Amazon Lumberyard

Amazon Lumberyard is a cross-platform game engine developed by Amazon and based on CryEngine, used to develop Star Citizen.

It is the engine used to develop Star Citizen, and replaces CryEngine and it's heavily modified version StarEngine.

Since the beginning of the project, CIG had to make a huge number of changes to the CryEngine code and tech to enable CIG 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 CIG has changed significant parts of the engine for their technology over time, such that only a baseline of the original engine truly remains.

When Amazon announced Lumberyard in February 2016, CIG were immediately interested as it was based on CryEngine but 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 CIG's as they have 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 CIG work, as broadly, the technology switch was a ‘like-for-like’ change, which is now complete.

In addition Amazon AWS data centers are spread around the world from North America to South America, Europe to China to Asia Pacific, which will allow CIG to better support the many backers across the globe as CIG scales 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 the game than ever before. It's also a great path for anyone interested in game development professionally.