RSI is happy to announce they have just released Alpha 2.6 of Star Citizen to all backers!
With Alpha 2.6 you can now enjoy: Star Marine, featuring a host of new FPS features; big improvements to Arena Commander; further improvements to characters and their animations; new locations and missions to try; 47 flyable ships, including 8 new ships (Herald, Hoplite, Caterpillar, 85X, Wildfire, Renegade, Valiant and Comet)!
There is one other big announcement they have made with the release of 2.6. They are now basing Star Citizen and their custom technology development on Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine. Since the beginning of the project, they’ve had to make a huge number of changes to the CryENGINE code and tech to enable them to deliver Star Citizen. While the original CryENGINE had great strengths in many areas like rendering and cinematics the needs of the game were well beyond what came ‘out of the box’. So they have, over time, changed significant parts of the engine for their technology, such that only a baseline of the original engine truly remains. In the future they will continue to make significant changes to AI, Animation and Network code and systems.
When Amazon announced Lumberyard back in February 2016, they were immediately interested. While based on the same baseline technology as Star Citizen, Lumberyard is specifically designed for online games, utilizing the power of Amazon’s AWS Cloud Services and their Twitch streaming platform. Amazon’s focus aligns perfectly to their own as they’ve been making significant engineering investments into next generation online networking and cloud based servers. Making the transition to Lumberyard and AWS has been very easy and has not delayed any of their work, as broadly, the technology switch was a ‘like-for-like’ change, which is now complete.
As an added benefit Amazon AWS data centers are spread around the world from North America to South America, Europe to China to Asia Pacific, which will allow them to better support the many backers across the globe as we scale up Star Citizen.
Finally, Amazon has made Lumberyard freely available for anyone building their own game. That means that technically-inclined members of the community can have a better view ‘under the hood’ of Star Citizen than ever before. It’s also a great path for anyone interested in game development professionally.
As they move forwards, they are confident you will see great benefits from our partnership. Amazon will bring new features to Lumberyard to assist in creating online persistent games, adding great support for their products like Twitch and of course investing heavily in engine research and development for years to come. They could not find a more stable and reliable engine partner than Amazon, so with this partnership they are sure that they have secured the future development and continuing technical innovation for Star Citizen.