Star Citizen, one of the few games that has made a fairly good case for Crytek’s beastly CryEngine, is now doing the same with Amazon’s Lumberyard instead. This engine switch took place with the release of update 2.6 just a few days back, and while the patch notes make no mention of this change of engines, a big new splash screen logo at the boot up of the game pretty much gave it away. Cloud Imperium Games’ CEO and creative director Chris Roberts confirmed the news in a press release:
We’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year, as we have been looking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. 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 upcoming 2.6 Alpha release for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.
If you’re a fellow Star Citizen, you’d probably be slightly more interested in the contents of the patch I am as a non Star Citizen. The new patch will finally be letting you play a bit of Star Marine (Star Marine being the game’s FPS module). Hold your own against other players in two maps and on two modes, fighting in traditional spaceship corridors or by heading out of the ship for a bit of zero gravity fights. Here’s what all that looks like:
And here’s a more general trailer showing off the patch’s new features:
