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News video games 27 December 2016, 12:32

author: luckie

Star Citizen gets a new engine and Space Marine FPS module with Alpha update 2.6

Some major changes have been made to Star Citizen over the last couple of days. With Alpha update 2.6 the game gained a new engine and an FPS module.

Star Citizen gets a new engine and Space Marine FPS module with Alpha update 2.6 - picture #1
Star Citizen is now powered by Lumberyard.

Over the weekend Star Citizen has switched from CryEngine to Lumberyard – Amazon’s in-house free set of game dev tools partly based on Crytek’s CryEngine (you can read more about this technology on the official website). This one is supposed to provide better support for the space sim’s online features and social components. The reasons behind this move were explained by Chris Roberts in this statement:

We’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year, as we have been looking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Lumberyard provides ground breaking technology features for online games, including deep back-end cloud integration on AWS and its social component with Twitch that enables us to easily and instantly connect to millions of global gamers. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard. In fact, we are excited to announce that our upcoming 2.6 Alpha release for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.

What’s probably even more interesting for Star Citizen fans is the newly added Star Marine FPS module brought in the Alpha update 2.6. It contains two multiplayer modes: Last Stand and Elimination, as well as two maps to fight on. The patch also expands space battles with a new dogfighting module, three ships, and balance tweaks. Watch the new trailer below to get the summary of the progress so far as well as a quick overview of the new content.