Couple of notes before we dig into this forum post by Chris Roberts. The post was not written by Chris Roberts or at least edited by an employee called: Zyloh-CIG. It reads like a standard marketing speech how everything is fine and no need to worry. However there are some interesting bits in there that we need to take a closer look at as they give us a hint at what actually happened in this "engine switch".
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).
This part is important as if this is indeed true, the base versions are exactly the same, then no work needed to be done other than making sure to include the Lumberyard branding (loading screen). It is indeed possible to do that in 2 days but this also implies that they did not take anything from Lumberyard at all.
This is further confirmed by one of the following paragraphs where Roberts clarifies what is going to happen moving forward.
Going forward we will utilise the features of Lumberyard that make sense for Star Citizen.
This clearly states that right now all they have done is a license deal with amazon to use Lumberyard so they can get access to AWS features.
If you ask a professional release engineer he will tell you that they have not yet switched engines at all and that the bulk of the work is still ahead of them when it comes to merging Lumberyard features with their heavily modified version of CryEngine3.8.5. Expect to hear a lot about that when the inevitable further delays start to roll in next year.
The unfortunate side effect of this licensing deal is that CIG can not sell their engine to a third party. This is a bit of a problem as the effort and cost of modifying a basic FPS engine into a 64bit precision open world sandbox MMO engine has to be written off and can not be used as a revenue stream to support the promised ongoing development of the MMO part of StarCitizen.
We made this choice as Amazon's and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilise 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).
This is pure marketing bull shit, the same thing Microsoft tried with the XBOX ONE when they announced the cloud will have all this power and possibilities. We are still cooking with water and we are still limited by the physical universe. Not even CIG will be able to change the fundamental laws of physics to run their dream game.
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!
Was there an ulterior motive? I don't know. It's however safe to assume that there was a reason to hide this change from backers as by CIG's own admission, the change was known for more than a year.
tl;dr: The engine has not changed and no Lumberyard features have been integrated into StarEngine yet. The bulk of the work is yet to come. Due to the Lumberyard licensing agreement CIG can not sell StarEngine to third parties. The engine change was known for over a year and backers were kept in the dark until the evening of the 23rd 2016. A nice Christmas present indeed.
Submitted January 01, 2017 at 10:45AM by RiSC1911 http://ift.tt/2iV67HF
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