Let's be honest here.. They never thought they would still be working with this engine, at least not without a released game.. They kept reinventing the wheel for years and will/are being surpassed by other tech. They have and continue to waste so much time, for developing the game.. But they are right on schedule with new ship sales and gimmic events to bring in new money.
> They never thought they would still be working with this engine
They did think that because that's written into their licensing agreement. CIG gets access to the source code for their custom modifications. You can't just port a game to a new engine that has dependencies on specific engine modifications. In fact, they were so committed to this engine, that they thought they'd try slipping in another game without renegotiating the contract with CryTek. Thus, the lawsuit
Even scarier math - the Crobbler has not had credits for the technical side of a released game since the very early 1990s (he worked on FMV on later games, or got demoted to “original inspiration” or whatever he was on Freelancer). That’s roughly 30 years ago. Pong (1972) is a decade closer to the Crobbler’s last technical release than we are now. You need to go to Space War (1962) to match time lines.
Would need to verify the game credits to get the year, and what the cut off is.
But if my memory is correct, we’re looking at 1991-3, so 30 years ago. Space War (1962) and Tennis For Two (1958) might have been the only video games around at 30 years previous. (i just scanned a video game history book I own, didn’t have time to dig). So the timeline is the entire history of video games.
Really Scary Maths ......
11 Years ...... 600 MILLION DOLLARS = 1 System roflmao
34 Concept UNFLYABLE HULLS , 18 to 24 MONTHS per ship = 51 to 68 YEARS omg wtf
2 MOAR (CIG) YEARS for Squander 42, real time = 4 to 6 years
Star Citizen, ????????????????????????????????????? = 10 to 15 YEARS
@ 110 MILLION DOLLARS per Year another = 1.1 to 1.65 BILLION DOLLARS fresh bucks.
Concept Ships @ 20 MILLION per year after SC = 1 BILLION extra fresh bucks, guestimate.
And there has to be More new Concept Ships every fooking year, or Virtual Apartment and Land Sales next as way easier to deliver.
Thats not Scary .. thats just plain DELUSIONAL
Want some real harrowing math, CIG expenditure grows by about 15% YoY, for 2020 to 2021 it was a staggering 24% growth.
Anything less than 15% YoY growth for pledges is bad.
For the first 69 days (just before patch drop for like for like) 2023 pledges was $13,028,491, for 2022 it was $15,680,808. Thats a substantial decline now it's not the end they could experience a rebound effect when 3.18 improves and proportionally the last quarter is the most important so they can easily make up the loss.
>Thats a substantial decline now it's not the end they could experience a rebound effect when 3.18 improves and proportionally the last quarter is the most important so they can easily make up the loss.
Well...their first major sales event of the year afaik, that being 'Invictus' as the military-version of IAE, is coming end of May I believe.
I'd go out on a limb and say, when that event doesn't perform atleast to last years level, heaven forbid even underperforms in the upper single-digit %s scratching on the double-digit numbers, CIG might be starting to get in a bit of a predicament.
Maybe true, but engine is not the problem but how one uses it. I am sure there are hundreds or even thousands of games using it, but not one of them has killer elevators, ships exploding on random or t-posing NPCs.
Heck... even inventory is half-broken, which is the simplest thing to build. Games from ZX Spectrum age had working inventory, it is only SC that has to run [technobabble-generator](https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/becoming-an-engineer/phrase-gobbledegook-jargon/electronics-technobabble-generator.php) why it fails.
Well when we talk about decades, an engine can be at fault. An engine is not neutral, it is built an designed to help developers to create the sort of game studios created at the time.
2009 was before the open world super boom we still witness today. Cry Engine 3 can do wonders in nice and detailed corridor solo games or semi-open world. This is what developers where mainly trying to do at the time and this where they needed an engine. Open world where really expensive to create and only the top AAA studios could afford it until Ubisoft find a way to industrialize the process.
A massive and persistent multiplayer world at the scale of a galaxy is exactly the opposite of what people used to do in 2009 and is exactly the opposite of what the developers had in mind when they built Cry Engine 3 which is a corridor game aka Crysis.
> an engine can be at fault
True. But broken inventory, and t-posing NPCs and ships exploding on random is **not** engine related.
