I am happy to announce we have just released Alpha 2.6 of Star Citizen to all backers!
With Alpha 2.6 you can now enjoy: Star Marine, featuring a host of new FPS features; big improvements to Arena Commander; further improvements to characters and their animations; new locations and missions to try; 47 flyable ships, including 8 new ships (Herald, Hoplite, Caterpillar, 85X, Wildfire, Renegade, Valiant and Comet)!
I hope you will spend many hours enjoying all the content we’ve put into this build and meeting new friends and enemies in our expanding universe! To find out more about what it took on the development side to get the patch ready for release make sure to check out the retrospective included in the final Alpha 2.6 schedule report.
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.
With that I would like encourage everyone to download and play Alpha 2.6. It is a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing you in the ‘verse!
RedEye9 wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 23:35:Agent-Zero wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 23:30:That's never going to happen. thinkSlick wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 22:50:
wait, so Amazon would buy SC, to gut the company and sell off the usable code... which is based on Amazon technology. ok?
SC is in no danger of being bought out, they have more than enough money to finish this project even if it takes another 3 years.
And IF Amazon did buy them out, they wouldn't release the project? They just want all of that sweet sweet buggy pre-alpha code for a game that will never exist?
think.
if amazon bought this, they would use the assets and salvage the rest to make their own game that actually works
read.
Agent-Zero wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 23:30:That's never going to happen. thinkSlick wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 22:50:
wait, so Amazon would buy SC, to gut the company and sell off the usable code... which is based on Amazon technology. ok?
SC is in no danger of being bought out, they have more than enough money to finish this project even if it takes another 3 years.
And IF Amazon did buy them out, they wouldn't release the project? They just want all of that sweet sweet buggy pre-alpha code for a game that will never exist?
think.
if amazon bought this, they would use the assets and salvage the rest to make their own game that actually works
read.
Slick wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 22:50:
wait, so Amazon would buy SC, to gut the company and sell off the usable code... which is based on Amazon technology. ok?
SC is in no danger of being bought out, they have more than enough money to finish this project even if it takes another 3 years.
And IF Amazon did buy them out, they wouldn't release the project? They just want all of that sweet sweet buggy pre-alpha code for a game that will never exist?
think.
Mordhaus wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 21:59:
Calling it now, just like Microsoft did with Freelancer, Amazon is going to end up buying (bailing out) SC from Roberts. It will be released
CJ_Parker wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 20:25:
Alrighty just played some Star Marine and here's some impressions:
- The game runs in DirectX 11 mode
- There are no detailed graphics options but only presets
- I played with 'very high' at 2560x1440 resolution
- My GPU is a GTX 1080 (1950MHz), 16GB RAM and a i7-4790K at default clocks
- My ping was ~130ms from EU (thus came across the typical lag and ghosting issues)
- The game ran at 50fps to 80fps on average most of the time
- It consumed ~4500 to nearly 5000MB of VRAM
- It does look quite pretty on very high, animations are still a mixed bag tho
- Sounds are broken (very muffled and it's obvious that there is no spatial/surround sound of any kind yet)
- It feels very much like a spit&glue alpha release
- Changing key bindings does not seem to work or they don't stick
- It is also very annoying that the default key bindings deviate from standard FPS bindings (e.g. 'TAB' does not bring up the scoreboard but the scoreboard is bound to 'F1') or scrolling the mousewheel did not switch to the next weapon for me
- Some key bindings do not seem to work at all, e.g. 'Enter' for chat did nothing for me. I could not chat at all.
- There are no loadout descriptions yet so picking equipment is kind of pointless since you do not even know what the advantages or disadvantages of the (very sparse) available items are... in fact the whole loadout screen does not make any fucking sense at all at this point
- When a MP match ends you get dropped all the way back to the main menu instead of being able to just continue with the next round
Overall, this is quite disappointing for 4+ years of development and let's not forget that Star Marine was originally promised to be released in early 2015.
There are a myriad of similar FPS games out there which are in a much better state than this half-assed garbage. It offers nothing special so far and annoys the user with the absence of standard FPS features or even a fully customizable control scheme.
It does have potential to at least match other standard FPS games in a few patches. It's not a lost cause beyond hope. It'll get there but there is nothing special setting this apart from any other FPS on the market.
CJ_Parker wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 17:18:
Bwwwwaaaaaahhhhhahahahahahahahahahaaaahahahahaaaaaa...![]()
Oh man...
What a clusterfuck of monumental proportions. So, this is apparently their admission that -as predicted by many- they simply can't hack the netcode then isn't it?
It will be quite interesting to find out how this will affect development from here on out. The next predictable changes will most likely be downscaling and outright feature cuts due to AWS/Lumberyard limitations.
Oh well, my download just finished so gonna check out the latest 2.6 trainwreck by myself. It is apparently too much to handle for AWS to properly download the client in one go as the download stopped about 50MB short of completion and only finished on resuming so I'm not exactly hopeful to be entertained much. Shit's buggy as fuck at the launcher stage already (which is business as usual).
I'm also not impressed that the graphics options still boil down to 'low', 'medium', 'high', 'very high' etc. without any more refined options to turn certain features on or off. Come on. After 4+ years there should be at least a rudimentary menu for more detailed graphics options.
The whole package what we have here is a sad joke for 4+ years of development but that's what happens when approximately 3 years were wasted on making pretty JPEGs for sales and "cool" trailers'n'demos for embarrassing (live) shows and conventions in order to keep the money train rolling. The even sadder part is that idiots actually keep supporting this shit "development model" (LOL).
They changed some code which allows them to integrate Amazon's web services and netcode into the already heavily modified CE that they were using, even Roberts said that this did not really cost them anything and was very easy, which means that it's a mostly superficial update so that they can get updates from Amazon's branch of CryEngine since it's more fitting for SC.
Parallax Abstraction wrote on Dec 24, 2016, 14:05:
Someone else already pointed it out but they're not really switching engines DNF style. Lumberyard is a fork of CryEngine and is more or less the same thing. They're likely making that switch because Crytek is all but dead at this point. The reason Crytek didn't go under the last time they had money problems is because Amazon paid them $75M to basically buy CryEngine outright, everything except the actual copyrights. That's why CryEngine is actually free now, except for premium support, because Amazon made Lumberyard free.
The reason CIG is switching to this is likely because Crytek is all but dead now. They just closed all but 2 of their studios, after months of payroll issues. Crytek took the money Amazon gave them and blew it making VR games. VR games that no one bought because so few people have bought headsets that it's almost impossible to make money on VR games unless a headset maker bankrolls it for you.
I have little faith in Star Citizen but all this took me 5 minutes to figure out. Of course, proper research is too much to ask of the gaming press these days, especially when it's easy to generate clicks with a controversial headline. Bottom line though is that CIG isn't really switching engines, they're just switching to the Amazon version of it because Crytek will probably be bankrupt within a few months.