Tag Archive

Star Citizen Switches To Amazon Lumberyard Engine

Posted on December 27, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Star Citizen

Star Citizen the ambitious crowd sourced multi-genre spaceship simulator under development at Cloud Imperium Games has made the switch from Crytek’s CryEngine to the Amazon.com developed Lumberyard  engine.

Lumberyard is a freely distributed fork of CryEngine that provides developers with the graphical capabilities and networking code to produce everything from indie to AAA titles. In addition to the graphical prowess of that CryEngine is known for, Lumberyard also allows devs to use Twitch.TV and Amazon Web Services (AWS) within the game engine itself. It is no wonder that Cloud Imperium was able to make the engine switch over the last 12 months without alarming the community.

Speaking about the switch to Lumberyard, Cloud Imperium Games’ Chris Roberts said:

“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.”

News about Cloud Imperiums’ switch to Lumberyard comes amidst news that Crytek Corporate would cease all studio operations save for two – their headquarters in Frankfurt Germany and one satellite studio in Kiev, Ukraine. This leaves the fate of Crytek’s expansion studios in Turkey, Bulgaria, South Korea and China facing an uncertain fate.

Star Citizen‘s recent 2.6 Alpha Update which includes the brand new FPS deathmatch mode is actually running on Amazon Lumberyard, marking the first major release from Cloud Imperium to do so.

0

Star Citizen’s Single Player Campaign Won’t Be Released This Year

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Today at CitizenCon Cloud Imperium Games announced that Star Citizen’s single player campaign ‘Squadron 42’ has been delayed outside of this year.

Squadron 42 is the single player component of the ambitious space title which is currently under development at Foundry 42’s UK Studio. Featuring a high profile cast with actors like Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill as well as Liam Cunningham and a whole host of other performers. The story tells the tale of the United Empire of Earth Navy and will include first person shooter sections, large scale space battles and ship to ship combat.

The current state of Squadron 42 has been described by the developers as being in the ‘grey box’ phase of testing, meaning that things are still early-on. It was revealed that key features like pathfinding for enemy characters and a mission structure still have yet to be implemented. Foundry 42 is working on polishing one of the game’s many chapters before any more footage will revealed to the public.

Alongside the reveal of the delay several other pieces of Star Citizen including the developers roadmap for the persistent universe. Here are some of the highlights of upcoming patches:

  • 2.6 – Arena commander will be updated. Leader boards will be refactored and the game’s flight model will be updated.
  • 3.1 – Mining & Refining and Processing will be added, Several new ships will be rolled out including four newly announced ships.
  • 4.0  – Will add jump points allowing citizens to travel between multiple star systems, Science and Research will be added and new Exploration & Discovery improvements.

0

Star Citizen 2.0 Procedurally Generated Planet Landing Video Swoops In

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Star Citizen

It seems that not a week goes by without a a brand new video for Star Citizen. The latest short video that has our attention is a three minute segment that showcases the upcoming ability  seamlessly fly from the outer orbit of a planet all the way down to the surface. It should be noted that this feature has not yet been implemented into the version of Star Citizen 2.0 that is currently available to backers.  In fact this video came from a Live-Stream of the game according to comments on both the r/PCGaming sub reddit and the video’s comment section.

[youtube id=”X5XSiww9ZO4″]

I think EvilNight on Reddit said it best when describing what kind of a technical achievement this is:

“All the things that SC does were done before in other games.

The praiseworthy part is that SC ties together a half dozen different game engine styles into one seamless, no-loading-screen persistent universe. This is something that a hell of a lot of people (including veteran game developers) have always said couldn’t be done. It is a truly mind boggling technical challenge to pull off.

SC is proving them wrong, one step at a time. It’s only been in development 3 years and the alpha v2 is already showing they’ve nailed most of the hard stuff. The rest is just fine tuning, bug squashing, prettying things up, and content generation.”

Star Citizen  of course recently passed the $100 million mark in crowdfunding in the last few weeks and has made steady progress in deploying regular updates to backers. The developers over at Cloud Imperium Games have also released an official Dev video educating potential pilots about their procedural generation system. These new features are expected to be rolled out with the Star Citizen 2.1 update sometime soon.

[youtube id=”-yLTm8DZ8s4″]

0

Get the latest articles and news from BrokenJoysticks and a selection of excellent articles from other sources.

Simply fill out the form below and you’ll be on your way to getting our upcoming newsletter.