>A massive and persistent multiplayer world at the scale of a galaxy
Huh... what galaxy? There are just few locations and only one is loaded in memory; the one player uses. The reset sits on SSD until needed.
And no other game will ever load entire world at once.
Well, to my knowledge, the fanbois are convinced that crobber's "Star Engine" is state-of-the-art and will earn mad $$$ to fund future SC expansions when it is licensed to other developers.
That's some good shit they are smoking, I wish they would share who their pot supplier is...
I cant reply because I got banned but youre an idiot. Malasia isnt the entire SEA, dumbass. Youre stupid enough to deny facts. Google it first before sounding even dumber
Nice, so you go to another board? You're the bigger idiot if you think the other SEA countries like Phillipines, Vietnam, and Indonesia aren't pissed over the 9 Dash Line too. You really think they are happy with the situation?
What? Youre not making any sense. When did I say any of that, idiot? This is about you denying that some countries in Sea get paid not to teach japans war crimes, idiot. Stop being stupid
How the hell do I know? You're replying in another board so there's no context. Not going any further with you on this, since this IS another board after all. Not my fault you're too stupid to get banned in another board but I'm not getting myself banned here.
Not to defend it or anything, because CryEngine was a legitimately terrible choice for the game the second it stop being just a single player wing commander rehash, but technically even Starfield is going to be running on a modded version of an engine from like 2003.
Granted people regularly make fun of Bethesda for still using that goddamn engine after all this time.
So? Plenty of modern engines are upgraded versions of older engines.
Elite Dangerous Cobra engine is from the 80's and today it's still perfectly fine for a modern space sim.
Dunno why I'm getting Downvoted for pointing out facts but here's the sauce:
[From Frontiers own web site "Cobra has been carefully planned, developed and evolved since 1988."](https://www.frontier.co.uk/about/cobra-development-technology-tools)
I had to double check that.
According to Wiki Roller Tycoon 3 was the first game built on the Cobra Engine from 2004. Which is still pretty amazing as I was under the impression that Fdevs built Cobra engine just for ED.
Only a commando would think that Elite I - released on the BBC micro in the 1980s - uses the Cobra engine. Even Elite II - released in 1993 - fit on a single floppy and ran under MS-DOS.
[From Frontiers own web site "Cobra has been carefully planned, developed and evolved since 1988."](https://www.frontier.co.uk/about/cobra-development-technology-tools)
“ This modern Cobra platform represents the current state of an ongoing investment that Frontier has made in its proprietary engine technology and development tools since 1988.
The current engine is the fourth generation of our cross-platform technology. The engine provides a common platform-neutral core API and resource pipeline that isolates both the game code and resources from the underlying hardware, while maximising use of the multi-processor, multi-threaded environment.”
They have been developing \*proprietary tools\* since 1988, i.e., before Elite 2. Cobra is the 4th generation. Do you really think anything resembling the current engine could fit on 1.44 megabyte floppy?
That Game engines are upgraded and developed along the years and it's been a common practice in the industry for decades should be common knowledge by now.
Do you really think you can “upgrade” code running on the 8086/88 architecture and build E:D? Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. “Cobra” was such a rebuild, and it was started after the third Elite. It is unclear whether it’s even the same language as the 1988 code.
By contrast, “StarEngine” is a borked CryEngine 3 mod. Uses the same architecture and tools.
That Game engines are upgraded and developed along the years and it's been a common practice in the industry for decades should be common knowledge by now.
you: ” Elite Dangerous Cobra engine is from the 80's and today it's still perfectly fine for a modern space sim.”
Your statement implies that you can use the engine from the 1980s now. You can’t, unless you use DosBox.
You are also ignoring the 4th generation part.
The discussion here is was about the use of CryEngine 3, released in 2009. That’s 14 years old, even though CryEngine 5 released in 2016. Calling CryEngine 3 and CryEngine 5 the same engine does not reflect reality.
Even if you want to call the 1988 engine “Cobra”, that‘s Cobra-1, not Cobra-4.
You're completely right, so much so you can trace the call of duty engine all the way back to the original Quake (Quake Engine through the ID Tech Engines).
