Star Engine

Game engine that power Star Citizen
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

Object space shader damage
Allows 4 different types of damage to be permanently inflicted on ships, including cutting holes, and blended seamlessly into the base shading.
Real time environment-probe capture and compression
Avoids needing to bake probes in space and on planets.
Image based lens flares
Use entire source image to simulate 4 different physically based lens distortions per color channel on up to 20 individual elements
Physically based bloom
Wide exponential kernel based purely on light intensity.
Human eye exposure simulation
Capture histogram of light intensity from both screen and surroundings, isolate range of light we intend to focus on, simulate both pupil and photo-pigment reactions for quick and slow reactions.
Major improvements to planar lights
Far more physical basis now which results in major quality improvements.
Intelligent mesh-merging system
Repeatedly searches for best bang-for-buck mesh merge opportunity in a scene until we hit a memory limit.
Upgraded volumetric fog
E.g.: support for planar lights, light-boxes, enviroment-probe priority sorting.
Major upgrade to shadow pool system
All lights share one giant pool for better dynamic resolution scaling, shadows can be cached between frames for better performance.
Render target pooling
Shares memory between internal textures used in the renderer to vastly reduce VRAM usage.
Render to texture pipeline
Ability to render secondary viewports with full or limited feature set to then be used as textures in the primary scene, e.g.: video comms or holograms.
Tiled lighting upgrades
Use rasterization light culling for greater efficiency, particle support.
Density based LOD algorithm
LODs change based on polygon density to ensure consistent appearance, less artist intervention, and promote more optimal art assets with fewer sub-pixel polygons.
GGX normal map filtering
gloss adjusted in mip-chain to best fit of our GGX lighting model to give the same results as super sampled normals.
Camera relative rendering
Allows 64-bit world without incurring any rendering performance hit by maintaining 32-bit precision for rendering.
GPU Particle System
Built from the ground up for efficiency, distinct from Lumberyards and CryEngine's GPU particle systems.
Various improvements to transparency sorting
Generalized system, allow depth of field and motion blur to not effect nearby in-focus objects, order independent transparency for specific shaders such as hair.
Artist friendly profiler
Captures statistics per art-team, and per area of the level allowing accurate breakdowns and quick diagnosing of performance issues.
Physically based atmospheric scattering
Hierarchical object management
Efficient searches and culling, local coordinate frames for things like ships inside ships on planets which are rotating etc.[16]

Tech included in Star Citizen Alpha 3.0.0[17]

  • 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)[17]

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[18]
  • Vulkan API - 3D graphics and compute API [19]
  • Wwise - Sound Engine [20]
  • 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[21]
  • 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

  1. Gamers Nexus - Interview with Chris Roberts, summary
  2. Gamers Nexus - Interview with Sean Tracy, summary
  3. Erin Roberts: "Lumberyard is completely based on Cryengine", wccftech, Star Citizen Switches Engines: Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Here, Dec 24, 2016
  4. Star Citizen Newsletter - Alpha 2.6 with Star Marine!, December 23rd, 2016
  5. RSInotext.svg Clarification by Chris Roberts on the switch to Lumberyard
  6. 6.00 6.01 6.02 6.03 6.04 6.05 6.06 6.07 6.08 6.09 6.10 6.11 6.12 CitizenCon 2953: Shaping the ‘Verse - The Future of StarEngine, Star Citizen, YouTube, 24 oct. 2023
  7. CitizenCon 2953 interview with Brian Chambers, Hugo Lisoir, Twitch, 22 Oct 2023
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Monthly Report Oct 2014
  9. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named GN-20160924-CR_CitCon16
  10. 10.0 10.1 Monthly Report Sept 2014
  11. 11.0 11.1 Monthly Report Nov 2014
  12. 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 Monthly Report April 2015
  13. Monthly Report May 2015
  14. Subscriber's Town Hall with Austin Developers
  15. Monthly Report June 2015
  16. Ali Brown comments on Star Engine renderer on Spectrum. Spectrum
  17. 17.0 17.1 CitizenCon 2017 Graphics Engineering Panel "Beyond the Cutting Edge"
  18. Kythera by Moon Collider
  19. RSInotext.svg Ali Brown (Director of Graphics Engineering) comment about Vulkan
  20. Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg Wwise
  21. PlanetEd reference
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