Star Engine

Game engine that power Star Citizen
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File:Star Engine Logo.png
Star Engine Logo

Star Engine is the name of Star Citizen's game engine since before moving to Amazon Lumberyard.[1] It was a heavily refactored version of CryEngine 3 from Crytek used since the first in-engine video released at the start of the Crowdfunding campaign. More specifically, the last update integrated into Star Citizen's code was patch 3.8.[2]

On 2016-12-23, CIG announced with the release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.6.0 its move to Amazon Lumberyard game-engine (which is also based on CryEngine 3.8)[3] in order to utilize the integrated Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloud-Computing features "to support next generation online gaming"[4][5] . It is not known which version of Lumberyard is currently integrated in Star Engine and how CIG will handle future iterations (as of November 2016, the current version of Lumberyard is Beta 1.6).

Star Engine aims among others to be seamless without any loading screens or invisible walls despite being massively mutliplayer.[6]

Engine development is still driven within the CIG studio structure with some of former Crytek employees supervising the project[citation needed].

Star Engine is not available for sale.[7]

Features

Here's a list of features added by CIG since CryEngine 3.8.

Notable Tech

Rendering

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Tech included in Star Citizen Alpha 3.0.0[16]

  • P4K System - improved data handling system
  • Planetary Rotation
  • Temporal Supersampling (TSAA) - previously rendered frames are used to improve the anti-aliasing results on the new frame
  • Improved Screen Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO)
  • New Filmic Tone Mapping Curve (ACES)
  • PBR Glass - Glass (e.g. cockpits) can be rendered with phyiscs-based distortions, cracks, reflections and chromatic effects

Planned features (as of October 2017)[16]

Short term

  • Terrain Occlusion & Shadowing
  • Gameplay Driven Material Shaders
  • "Space Fog" (Gas Clouds in e.g. asteroid fields)
  • Improved Hair
  • New Shield Effect
  • Depth of Field Improvements
  • Colour Processing Improvements
  • New Motion Blur Implementation
  • Support for Complex Shading Models

Mid/Long term goals

  • Object Container Streaming support on the low level/system side
  • Improved Planet Effects (shadows, clouds, etc.)
  • Improved Space Effects (stars, sun, rings, etc.)
  • Dynamic Global Illumination
  • Batching of physics-thread
  • Batching of render-thread
  • Vulcan backend support

Planned features (as of October 2023)

  • Cloud light shafts - 3D volumetric shadows from clouds as opposed to post effect[6]
  • Ground fog - follows the terrain, fully integrated into the atmosphere, reduces the scattered light[6]
  • New water - constantly in motion, reactive to wind and objects, be it fottprints in puddles, rivers, lakes, oceans or hot tubs[6]
  • Fully dynamic blood, sweat and tears[6]
  • Temporal Upscaling[6]
  • Virtual Terrain Texturing[6]
  • Improved Scattering System[6]
  • Ray Traced Global Ilumination[6]
  • Starcloth[6]
  • Starhair[6]
  • Maelstrom - physically based destruction system.

Tools & 3rd-Party Software

  • Kythera - AI middleware[17]
  • Vulkan API - 3D graphics and compute API [18]
  • Wwise - Sound Engine [19]
  • FMOD - (deprecated) Sound Engine [8]
  • DataForge [citation needed] - Data management, Ship & Weapons balancing[8]
  • StoryForge - Dialogue and Conversations system, built upon DataForge[11]
  • VERS 3D (formerly known as PlanetEd) - Editor for creating planets[20]
  • System Layout Tool - Star system layout and design[10]
  • Room Management System - (deprecated) System for players to manage their hangars; now changed and integrated in Item Port System[8]

Trivia

  • A typical Star Engine frame update has up to 64 hardware threads, 200 software threads, over 700 000 streamed-in entities on a server, millions of entities overall in the solar system, about 150 000 component updates.[6]
  • Any given frame has over 200 vehicles, thousands of actors, including new creatures, over 2 000 000 physical objects, over 100 000 objects generated per frame, many unique locations to explore in a gigantic seamless space.[6]

List of Videos on the Star Engine

See also

References