempted to get a PC that will play the game. Mine is around 7 years old now (i7-920, an amazing -for the time- 6GB of RAM, …). I’ve been delaying as the builds come and go. The longer I wait, the more Star Citizen ready and cheaper my PC will be.

Wendelius

3574

I don’t know that Space Marines trailer left me as excited as their character model looks as it is about to enter combat.

3575

Briefly excited.

3576

I logged into a Space Engineers server that had tons of Star Citizen ships flying around. You can just play that if you want.

3577

I’m not even excited about that Star Marine trailer. That looked more like a tech demonstrator, like 3DMark. And not a particularly good tech demo, either.

3578

I’d wait for it to hit 1.0 - I.e. being an actual release of the finished product.

3579

That’s what it reminded me of! It was bugging me like, Where have I seen this? But is that really a bad thing? I liked how it looked.

3580

There’s a reason why tech demos look the way they look; it’s because they can focus entirely on the graphics and don’t have to worry about gameplay or AI or anything like that.

This felt the same way. It’s mainly just a bunch of guys shooting at each other in tiny rooms. Lots of fast-cutting, so you don’t actually see like 10 or 15 seconds of uninterrupted gameplay. The animation seems wooden, the character faces are almost comical, and there’s nothing really interesting going on.

Sure, it looks pretty. It looks like a CryEngine game, and I’m reminded why I’ve never seen a good multiplayer experience out of the CryEngine.

3581

Point taken.

3582

You’re going to be waiting a long time in that case. If someone is asking whether the current version of an Early Access/Alpha game is worth getting, it usually means they are the sort of person who is willing to deal with the nuances of Early Access in order to get their hands on a game sooner. Or they could just be trolling for whatever reason.

Even if they fall into the former category, I would recommend holding off on 2.6. The core gameplay loop of the Persistent Universe has not been completed, and a smooth experience is impossible until the netcode refactor. Arena Commander and Star Marine, while functional enough, are not representative of Star Citizen’s broader vision.

3583

Chris Roberts made a forum post concerning the switch to Lumberyard:

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.

Finally there was no ulterior motive in the timing of the announcement. The deal wasn’t fully finalized until after the release of 2.5 and we agreed with Amazon to announce the switch and partnership upon the release of 2.6, which would be the first release on Lumberyard and AWS. If you have been checking out our schedule updates you would know that we originally had hoped to release 2.6 at the beginning of December, not Friday the 23rd!

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.

3584

Is it just me or does it look like the alpha 2.6 already has enough content for possible gameplay longevity longer than most 60$ AAA games?

Now I will still not buy it since I am interested in Squadron 42, but what I am seeing seems solid to me. And Chris’s explanation makes perfect sense.