Star Citizen Development Discussion (Is Derek Smart Right?)

[Skel]

Does cig have any examples of a game that runs starengine?

They have an Alphaish? Depends on who you're asking, it's back to that if someone says the game's not out, then you'll be told you can download and fly right now, but if you complain about issues with that then it's "it's only an Alpha wait for the release".

This I would actually be interested in. I know that CIG has full source access to Cryengine and have made huge changes to significant portions of the code, but I would guess it'd come down to the contract ultimately.

I was just reading about the Axanar thing, the Star Trek Fan movie that's being sued. Seems the guys trying to make the movie spent most (if not all, there's a ton of fuzziness around where teh money went as they're claiming they're broke and no movie has been made) on building a movie studio. Some are claiming that's what the main goal of Axanar was, so they could make money by the studio.

I don't think that's happening here. I really do think that CR and crew are trying to make a game. The thing that keeps popping into my mind, is if they can't finish the game, could they license this new engine they've built? The more I hear about how they've had to rewrite most of the Crytek engine, the more I start wondering if that's a way for people to recoup money if this thing doesn't make it out. Of course the changes to the TOS make that close to impossible now,. If nothing else, it would give CR a new rev stream regardless.. provided they can of course.

As rivet mentioned, that would be one of 100 systems. Right now they've been working on tech to assist the artists and designers generate their content more quickly. They have also shown us bits and pieces of how the game will generate mission and story chains that follow along logically from lego-like set pieces and objectives.

They've proven they have 64-bit positioning working. As they finish ironing out these major underlying technologies we should see much more content come online pretty quickly. That's why that pie chart shown earlier selectively picks facts to fit a particular viewpoint. It also over states how long they've had dedicated teams. They didn't even really get started until early spring 2013 and even then it was a pretty small team. They only reached their current size about 18 months ago.

On top of that, Star Citizen isn't the only game they're working on since SQ42 is being produced. They don't show us much from that to keep the single player story under wraps. What we have seen came from the great leak of early 2015 where we saw hundreds of assets not previously known about. And that was over 18 months ago.

That is oddly worded.. Makes one question which version they're on the hook to provide to backers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but both SQ42 and the MMOish SC were what was sold to backers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cults/comments/5jwb0m/meta_has_gaming_become_a_cult_star_citizens_fans/

That link is funny... I would agree though there have been fans that have acted very cultish, but those are much more rare than that makes it look like.

We will have real evidence in 1 to 3 years. Until then we are all speculating. However I'm taking into account past performance and I feel like citizens arent doing that.

Anyways this thread is hot right now but it will die down until more new information comes. You guys get to choose if you accept that information as real or not. At least we have a thread now to discuss that new information.

But I did post real evidence about the lies regarding a space door and stealing of stock art but those were both shot down by the believers. Its ok. Thats their right. But its going to take a lot for these people to see a problem. In the end I think they wont even blame cig for the failure. They will blame goons and ds for the problems.

I'd be really interested to see how DS and the 'goons' could be blamed for it failing. Not like they're being sued by anyone.

 

[JSt0rm]

To be able to sell starengine they would need to show products in completion and why its more efficient then engines coming onto the market today... like this one...

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

oh wait I guess rsi switched the lumberyard...

You guys seeing that in game?

or this one...

http://lucidscape.com

 

[Sabrewings]

No, I haven't seen anything like that in game. Looks photoshopped to me.

Assuming they meet their goals, StarEngine would be unique in its capabilities all under one roof. 64-bit positioning, MMO, physics, detailed graphics, etc.

That is oddly worded.. Makes one question which version they're on the hook to provide to backers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but both SQ42 and the MMOish SC were what was sold to backers.

Until around February of 2016, both were sold together. Most backers are owed SQ42.

 

[rivethead]

Yes. CIG switched to Lumberyard. I'm surprised. Maybe I missed discussion of this......but I didn't know they were going to do this.

 

[Sabrewings]

Yes. CIG switched to Lumberyard. I'm surprised. Maybe I missed discussion of this......but I didn't know they were going to do this.