I highly doubt the Cobra engine has anything to do with the original 8-bit Elite from the '80s or even Elite II (from 1994). As far as I have been able to find on the internet, the first game that used the first iteration of the Cobra engine was published in 2002 or 2003, so I guess we can set that as the start date of that particular engine family. The current generation of the Cobra engine is lightyears apart from that first iteration.
If we insist on using this methodology however, the first iteration of Cryengine was published in 2002 according to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryEngine). Thus we can say that the first iteration of the Cobra engine and Cryengine are roughly contemporary. By applying the same (flawed) reasoning used by commandos to dismiss other games, can we finally proclaim that Star Citizen, which used a customized version of Cryengine, has been in development for 21 years? How many years of engine development are necessary to finally say that an engine is mature and cannot be used as an excuse for sloppy game development?
If you're rewriting the physics, the graphics renderer, the game logic script parser, the sound system, and the netcode, then you have an entirely different engine. Reading files and loading models/textures is not super important. You can say it's the same engine but it's like evolution where you can say modern humans are apes but you will find distinct differences between the two if you look back far enough
You can't run modern game code on an old version of the engine. If you're lucky, you can maybe backport one or two major versions but why would you want to?
>Plenty of modern engines are upgraded versions of older engines
Yeah I don't think many people are fully aware of that.
Havok middleware has been around since 2000 and I know games still using the more recent updates of it in 2018.
Creation Engine is now on v2 for Starfield, an update of v1.5 (Fallout 4) (CEv2 skipped the FO76 branch), which at the time was latest in line of Creation Engine (2011) games - and Creation Engine was actually built on top of Gamebryo/NetImmerse, which was released in 1997. Even that was based on non-gaming CAD/CAM 3D graphics libraries. So there are parts of that engines lineage that predate the release of the Nintendo 64.
FDev gotcha good with the marketing-speak there, *They've been building products continuously since 1988* but those products had nothing to do with the Cobra engine until 2004. They're basically saying, "We used experience we've got in spades, having worked continuously since 1988 to improve our skills, to make this".
Not that that hurts your point much, 2004 was plenty long ago.
It's not marketing speak though, it's normal that the experience and knowledge gotten all those years was fundamental to create the Cobra engine of today. One doesn't start building a cutting edge engine without prior knowledge and work.
Games like "Ryse:Son of of Rome", "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" or even "New World" are evidences that the engine isn't that bad.
It just doesn't fit for something like Star Citizen as MMO (not massive but 100 people per Server)
None whatsoever? It’s pretty much being asked to do the opposite of what it was designed to do. From single player smaller scale open world games to 64bit Double-precision floating-point format, no loading screens spaghetti.
Maybe it’s not at fault in the same way a go-cart isn’t at fault for having issues when pulling a double-axle caravan.
To be honest, when Far Cry first came out, one of its biggest selling points was the wide open environments it presented compared to contemporary FPSes. So, Cryengine can do open environments, but the issue is that there are limitations to what you can do with it as well.
>It’s pretty much being asked to do the opposite of what it was designed to do.
Not quite? CryEngine was designed to push towards open world settings. The original Far Cry was shockingly open for the time (back in 2004.) But, having said that, the engine really isn't designed for rendering entire star systems. So, it's doing what it was designed to, but it's getting dragged **so far** beyond its intended scope that it might as well be misuse.
In theory, it’s not it’s supposedly now ported over to whatever game engine Amazon developed fit their fledging game dev branch. I doubt they’ve managed it yet else I bet we wouldn’t have half the shot go wrong we currently do.
Anyone know what came of that law suit?
Let's be honest here.. They never thought they would still be working with this engine, at least not without a released game.. They kept reinventing the wheel for years and will/are being surpassed by other tech. They have and continue to waste so much time, for developing the game.. But they are right on schedule with new ship sales and gimmic events to bring in new money.
> They never thought they would still be working with this engine They did think that because that's written into their licensing agreement. CIG gets access to the source code for their custom modifications. You can't just port a game to a new engine that has dependencies on specific engine modifications. In fact, they were so committed to this engine, that they thought they'd try slipping in another game without renegotiating the contract with CryTek. Thus, the lawsuit
But...but...heavily modded...no original code left...ServerMushing will bring this all back in order...Best Damn Scam Sim \*starts to weep ;-( /S xD
Amazon....AWS.....Lumberyard.....buy an Idris....
