4 ms·

I never understood why CR choose CryEngine. Yes, it can Single Player games make look beautiful, but when it comes to Multiplayer, it never really could compete

I never understood why CR choose CryEngine. Yes, it can Single Player games make look beautiful, but when it comes to Multiplayer, it never really could compete with Unreal Engine. Just look how much work RSI has to do, to get the netcode working - and so far, they still are limited to 24 players. In addition, the requirements of the CryEngine have always been high, the FPS drops and a lot of other performance problems probably have to do a lot with that. I am not sure if the Unreal Engine would have allowed the detailed modeling of the ships, but to be honest, I can see no advantages of CryEngine compared to Unreal Engine. If you have any, please let me know, I've been racking my mind over this.

cma 9y ago
UE4 wasn't out when Star Citizen went into early pre-production. A lot of things changed in the licensing model betwen UE3 and UE4. If they wanted to hit their original launch window they probably would have had to have gone with UE3. And if they had still ended up slipping as bad as they now have they would be on something that was really outdated (though they probably would have announced a switch to UE4).
stonith 9y ago
IIUC they modified CryEngine to support a 64 bit coordinate system, and part of the reason this was possible was because they hired ex-Crytek devs to do it. Doing the same conversion in Unreal might not be feasible. I believe this is needed for the 'space scale' kind of stuff they're doing. So as far as why they chose CR, it might have been because they had access to devs that they didn't have in the case of UE3/UE4. As far as modelling goes it makes no difference - they're all made in 3dsmax/maya and then imported and both engines would be heavily optimised for that pipeline.
- katastic 9y ago
  I haven't used the CryEngine but often times if you think you "need" a higher bit coordinate system (don't you mean 128-bit? ala long double? Doubles are already 64-bits and 80-bits internally.) you may be thinking of the problem in the wrong way. There's no reason you can't (in most games) have a segregated coordinate system. For example, where each star is the center, the (0,0,0) point. And when you warp from one star system to another, the new star is the new (0,0,0) point. Floats are great for huge distances, and tiny distances. They are horrific at BOTH at the same time... like say... adding a tiny fractional velocity vector per frame to an object millions or billions of units away. (There is a minimum amount you can add to a float without rounding down to the same original number, and the minimum change gets bigger the bigger the number is.) http://blog.reverberate.org/2014/09/what-every-computer-programmer-should.html http://blog.reverberate.org/2014/09/what-every-computer-prog... IIRC, KSP does the same thing and coordinates are to the nearest "planet of influence"--which has the affect of removing Lagrangian points for orbits but otherwise works great without needing custom math types which are much much slower than native types, and it doesn't require ripping out all of the assumptions that an entire engine (Unity in the case of KSP) runs on. When I created my own 2-D KSP, I ended up encountering all of these issues first-hand, and simply adding more precision didn't help nearly as much as segregating my coordinate system when we're talking about "astronomical" scales. So if they're actually using non-native types, or having to change the engine, then they better have damn good reasons to do it. You don't change something that fundamental unless you're insanely brash, or, you've got a very-carefully-thought-out hard requirement that cannot be worked around. If they really "need" space ships to have huge precision at any point in the universe regardless of proximity to a star, I would rather create "false/invisble stars" (almost like a quadtree/octree tree) where ever they are needed. Like when a huge fleet is moving around in free space, it would have a coordinate system following the capital ship. And if two groups of capital ships are attacking, you merge the coordinate systems.
  - zero_iq 9y ago