I just had to read up on it. Surprising to me as well. Though it sounds like they're doing it for the integrated online backend. Since it's a fork of CryEngine, most of their changes should carry right over.

This splash screen was added to the live 2.6 release (wasn't on the PTU). I'd assume they're already using it if it's incorporated into the splash screens.

From the official announcement:

From the email:

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.

Edit: I'm really glad theagent was there to tell us about this ahead of time, since he as an insider must have known. Oh, wait, he didn't because he isn't.

 

[JSt0rm]

Yes. CIG switched to Lumberyard. I'm surprised. Maybe I missed discussion of this......but I didn't know they were going to do this.

But do you have any evidence that they are going to use lumberyard?

 

[JSt0rm]

Edit: I'm really glad theagent was there to tell us about this ahead of time, since he as an insider must have known. Oh, wait, he didn't because he isn't.

Just a couple pages back I said they should switch engines.

 

[JSt0rm]

a lot of people thought they never did the 64bit port and just made everyone a miniature. This would make sense as to why they can make this kind of switch quickly.


Thats some open development to sell a bunch of stuff over a "sale" and then break the news xmas eve basically with hardly a notification.

 

[Sabrewings]

Just a couple pages back I said they should switch engines.

They didn't switch engines. Lumberyard is still CryEngine. It has some custom tools, and it comes with a hearty integration to use AWS. That's it.

a lot of people thought they never did the 64bit port and just made everyone a miniature. This would make sense as to why they can make this kind of switch quickly.


Thats some open development to sell a bunch of stuff over a "sale" and then break the news xmas eve basically with hardly a notification.

First, that's nonsense. If you make the models smaller it doesn't magically solve your problems. As you get very far from the origin you will still lose precision in the same ratio to the model regardless of size. Smaller models mean you need more precision to keep them from looking jittery and to keep items mounted to them. You may not have to go as far away, but you need more precision so it results in the same issues. That's just how floating point works.

Second, they apparently have been working on this for a little while and is part of what held up 2.6. It is relatively quick because it's still CryEngine and they were able to copy and paste the majority of the modifications.

And why would we need a notification ahead of time for them to tell us that? They had said before they had an announcement to make with 2.6. However, you act like this is bad news. AWS is superior to Google Cloud, so this is a good move. They keep the work they've been doing, have a more reliable engine partner than Crytek, and they get deep AWS integration. All in the same engine their engineers are used to working in. Win win.

Edit:. Here's a CIG dev on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/5k06v9/letter_from_the_chairman_26_lumberjack/dbktfe6

Pretty close. StarEngine was based on CryEngine 3.7 (last big integration) with cherry picked changes from CryEngine 3.8 (mainly some Animation/Serialization fixes/improvements). The Lumberyard builds we used had the same CryEngine 3.7 base with the main changes on the Editor/Tools side. We heavily changed or have completely rewritten CPU/GPU side rendering, memory management, multithreading, entity/game object handling + added tons of engine features wich neither CryEngine nor Lumberyard have. Everything else is relatively easy to merge, thanks to the same code base + adding independent Lumberyard only features is straightforward too, especially with the help of Amazon developers. We are pretty good at handling the rest of the old CryEngine codebase, which CryEngine, Lumberyard and StarEngine have in common, ourselves

 

[SLU Aequitas]

I'm still confused, with the 2.6 release and people playing Star Marine, what's going on. I was told by Dede that this was fake, it was smoke and mirrors, and we'd never have Star Marine. What's the next moving goal post ELE we have to look forward to in the next 2 weeks (90 days tops)?

I think lumberyard is a big win for CIG, AWS integration with minimal dev time cost?

 

[Sabrewings]

I think lumberyard is a big win for CIG, AWS integration with minimal dev time cost?

Shhh, you're not fitting the narrative. If they hadn't done this and had developed the web architecture themselves they would be crucified for development debt. Taking this choice means the project is failing and will shut down soon. Either way their choices deserve criticism.

Get it straight, Citizen.

 

[JSt0rm]

So all that development on starengine is thrown out and you guys tout it as a victory. Really amazing guys.

 

[SLU Aequitas]

So all that development on starengine is thrown out and you guys tout it as a victory. Really amazing guys.