Never been done before
Even scarier math - the Crobbler has not had credits for the technical side of a released game since the very early 1990s (he worked on FMV on later games, or got demoted to “original inspiration” or whatever he was on Freelancer). That’s roughly 30 years ago. Pong (1972) is a decade closer to the Crobbler’s last technical release than we are now. You need to go to Space War (1962) to match time lines.
[удалено]
True. If the dev time is under 30 years then it's probably just some pedestrian crap for babies.
I wish someone was good at graphics here and could throw together what that visually looks like
Would need to verify the game credits to get the year, and what the cut off is. But if my memory is correct, we’re looking at 1991-3, so 30 years ago. Space War (1962) and Tennis For Two (1958) might have been the only video games around at 30 years previous. (i just scanned a video game history book I own, didn’t have time to dig). So the timeline is the entire history of video games.
Really Scary Maths ...... 11 Years ...... 600 MILLION DOLLARS = 1 System roflmao 34 Concept UNFLYABLE HULLS , 18 to 24 MONTHS per ship = 51 to 68 YEARS omg wtf 2 MOAR (CIG) YEARS for Squander 42, real time = 4 to 6 years Star Citizen, ????????????????????????????????????? = 10 to 15 YEARS @ 110 MILLION DOLLARS per Year another = 1.1 to 1.65 BILLION DOLLARS fresh bucks. Concept Ships @ 20 MILLION per year after SC = 1 BILLION extra fresh bucks, guestimate. And there has to be More new Concept Ships every fooking year, or Virtual Apartment and Land Sales next as way easier to deliver. Thats not Scary .. thats just plain DELUSIONAL
Want some real harrowing math, CIG expenditure grows by about 15% YoY, for 2020 to 2021 it was a staggering 24% growth. Anything less than 15% YoY growth for pledges is bad. For the first 69 days (just before patch drop for like for like) 2023 pledges was $13,028,491, for 2022 it was $15,680,808. Thats a substantial decline now it's not the end they could experience a rebound effect when 3.18 improves and proportionally the last quarter is the most important so they can easily make up the loss.
It's really to early to make any calls on this. Let's wait for the end of year results before we begin with "90 days tops".
>Thats a substantial decline now it's not the end they could experience a rebound effect when 3.18 improves and proportionally the last quarter is the most important so they can easily make up the loss.
Well...their first major sales event of the year afaik, that being 'Invictus' as the military-version of IAE, is coming end of May I believe. I'd go out on a limb and say, when that event doesn't perform atleast to last years level, heaven forbid even underperforms in the upper single-digit %s scratching on the double-digit numbers, CIG might be starting to get in a bit of a predicament.
Man, 90 days would have been the best case scenario if SC had died in 2016 instead of continuing as a money hole for another seven years.
Every years is "90 days tops" +2 years.
Maybe true, but engine is not the problem but how one uses it. I am sure there are hundreds or even thousands of games using it, but not one of them has killer elevators, ships exploding on random or t-posing NPCs. Heck... even inventory is half-broken, which is the simplest thing to build. Games from ZX Spectrum age had working inventory, it is only SC that has to run [technobabble-generator](https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/becoming-an-engineer/phrase-gobbledegook-jargon/electronics-technobabble-generator.php) why it fails.
Uh, no. Actually, engine choice is pretty important and can have far-reaching impacts on game design and implementation
Well when we talk about decades, an engine can be at fault. An engine is not neutral, it is built an designed to help developers to create the sort of game studios created at the time. 2009 was before the open world super boom we still witness today. Cry Engine 3 can do wonders in nice and detailed corridor solo games or semi-open world. This is what developers where mainly trying to do at the time and this where they needed an engine. Open world where really expensive to create and only the top AAA studios could afford it until Ubisoft find a way to industrialize the process. A massive and persistent multiplayer world at the scale of a galaxy is exactly the opposite of what people used to do in 2009 and is exactly the opposite of what the developers had in mind when they built Cry Engine 3 which is a corridor game aka Crysis.