    No, he means 64-bit. Most games use 32-bit floats, (which pose far greater practical precision/range issues in many scenarios involving multiple scales and reasonable distances) and this is what most GPU hardware has focused on until relatively recently. Only newer, higher-end GPU hardware has native support for 64-bit double precision geometry with game-level performance. It's quite easy to run up against the limitations of single-precision floats. It's an issue where I work and we only deal with data at city-block scale, and far worse if you have to work at solar system scale like Star citizen, hence the need to move to 64-bit doubles. You can work around the problems using multiple reference frames and conversions, but it's a pita. I'm not sure if Star Citizen has gone down the route of a full 64-bit pipeline (limiting it's target audience GPUs) or if it's a hybrid system. I'm guessing that it will need a fairly high spec GPU to run anyway.
    - shak77 9y ago
      Would it be the same as this? https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/4175 https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/4175
      - katastic 9y ago
        Sounds like it. Minecraft had a similar problem at far distances from the starting point when people were trying to walk as far as they could.
    - katastic 9y ago
      Are you sure you know what you're talking about? Are we talking about the same things here? Are you saying that Star Citizen is using 64-bit doubles for their GRAPHICS pipeline? That's pretty much insane for the exact reason you mention--single (and half) precision float units are in the GPU. Or are you saying "most games" use 32-bit floats for their PHYSICS calculations? Because that's also not a requirement and game dependent. Doubles are faster on many CPUs. There's a tradeoff for memory packing efficiency (using more cache and alignment issues), but floats are upgraded to doubles before being operated on on x86 and x64. So for physics: Doubles are faster, and, they've been hardware accelerated for decades (even when CPU's were "32-bit"). But you mention both physics and graphics and seem to be conflating the two. The graphics and physics pipelines don't have to have related at all. Drawing with 64-bit natives is almost unheard of and would be incredibly slow on a GPU. So what are we actually debating here?
vita17 9y ago
This website is awfully damning considering the game was supposed to be released over a year ago: https://starcitizentracker.github.io/ https://starcitizentracker.github.io/ As you can see, development has stalled and very little progress is being made. To answer your question: they chose a game engine to create shiny demos and carefully crafted videos. They have no intention of releasing a fully playable game. They just need to keep the hype going to keep selling virtual spaceships and virtual land.
- jochung 9y ago
  People seem eager to forget Chris Roberts pitched this exact game before, as Freelancer, and that was released years too late, with none of the promised "living universe" features, after being bought out and handed off to someone else. Fool me once... I've heard people say "the technology didn't exist back then!", which is true. But the technology doesn't exist today either. Games have gotten a lot better at drawing convincing pictures, but in terms of simulating worlds and generating content, we've mostly stood still. No Man's Sky already showed that, with its demo scene derived trickery. You can't entertain people with random seeds for very long. You need intent, storytelling and reactive, interacting systems.
  - qplex 9y ago
    Freelancer was a great game, I really enjoyed playing it. I'm not sure how much Chris Roberts had to do with the final product but I don't think Freelancer was a failure when it was released.
    - jochung 9y ago
      Sure but go read the original pitch for it on wikipedia. It sounds word for word like Star Citizen. If we get another Freelancer, the project will have failed once again... it'll be years overdue and missing 90% of its promised feature set. I dunno if you've played it recently btw, but it hasn't aged that well either. Ambition and wild ideas are fine, but you shouldn't make promises you can't deliver on.
  - 9y ago

