News have surfaced online that Star Citizen is switching Game Engines, well that is true indeed and seems like a disaster. With up to 4 years in development, changing game engine can really delay the launch of the game by another year or two. As all the changes will be needed to be made in the new engine.

This is what Erin Roberts (Head of Foundry 42, the UK arm of CIG) had to say:

Thanks for getting in touch. As you’ve (correctly) surmised, any suggestions that the engine switch would have a major impact on our development couldn’t be further from reality. Lumberyard is completely based on Cryengine, yet with a lot of improvements. As a consequence, we do not have to change the fundamental core engine at all which is why this change has had absolutely no effect on our development of Star Citizen.

The advantage of Lumberyard is that we get great ongoing support on the cloud / networking side from Amazon as well as great tools support while continuing uninterrupted development on what we have built up over the last 4 years. As we’ve tried to explain many times before, we have pretty much rewritten 50% of what we licensed 4 years ago now, even in core systems from Cryengine. What is great is that everything we have reworked, also now seamlessly integrates into Lumberyard, and the engine switch has not required any extra engineering time. We are actually very lucky that this opportunity presented itself to work with a powerful and committed company like Amazon that is investing heavily in its tech. This collaboration will effectively allow us to do more for our community going forward without costing us really anything in terms of engineering time or otherwise, so it is a win-win situation and good news all around.