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.

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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.

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Check Out This Stunning 4K Star Citizen Short Film

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Star Citizen

Star Citizen is one of those games that I’ve kind of been keeping an eye on for some time. Despite not actually owning it, I’ll still find myself going to YouTube and watching footage from the latest PTU patches and additions as well as read the developer’s announcements simply because the game’s scope and aesthetic fascinate me.

Enter some absolutely drop dead gorgeous gameplay curtesy of YouTuber Xenthor Xi. While some of the scenes in this 8 minute 4K demonstration are rather mundane – watching Xenthor’s ship landing or it’s pilot eject into the emptiness of the void are not that impressive on their own but combine them with some clever editing and a smooth Jazz soundtrack and you’ve got something reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop.

I can’t wait to see what else the community comes up with!

[youtube id=”Rb4XE3c41Xg”]

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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″]

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Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is Live

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Star Citizen

Highly anticipated space sim reaches major development milestone; early playable version combines space combat, FPS and multi-crew ships

LOS ANGELES, December 11, 2015 —  Cloud Imperium Games™ (CIG), the company behind the hugely popular  Star Citizen™ space simulation game, announced today that the game’s  Alpha 2.0 version is now available for all backers to play. Last night we covered pretty extensively the new features and using reddit and the games own forums estimated that the release would be last night. turns out we were right.

“Alpha 2.0 is a major breakthrough for Stars Citizen,” said Roberts. “It represents the first true slice of gameplay that includes much of what Star Citizen will bring to our fans: thrilling space combat in a massive play area, first person battles and multi-crew ships where you and your friends can adventure together in a portion of the universe on the same ship. It’s all technology that has never been undertaken to this scale and depth before in our industry.”
Just a few of the exciting new features in Star Citizen 2.0:
·         EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) – drift out of your ship’s airlock and venture into the void of space and back
·         20+ random encounters – combat and exploration (lost wrecks and abandoned space stations)
·         Quantum travel – travel in ships through the vastness of space at 0.2 the speed of light
·         New flyable ships including the Constellation, the Retaliator and the Vanguard.
·         Large world tech – explore extremely large expanses of space seamlessly, without loading screens
·         Locations to explore:
o   One planet (Crusader)
o   Three moons
o   Three distinct space stations
o   One repair/restock station
o   Nine comm arrays
The game continues to surpass records for funding, and active players. RSI claims more than one million “citizens” and  there are more than 32-thousand fan-created organizations, the largest of which numbers more than 11-thousand people. Despite the money and power the company stays humble. “We are forever grateful for our backers and fans,” said Roberts. “They been there from the beginning when we launched Star Citizen’s funding campaign three years ago. And they’ve helped create the most passionate and loyal community in our industry. They are helping us every step along the way in creating the best damn space sim ever.”

take a look at the alpha 2.0 trailer here  it sure looks like a doozy.

 

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Star Citizen 2.0 Alpha User Interface Video Blasts-Off

Posted on November 7, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Star Citizen

A video has surfaced from the R/PCGaming sub-reddit that gives us a really in-depth look at the UI for one of the ships in the upcoming Star Citizen. I am really impressed by the level of interactivity that is available – you can check various statistics about your ship and everything is really well animated.  It looks like Star Citizen will be really immersive for fans of the space-flight genre.

I’ll be honest I don’t know what 5% of these statistics and flashy buttons in the video do but as my favorite Starcraft II unit says “What’s with all these blinky lights?”

Check it out in the embedded player below.

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3 new flight modes to be added in Star Citizen 2.0 Release

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Star Citizen

Star Citizen has been pretty controversial recently. Robertson Space Industries, the developer, has been accused of not delivering of having major staff issues, many backers requested updates on time tables and finances, and it even seemed some former employees corroborated these stories.  Well RSI hopes to put to bed all the malcontents with patch 2.0 for the alpha which brings major changes.  The change will add three new flight modes, Quantum travel, and move to a “third order motion control system,” what ever the heck that is.

Here’s what we know about the three modes: ships will now launch in the first flight mode precision mode. During this launch top speed is reduced and acceleration scaled back in exchange, the player gets  finer and easier maneuvering. An opposite mode will be called cruise: “Velocity at the expense of control,” as Cloud Imperium Games explained in yesterday’s update. The third mode, which is called SCM  is quite the same as the current area commander flight model, but now calculates maximum velocity dynamically as a function of force and mass in order to optimize each ship’s performance in a fight.

StarCitizenDev-2015-10-16-14-17-57-96

Additionally we will get Quantum Travel, which sounds like something out of bad scifi, but is similar to cruise mode, utilizing a quantum drive, and enabling long distance travel over short time periods. The limitations of the Quantum Drive mean that any ship equipped with one can achieve the same maximum velocity of 0.2c—that’s one-fifth the speed of light—but some will take longer to get there than others. In the blog post it says

 “At these speeds, tiny variations in angle will result in massively different flight paths, so this is where slower ships will have the chance to escape a faster ship accosting them,”Of course, traveling at these incredible speeds is quite dangerous, so the ship computer will automatically pull you out of Quantum Travel if the possibility of collision is detected or the ship has any downed shields.”

2.0 will also feature many bug changes, fixes, and the standard patch balancing and content addition you are used to seeing in a major patch release.

 

check out the blog here for full info and some nice videos of the new stuff in action.

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Star Citizen Exits Closed Alpha

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Star Citizen

Cloud Imperium Games announced today that their much hyped space game Star-Citizen has essentially exited its closed alpha access. The news comes in Chris Roberts’ most recent Letter From the Chairman update, in which he also announced that Star Citizen has surpassed one million backers.

“Anyone who has pledged for a Star Citizen Package can now play today without worrying they won’t have access to some portion of the ‘Verse in the future. No Star Marine pass, no Alpha 2.0 pass… no additional payment needed for any module in the works, pre-release,” Roberts wrote. “Going forward, should we need to put out some sort of limited release it will be done through the PTU test server. All backers will have access to any live release, the moment it publishes.” 2771431-9053075413-25493

Backers with Alpha access are also being given 10,000 UEC [United Earth Credits, Star Citizen’s in-game currency], with the UEC cap raised to accommodate the boost. Roberts went on to mention that players who have purchased an Arena Commander pass would get 5000 UEC, but that was later clarified by community manager Jared Huckaby in a a forum post where he said that instead it would but 5$ in in store credit for the games store.

Star Citizen has been in closed backed only alpha, for over a year, as modules are added and development continues, this new general release to all of its Kickstarter backers marks a major milestone in its development.

 

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