cma 9y ago

UE4 wasn't out when Star Citizen went into early pre-production. A lot of things changed in the licensing model betwen UE3 and UE4. If they wanted to hit their original launch window they probably would have had to have gone with UE3. And if they had still ended up slipping as bad as they now have they would be on something that was really outdated (though they probably would have announced a switch to UE4).

stonith 9y ago

IIUC they modified CryEngine to support a 64 bit coordinate system, and part of the reason this was possible was because they hired ex-Crytek devs to do it. Doing the same conversion in Unreal might not be feasible. I believe this is needed for the 'space scale' kind of stuff they're doing. So as far as why they chose CR, it might have been because they had access to devs that they didn't have in the case of UE3/UE4. As far as modelling goes it makes no difference - they're all made in 3dsmax/maya and then imported and both engines would be heavily optimised for that pipeline.

katastic 9y ago
I haven't used the CryEngine but often times if you think you "need" a higher bit coordinate system (don't you mean 128-bit? ala long double? Doubles are already 64-bits and 80-bits internally.) you may be thinking of the problem in the wrong way. There's no reason you can't (in most games) have a segregated coordinate system. For example, where each star is the center, the (0,0,0) point. And when you warp from one star system to another, the new star is the new (0,0,0) point. Floats are great for huge distances, and tiny distances. They are horrific at BOTH at the same time... like say... adding a tiny fractional velocity vector per frame to an object millions or billions of units away. (There is a minimum amount you can add to a float without rounding down to the same original number, and the minimum change gets bigger the bigger the number is.) http://blog.reverberate.org/2014/09/what-every-computer-programmer-should.html http://blog.reverberate.org/2014/09/what-every-computer-prog... IIRC, KSP does the same thing and coordinates are to the nearest "planet of influence"--which has the affect of removing Lagrangian points for orbits but otherwise works great without needing custom math types which are much much slower than native types, and it doesn't require ripping out all of the assumptions that an entire engine (Unity in the case of KSP) runs on. When I created my own 2-D KSP, I ended up encountering all of these issues first-hand, and simply adding more precision didn't help nearly as much as segregating my coordinate system when we're talking about "astronomical" scales. So if they're actually using non-native types, or having to change the engine, then they better have damn good reasons to do it. You don't change something that fundamental unless you're insanely brash, or, you've got a very-carefully-thought-out hard requirement that cannot be worked around. If they really "need" space ships to have huge precision at any point in the universe regardless of proximity to a star, I would rather create "false/invisble stars" (almost like a quadtree/octree tree) where ever they are needed. Like when a huge fleet is moving around in free space, it would have a coordinate system following the capital ship. And if two groups of capital ships are attacking, you merge the coordinate systems.
- zero_iq 9y ago
  No, he means 64-bit. Most games use 32-bit floats, (which pose far greater practical precision/range issues in many scenarios involving multiple scales and reasonable distances) and this is what most GPU hardware has focused on until relatively recently. Only newer, higher-end GPU hardware has native support for 64-bit double precision geometry with game-level performance. It's quite easy to run up against the limitations of single-precision floats. It's an issue where I work and we only deal with data at city-block scale, and far worse if you have to work at solar system scale like Star citizen, hence the need to move to 64-bit doubles. You can work around the problems using multiple reference frames and conversions, but it's a pita. I'm not sure if Star Citizen has gone down the route of a full 64-bit pipeline (limiting it's target audience GPUs) or if it's a hybrid system. I'm guessing that it will need a fairly high spec GPU to run anyway.
  - shak77 9y ago
    Would it be the same as this? https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/4175 https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/4175
    - katastic 9y ago
      Sounds like it. Minecraft had a similar problem at far distances from the starting point when people were trying to walk as far as they could.
  - katastic 9y ago
    Are you sure you know what you're talking about? Are we talking about the same things here? Are you saying that Star Citizen is using 64-bit doubles for their GRAPHICS pipeline? That's pretty much insane for the exact reason you mention--single (and half) precision float units are in the GPU. Or are you saying "most games" use 32-bit floats for their PHYSICS calculations? Because that's also not a requirement and game dependent. Doubles are faster on many CPUs. There's a tradeoff for memory packing efficiency (using more cache and alignment issues), but floats are upgraded to doubles before being operated on on x86 and x64. So for physics: Doubles are faster, and, they've been hardware accelerated for decades (even when CPU's were "32-bit"). But you mention both physics and graphics and seem to be conflating the two. The graphics and physics pipelines don't have to have related at all. Drawing with 64-bit natives is almost unheard of and would be incredibly slow on a GPU. So what are we actually debating here?

vita17 9y ago

This website is awfully damning considering the game was supposed to be released over a year ago: https://starcitizentracker.github.io/ https://starcitizentracker.github.io/ As you can see, development has stalled and very little progress is being made. To answer your question: they chose a game engine to create shiny demos and carefully crafted videos. They have no intention of releasing a fully playable game. They just need to keep the hype going to keep selling virtual spaceships and virtual land.

jochung 9y ago
People seem eager to forget Chris Roberts pitched this exact game before, as Freelancer, and that was released years too late, with none of the promised "living universe" features, after being bought out and handed off to someone else. Fool me once... I've heard people say "the technology didn't exist back then!", which is true. But the technology doesn't exist today either. Games have gotten a lot better at drawing convincing pictures, but in terms of simulating worlds and generating content, we've mostly stood still. No Man's Sky already showed that, with its demo scene derived trickery. You can't entertain people with random seeds for very long. You need intent, storytelling and reactive, interacting systems.
- qplex 9y ago
  Freelancer was a great game, I really enjoyed playing it. I'm not sure how much Chris Roberts had to do with the final product but I don't think Freelancer was a failure when it was released.
  - jochung 9y ago
    Sure but go read the original pitch for it on wikipedia. It sounds word for word like Star Citizen. If we get another Freelancer, the project will have failed once again... it'll be years overdue and missing 90% of its promised feature set. I dunno if you've played it recently btw, but it hasn't aged that well either. Ambition and wild ideas are fine, but you shouldn't make promises you can't deliver on.
- 9y ago