Oh man Lumberyard was discontinued? Who saw that coming, lol (I think everyone).
That Lumberyard switch was such a joke by the way. They never actually switched to new versions of the engine, which Lumberyard developed off from (being itself a fork of CryEngine). They remained exactly where they were, in their own fork of old CryEngine (3 something iirc), doing their own hacks -- they had to, since CryEngine never supported expansive space levels, space flight, and the other things that Star Citizen aspired to (eventually) do.
So what did they actually do for the Lumberyard "switch"? They adopted the license, since Lumberyard included license for historic CryEngine releases.
That. was. it.
They went from full crytek support, like crytek engineers going to CIG office in germany to help, even those crytek engineers finding the seamless tech, to now CIG saying a couple of years ago they are ~10% legacy and ~90% StarEngine.
It didn't happen overnight to get to 90%.
From the hangar demo that had the ugly <USE> button straight out of the interaction system baked into cryengine, they had to change a LOT of things. Sure by 2015 they had work done because crytek was way too limited of an engine back then with . They had to rewrite the whole animation process to unify the camera rigs and animations to be the same for 1st person and 3rd person for example. This is a very complicated system in engines and changing it is equivalent to restarting development, whenever that happened circa 2013.
Imagine in 2016 not having support for engine anymore? It's not something you could plan around. You need to hire accordingly, R&D and debug. They poached crytek employees from germany, but its not the same workforce. For Lumberyard, the code foundation/license, that part is minor I'll give you that, maybe a couple of days worth of engineer time.
What the lumberyard/amazon situation didn't help in is that by that time, devs called the engine "Franken engine" and according to devs at the time it would break even uploading the new code to the cloud server. The license stuff was the easy part, the migration to amazon was "eh" because they had deviated from cryengine foundation. Not Amazon's fault of course, but its again, a roadblock.
Again, part of mismanagement at CIG, among many other mismanaged things in that era, is that they picked crytek. The engine was such a mismatch with what they wanted to do, more hurdles than anything else. I guess they bought the cheapest license for the time when the funding was in the range of ~$7M in 2012, but had they seen how it would explode in funding, I think anyone but crytek would have been a better pick. Hell with the funding explosion of 2013, they might as well have considered their in-house engine straight away and hired staff accordingly.
By now they're probably well under 5% legacy code whenever their new GI solution is implemented and probably they aim for 0% by release, to remove any potential of crytek smelling money and go for a lawsuit.
Still, how many games have had that kind of turmoil for engines? Been following every news on GAF since 99, I can only think of Too human and epic's turmoil, which killed the studio.
I tossed them a £30 back in the day. I've had my monies worth already.
If they realise their vision for both games then great, if its a load of bollocks then whatever, ive got worse things to worry about.
Most people who are backers don't seem to give a shit.
I've lost more on other kickstarters.
Some released but might as well never have released, like Mighty No. 9
I backed Infinity Battlescape, also space game with seamless transition from space to ground, pretty much dead as number of players are abysmal. Peak of 227 players at launch, now max 8 players daily
I backed Elite Dangerous, and actually thought they had much better plans than CIG with limited scope, no feature creep and their plan to release soon. Well that release and all the ambition truncated of the concept arts and talks the devs had for the future of the game for a "release" ended up also its nail in the coffin. This game stagnated so much. Stupid moves like releasing to consoles and then pulling back, not releasing expansions on consoles (how to piss off fanbase 101). Their engine is so outdated that to satisfy the demands of what the community wants, they basically have to redo it all, which they can't anymore, studio bleeded its talent a while ago, CEO is out, they are -$25M in the hole and rising.
I had more fun in Star Citizen's jank and glitchy status in 2023-24 from my original $45 kickstarer than No man sky, Everspace 2, House of the dying sun, Starfield, combined. To each their own.