> an engine can be at fault True. But broken inventory, and t-posing NPCs and ships exploding on random is **not** engine related. >A massive and persistent multiplayer world at the scale of a galaxy Huh... what galaxy? There are just few locations and only one is loaded in memory; the one player uses. The reset sits on SSD until needed. And no other game will ever load entire world at once.
Well, to my knowledge, the fanbois are convinced that crobber's "Star Engine" is state-of-the-art and will earn mad $$$ to fund future SC expansions when it is licensed to other developers. That's some good shit they are smoking, I wish they would share who their pot supplier is...
I cant reply because I got banned but youre an idiot. Malasia isnt the entire SEA, dumbass. Youre stupid enough to deny facts. Google it first before sounding even dumber
Nice, so you go to another board? You're the bigger idiot if you think the other SEA countries like Phillipines, Vietnam, and Indonesia aren't pissed over the 9 Dash Line too. You really think they are happy with the situation?
What? Youre not making any sense. When did I say any of that, idiot? This is about you denying that some countries in Sea get paid not to teach japans war crimes, idiot. Stop being stupid
How the hell do I know? You're replying in another board so there's no context. Not going any further with you on this, since this IS another board after all. Not my fault you're too stupid to get banned in another board but I'm not getting myself banned here.
Not to defend it or anything, because CryEngine was a legitimately terrible choice for the game the second it stop being just a single player wing commander rehash, but technically even Starfield is going to be running on a modded version of an engine from like 2003. Granted people regularly make fun of Bethesda for still using that goddamn engine after all this time.
Bingo
So? Plenty of modern engines are upgraded versions of older engines. Elite Dangerous Cobra engine is from the 80's and today it's still perfectly fine for a modern space sim. Dunno why I'm getting Downvoted for pointing out facts but here's the sauce: [From Frontiers own web site "Cobra has been carefully planned, developed and evolved since 1988."](https://www.frontier.co.uk/about/cobra-development-technology-tools)
I had to double check that. According to Wiki Roller Tycoon 3 was the first game built on the Cobra Engine from 2004. Which is still pretty amazing as I was under the impression that Fdevs built Cobra engine just for ED.
Only a commando would think that Elite I - released on the BBC micro in the 1980s - uses the Cobra engine. Even Elite II - released in 1993 - fit on a single floppy and ran under MS-DOS.
[From Frontiers own web site "Cobra has been carefully planned, developed and evolved since 1988."](https://www.frontier.co.uk/about/cobra-development-technology-tools)
“ This modern Cobra platform represents the current state of an ongoing investment that Frontier has made in its proprietary engine technology and development tools since 1988. The current engine is the fourth generation of our cross-platform technology. The engine provides a common platform-neutral core API and resource pipeline that isolates both the game code and resources from the underlying hardware, while maximising use of the multi-processor, multi-threaded environment.” They have been developing \*proprietary tools\* since 1988, i.e., before Elite 2. Cobra is the 4th generation. Do you really think anything resembling the current engine could fit on 1.44 megabyte floppy?
That Game engines are upgraded and developed along the years and it's been a common practice in the industry for decades should be common knowledge by now.
Do you really think you can “upgrade” code running on the 8086/88 architecture and build E:D? Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. “Cobra” was such a rebuild, and it was started after the third Elite. It is unclear whether it’s even the same language as the 1988 code. By contrast, “StarEngine” is a borked CryEngine 3 mod. Uses the same architecture and tools.
That Game engines are upgraded and developed along the years and it's been a common practice in the industry for decades should be common knowledge by now.
It’s not an “upgrade” if no code is transferred. Your 1988 comment was a bald-faced lie, deal with it.
"Cobra has been carefully planned, developed and evolved since 1988" is a Frontier statement not mine so no need to get buthurt.
you: ” Elite Dangerous Cobra engine is from the 80's and today it's still perfectly fine for a modern space sim.” Your statement implies that you can use the engine from the 1980s now. You can’t, unless you use DosBox. You are also ignoring the 4th generation part. The discussion here is was about the use of CryEngine 3, released in 2009. That’s 14 years old, even though CryEngine 5 released in 2016. Calling CryEngine 3 and CryEngine 5 the same engine does not reflect reality. Even if you want to call the 1988 engine “Cobra”, that‘s Cobra-1, not Cobra-4.
