I was hoping someone called me out on that, funny it ended up being exactly who I was expecting to. [big grin]
Listen carefully @ 6:20m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb5NZbWGh3Q
See you've learned something new about Star Citizen today Derek. [rolleyes]
First, thanks for pointing that out. Not that I have watched every single interview by every dev. Anyway, here's where we dive into the nitty gritty of this. I will try to keep it as accurate as I can - for the record - since your friends on /r/ds have now taken to also screen capping my comments here and creating a hissy fit over them on Reddit.
I already knew that they were using CryEngine3 as the basis for the game. In fact, I wrote an entire section in my
July 2015 blog specifically about that, and why the engine they chose simply
wasn't up to the task.
Here's the thing, when you use middleware engines, they are as-is. You rarely ever have to modify the source engine. In fact, back in the day, you would need a
very expensive source engine (e.g. ID Tech5, UE, CryEngine etc) to even do that. Why would you need a source engine license? Simple: if the engine isn't adequately suited for something that you need to support. And more often than not, it's usually better to build your own engine, than to try and modify a middleware engine, because depending on how far you want to take it, you're better off doing it from scratch if you already have the expertise to modify someone else's engine using their source code.
That's why, even today, anyone licensing engines like UE4, Unity etc, rarely have to mess with the "guts" of the engine. They use them as-is; and if you want extended features (e.g. network, UI, scene management), you can find plugins which augment (are built on top of) the underlying engine without you ever having to mess with the engine's source code. e.g. anyone wanting advanced networking/multiplayer in Unity5, will probably buy the Photon plugin. Similarly there are hundreds of plugins for it. So, more often than not, someone else has already done the "targeted" work for you. Want larger scenes? There's a plugin for that. Want a better scene editor? There's a plugin for that. Want better audio, networking, UI, matchmaking, shaders, progen terrain etc - you have so many options that you simply do NOT have to write ANY custom code for UE4 or Unity5, unless you want to, or have no choice.
Similarly, when we licensed Trinity (later bought and renamed to Havok Vision Engine), we didn't need anything in the source license as we had no intentions of modifying the source because we already knew that the engine (bare metal, with very little fluff and/or useless features) was capable of doing exactly what we wanted. In the implementation of other middleware to "overload/replace" the built-in HVE implementation (e.g. Triton for water bodies, Silverlining for sky, clouds, atmosphere etc, FMOD for audio, Iggy for UI etc) we made minimal changes to the underlying engine.
So, our revision of HVE, coupled with the augmentation of third-party middleware which worked better with the built-in HVE versions, became our "custom game engine". We didn't even make .01% mods to HVE because the engine was quite capable of supporting the game I was building. In fact, it was because I was able to find such a C/++ engine, that I halted development of yet another in-house game engine for this game; as I felt that we were reinventing the wheel. We lost a little over six months of dev work on that; and which I wrote-off as R&D. CryEngine was a non-starter due to scene sizes and other limitations; Unity was C#, UE4 wasn't out yet, and though I already had private access to it, I was advised (by Epic) use it for production work at the time, since it wasn't ready and too many things could change along the way.
In contrast - hence my alarmist warnings from last year - once it occurred to me that the new game scope CIG were trying to build could never be done on CryEngine3, I said so; right off the bat. I also stated that such a game needed a custom engine.
Then it came to light that they were in fact using CryEngine3 as the basis for such a custom engine. This despite the fact that once you embark on such an endeavor, the further you go, the more you realize that you could've just written your own engine from scratch to build the
exact game you wanted.
Which brings me to this exchange:
Agreed here, UE4 probably a worse choice. They needed to make their own engine, but it's too late for that now.
Considering that they stated they changed more than 50% of the engine Its accurate to say that they already did just that.
is more accurate to say that to do just that they have to change the remaining 50%.
You know that's false, right? Go ahead, do ask him to cite sources where they stated - anywhere - that they had changed more than 50% of CryEngine3
In this interview that you linked, Brian says specifically: "
over 50% modified from the base CryEngine". Note that would be CryEngine3. And (just as I said in my blog), they stopped taking updates from CryTek awhile back due to the fact that their code base had forked so far off, that it didn't make sense. Also they only have source license to CryEngine3. Which, btw, is why VR will never come to Star Citizen unless they go back in and bring up the now legacy (and broken) VR support they have in CryEngine3, up to the current standards. The game will never support VR anyway; so there is that. But I digress.
The reason that I went back and quoted (the forum trims multi-quotes) the entire comments (from you and Soliluna) in what you just now responded to with Brian's comment, was because
i) when you say
they already did just that, I stated that it's false. why? well because they did
not make their own engine
ii) when you say
they changed more than 50% of the engine, I asked for cited sources because to my knowledge, nobody knew just how much modification they had done to CryEngine3 in order to come up with StarEngine
Now we do. And it not only looks even more bad for them; but it also - again - proves me
right when I stated last year that the game they were building could
never be built with the engine they chose. Ask any tier 1 engineer, and they will tell you that no dev goes and modifies a source engine by
50% unless they are a) out of time to build a custom engine, or don't have the expertise to do so b) out of time to switch to another engine c) have game assets which have slaved them to the engine they're stuck with
So, from the start, they thought vision 1.0 of the game could be done with CryEngine3. They were right. Then Chris increased the scope; which then put vision 2.0 of the game outside the scope of CryEngine3. They kept going with the CryEngine2 mod, until at some point, they reached "zero barrier" and could no longer turn back (port to an adequate engine such as UE4 or even CryEngine5, or build a custom engine from scratch).
Now, according to Brian, in Sept 2016, they have modified CryEngine3 by about 50% in order to come up with a custom engine for the game Chris wants them to build. And it's still a mess.
The problem is that even if they get to 90% modification of CryEngine3, it still won't be possible for it to power the game that Chris wants because, not only will they never - ever - get to a 100% modification to make that happen, but that would also imply that they have completely
replaced CryEngine3 with whatever abomination that is Star Engine. With all their resources and money, they could have built a custom engine - from scratch - in under two years.
And they will still fail to build, let alone deliver the Star Citizen game promised. Since SQ42 doesn't have all the ganky nonsense that is in SC, they stand a good chance of delivering on that, as I've stated time and time again. Unfortunately, not only are a multitude of backers already entitled to
that game for free, but unless SQ42 knocks it out of the park, it's never going to earn the income required to keep buying them time to continue with Star Citizen.
In closing, I welcome folks to ponder this: They are using a heavily modified version of CryEngine3. CryTek are now on
CryEngine5 (free). And even
Amazon's Lumberyard is built on CryEngine5 (free). So ask yourself this, how is spending all this money and dev resources to modify a source engine by 50%, a good thing - under any circumstance? It's not. It's a waste of time and money. Which is precisely why they are coming up with all these tricks to keep raising money; even long after they quadrupled the money they were originally asking for.
This is the sort of thing that should make any reasonable and/or sensible backer, absolutely
mad.