No development thrown out, try again. Sabre already addressed that in his prior post.

Thank you, come again!

 

[SLU Aequitas]

Shhh, you're not fitting the narrative. If they hadn't done this and had developed the web architecture themselves they would be crucified for development debt. Taking this choice means the project is failing and will shut down soon. Either way their choices deserve criticism.

Get it straight, Shitizen.

Fixed that, amateur. And furthermore.

 

[JSt0rm]

truly a victory of epic proportions.

That quote is spin. spin. spin. They did a ton of work to 3.8 that cant be ported over to lumberjack. Yeah they saved the art assets but lol. This thing is too fun.

 

[JSt0rm]

I mean you guys were just talking about how cig rewrote most of cryengine and now its almost the same as 3.8 and lumberjack is almost 3.8 so its easy. You guys are navigating the issues in your minds in a weird way.

oh man:

lmaolmaolmao

 

[Skel]

It sounds more like they've jacked parts of lumberjack and added them to their stuff.. I do put the disclaimer that they might have just dropped stuff and ported stuff over, I honestly don't know.. but from what the dev said that Sabrewings posted it was more like they pulled features from both the base engine and lumberjack into their heavily modified engine. As a guy that see no point in rewriting what's been done already, I can't say I'm upset by it. If it turns out they did dump a lot of work just to fit it into lumberjack, then yeah, that's bullshit, but I haven't seen anything on that yet.

I am thrown a bit on why they needed Amazon devs though.. thought they had most of the devs from Crytek, you'd figure they'd be able to figure out what's what. Of course that's one of my peeves about this mess.. one hasn't a clue on what's in constant churn, and why they're so many devs working on this without the game finished to show for it.

 

[JSt0rm]

I thought the hold up this whole time was because they were working on the engine. Now they switched engines. Be clear they did switch engines. If they did what you say they would of said it that way.

5 years in cryengine. Engine switch. What other games have done this?

daikatana

duke nukem forever

hmmmm

 

[Skel]

I thought the hold up this whole time was because they were working on the engine. Now they switched engines. Be clear they did switch engines. If they did what you say they would of said it that way.

5 years in cryengine. Engine switch. What other games have done this?

daikatana

duke nukem forever

hmmmm

Please correct me if I'm wrong... but I gathered that Lumberjack was a fork of the cryengine, so same engine just more features.. it also sounded like they just pulled stuff from it and incorporated it into their starengine. I don't discount that it's odd that they'd spend the dev time doing it, but until I know what they pulled I couldn't say how wrong it was..

 

[Skel]

Also you should know by now if you say the words Duke and/or Nukem you're automatically a troll..

 

[SLU Aequitas]

Please correct me if I'm wrong... but I gathered that Lumberjack was a fork of the cryengine, so same engine just more features.. it also sounded like they just pulled stuff from it and incorporated it into their starengine. I don't discount that it's odd that they'd spend the dev time doing it, but until I know what they pulled I couldn't say how wrong it was..

The code that they pulled from lumberyard is from 3.7, which was the base of code for Star Engine (they've pulled in some 3.8 features).

It's right in the quote from the CIG dev. J needs to keep repeating his fud right now because progress in development threatens his deep investment in Derek's narrative.

And furthermore.

 

[JSt0rm]

so you are saying they are still using starengine? And they copy pasta crap from lumberyard into starengine? Thats what you read from the statements?

 

[JSt0rm]

It's right in the quote from the CIG dev. J needs to keep repeating his fud right now because progress in development threatens his deep investment in Derek's narrative.

^^^ you are projecting again.

 

[JSt0rm]

time for the shitizens to re-write history:

again.

 

[Skel]

The code that they pulled from lumberyard is from 3.7, which was the base of code for Star Engine (they've pulled in some 3.8 features).

It's right in the quote from the CIG dev. J needs to keep repeating his fud right now because progress in development threatens his deep investment in Derek's narrative.

And furthermore.

Have they ever said what they pulled from Lumberyard (lumberjack?) ? Seems that would go a long way into stopping people from thinking they've one a port. Also, is Lumberyard/jack a Amazon thing?