Star Engine

The unofficial name of Star Citizen's game engine is Star Engine. It is a heavily refactored version of the CryEngine from Crytek used since the first in-engine video released at the start of the Crowdfunding campaign. More specifically, the last update for the initially used CryEngine 3 integrated into Star Citizen's code was patch 3.8.

Now engine development is driven within the CIG studio structure with some of former Crytek employees supervising the project.

List of Features

 * Large World

(64bit world space coordinates) needed for the huge star system environments, theoretically scales up to millions of kilometers are possible


 * Zone System

More efficient and flexible way to be able to render, update and move thousends of objects within a Large World star system. The usual approach is dropped for "zone containers", which hold all objects and data needed for a certain area, e.g. within a system a planet could be a zone and a station orbiting the planet another.

Now, doing something like this, you could basically take the view frustum and essentially figure out what sort of containers would be visible [against an octree], then you deal with the objects. So you move the render objects around [in] an octree structure, and it's just sort of an efficient way to get to a pass and figure out what objects are in what area pretty quickly.


 * Local Physics Grids
 * Camera Relative 32 bit Rendering
 * Procedurally Generated Planets
 * PBR (Physically Based Rendering)
 * The Sun as a physical object (e.g. lighting is relative to a stationary Sun, while other engines primarily use a moving Sun; possibility of Binary Star Systems)
 * Subsumption AI
 * Unified First- & Third-Person animations
 * Unique Global Entity ID
 * Generic Instance Manager
 * Universe Simulator
 * Persistence (Player Info Server, Presence Server, HUB Server and Player Persistence)
 * Item Port System
 * StarNetwork
 * GOST (Game Object State) (reworked to newer system )
 * "Grabby Hands" - now integrated into the Cargo system, initial system for grabbing and moving objects (e.g. cargo) and initially set to be released in the (later delayed) Astro Arena or SATABall FPS game mode
 * Multi-LayerBlend - character shader tech
 * iPredictor (movement prediction) system

Tools & 3rd-Party Software

 * Kythera - AI middleware
 * Wwise - Sound Engine
 * FMOD - (deprecated) Sound Engine
 * DataForge - Data management, Ship & Weapons balancing
 * StoryForge - Dialogue and Conversations system, built upon DataForge
 * PlanetEd - Editor for creating planets
 * System Layout Tool - Star system layout and design
 * Room Management System - (deprecated) System for players to manage their hangars; now changed and integrated in Item Port System

List of Videos on the Star Engine
Gamers Nexus - Video Interview with Chris Roberts

Gamers Nexus - Video Interview with Sean Tracy

Gamers Nexus - CitizenCon 2016 PlanetEd tool

Squadron 42 Trailer