Star Citizen Plans To Go Vulkan-Only

[pal666]

Well they need rewrite their engine to get the right calls without screwing up their current work, then get their rendering pipeline ready again without screwing up what currently works.

they don't need to do any of that. cryengine already supports vulkan

[pal666]

fact that they are dropping dx11 as well is a surprise because most devs don't do this.

there are no reasons for keeping dx11. if you want xbox support, dx12 is better choice

[Shevchen]

they don't need to do any of that. cryengine already supports vulkan

Not the version CIG has. Their code is by any mean not vanilla anymore and all tech in the rendering is to a certain degree either custom made or entirely different from what CryEngine used. As of such, they have to write their own custom Vulkan implementation, which is in my opinion better on 2 reasons:

1. They don't just activate a button that enables the Vulkan-wrapper, leading to close to no performance gains at all (cause generic wrappers tend to not have any impact at all - they may be even slower)
2. The Devs working on it get knowledge by working, thus being able to squeeze out more performance AND being able to optimize bottlenecks, that can be found on other parts of the code (thus making the code base not only "ready" for Vulkan, but maybe even specifically optimized for it)

[pal666]

Not the version CIG has.

so the correct solution is to upgrade their version

[humbug]

they switched from cryengine to lumberyard (a fork) supported by amazon

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/364217/lumberyard-for-those-interested

Lumberyard and StarEngine are both forks from exactly the SAME build of CryEngine.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team). What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for like parts of the engine from CryEngine to Lumberyard. All of our bespoke work from 64 bit precision, new rendering and planet tech, Item / Entity 2.0, Local Physics Grids, Zone System, Object Containers and so on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen.

Going forward we will utilize the features of Lumberyard that make sense for Star Citizen. We made this choice as Amazon's and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilize the power of cloud computing to deliver a richer online experience than would be possible with an old fashioned single server architecture (which is what CryNetwork is).

Looking at Crytek's roadmap and Amazon's we determined that Amazon was investing in the areas we were most interested in. They are a massive company that is making serious investments into Lumberyard and AWS to support next generation online gaming. Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are. Because of this combined with the fact we weren't taking new builds of CryEngine we decided that Amazon would be the best partner going forward for the future of Star Citizen.

[Shevchen]

so the correct solution is to upgrade their version

They can't, as they are incompatible to each other for quite some time now. Cryteks version was used for a certain time (until 2-3 years ago I guess) as a cherry-picking box and CIG used some of the new features to update their own on. Features not being updated were the ones that were already replaced or heavily modified by their own engine-engineers. Both versions drifted apart - esp. after creating a whole set of new tools that the original Cry-Engine is simply not made for (which tools are now standard in their production pipeline), CIG dropped the new versions entirely (not even cherry picking) and went their own way for at least a year by now and did not look back. They did however adapted amazons lumberyard (which is also an alternative version of the Cry-Engine), while still maintaining all their custom code.

At this point, the StarEngine has only remnants of code left from the original CryEngine and I highly doubt, that the generalized Vulkan-wrapper Crytech wrote is even remotely capable of rendering the code SC has by now.

[DMJC]

I kicked in $1250 for Star Citizen, and am a Golden Ticket holder (signed up to the forums before the first reveal was announced) Chris Roberts makes the best space games out there IMHO (and that's purely a matter of my taste). I'm very excited to finally see solid news on the Linux port of Star Citizen starting to come together. It has been a bit frustrating seeing the game coming together with 0 news on the Linux version. Vulkan being used as the primary rendering system sets the game up to be far more easily supported on Linux. The multiplayer code is all Amazon cloud based and the audio/input systems should be very easy to replace with OpenAL/SDL.equivalents

[indepe]

Sounds awesome. Playing Star Citizen will be even more fun knowing it runs on Vulkan.

And curious how it will scale on higher core count CPUs with those optimizations.

[Delgarde]

While waiting this game to be released, there is free demo of Karball Space Program in Steam.

True, though the demo version of KSP is based on a very old version of the game, and even then it had about 1/10th the functionality of the full version. The game has changed massively since then... even more so when you look at the extensive modding community...

I have no clue what kind of skyrocket I need to build to get to the moon orbit at 357 000 km.

A reasonably big and clumsy one. From memory, the demo version of the game doesn't include docking ports, so you can't do things like refueling in orbit. It also doesn't include any of the larger engines or fuel tanks, so your craft is going to be composed of big clusters of small tanks and engines. Fortunately, the demo has a much cruder physics model, so you can get away with a lot of stuff that just isn't possible in newer versions (e.g. safely re-entering atmosphere at lunar-return velocity).

[Geopirate]

I'm most excited for this announcement for it's influence on other games and developers. This really started with Doom as a AAA title going with a Vulkan first mentality and as more games do it, others will follow suit. On the other side you have games like Tomb Raider and Mirror's Edge that are a disaster on Dx12. I like many on these forums care more about Linux than Windows gaming, but as Vulkan takes over more of the Windows gaming space, it will open up more opportunities for more ports.

I especially love that they are dropping Dx11 support, the sooner that dies, the better it will be for everyone.