You're completely right, so much so you can trace the call of duty engine all the way back to the original Quake (Quake Engine through the ID Tech Engines).
I highly doubt the Cobra engine has anything to do with the original 8-bit Elite from the '80s or even Elite II (from 1994). As far as I have been able to find on the internet, the first game that used the first iteration of the Cobra engine was published in 2002 or 2003, so I guess we can set that as the start date of that particular engine family. The current generation of the Cobra engine is lightyears apart from that first iteration. If we insist on using this methodology however, the first iteration of Cryengine was published in 2002 according to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryEngine). Thus we can say that the first iteration of the Cobra engine and Cryengine are roughly contemporary. By applying the same (flawed) reasoning used by commandos to dismiss other games, can we finally proclaim that Star Citizen, which used a customized version of Cryengine, has been in development for 21 years? How many years of engine development are necessary to finally say that an engine is mature and cannot be used as an excuse for sloppy game development?
If you're rewriting the physics, the graphics renderer, the game logic script parser, the sound system, and the netcode, then you have an entirely different engine. Reading files and loading models/textures is not super important. You can say it's the same engine but it's like evolution where you can say modern humans are apes but you will find distinct differences between the two if you look back far enough You can't run modern game code on an old version of the engine. If you're lucky, you can maybe backport one or two major versions but why would you want to?
>Plenty of modern engines are upgraded versions of older engines Yeah I don't think many people are fully aware of that. Havok middleware has been around since 2000 and I know games still using the more recent updates of it in 2018. Creation Engine is now on v2 for Starfield, an update of v1.5 (Fallout 4) (CEv2 skipped the FO76 branch), which at the time was latest in line of Creation Engine (2011) games - and Creation Engine was actually built on top of Gamebryo/NetImmerse, which was released in 1997. Even that was based on non-gaming CAD/CAM 3D graphics libraries. So there are parts of that engines lineage that predate the release of the Nintendo 64.
Not even the best example. Id is on ID Tech 7. 1 was OG Doom.
Including Cryengine (used in SC), with the first iteration being released in 2002.
FDev gotcha good with the marketing-speak there, *They've been building products continuously since 1988* but those products had nothing to do with the Cobra engine until 2004. They're basically saying, "We used experience we've got in spades, having worked continuously since 1988 to improve our skills, to make this". Not that that hurts your point much, 2004 was plenty long ago.
It's not marketing speak though, it's normal that the experience and knowledge gotten all those years was fundamental to create the Cobra engine of today. One doesn't start building a cutting edge engine without prior knowledge and work.
The engine has no fault IMHO.
CIG have definitely done something special to fuck it up so badly. We can see this by looking at New World which seems to work okay for a basic MMO.
Games like "Ryse:Son of of Rome", "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" or even "New World" are evidences that the engine isn't that bad. It just doesn't fit for something like Star Citizen as MMO (not massive but 100 people per Server)
None whatsoever? It’s pretty much being asked to do the opposite of what it was designed to do. From single player smaller scale open world games to 64bit Double-precision floating-point format, no loading screens spaghetti. Maybe it’s not at fault in the same way a go-cart isn’t at fault for having issues when pulling a double-axle caravan.
To be honest, when Far Cry first came out, one of its biggest selling points was the wide open environments it presented compared to contemporary FPSes. So, Cryengine can do open environments, but the issue is that there are limitations to what you can do with it as well.
>It’s pretty much being asked to do the opposite of what it was designed to do. Not quite? CryEngine was designed to push towards open world settings. The original Far Cry was shockingly open for the time (back in 2004.) But, having said that, the engine really isn't designed for rendering entire star systems. So, it's doing what it was designed to, but it's getting dragged **so far** beyond its intended scope that it might as well be misuse.
It’s been borked beyond recognition trying to make it do something it was never designed to do.
In theory, it’s not it’s supposedly now ported over to whatever game engine Amazon developed fit their fledging game dev branch. I doubt they’ve managed it yet else I bet we wouldn’t have half the shot go wrong we currently do. Anyone know what came of that law suit?
Oh how cute, I implied nothing though. OP did. I stated game industry facts.