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Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

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Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#41
post #2

CryEngine is amazing technology and CryTek is a great company. I believe there must be merit to this. Star Citizen is also a very cool project and so I hope they work things out together. I want both companies to be very successful.

The engine used to certainly be impressive. The company, though, had quite a bit of trouble paying their employees in the last year or two: https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees... They're more of a struggling company. But hey, at least they deliver a product.

This lawsuit won't help them a bit, though. They're struggling because they gained a persistent reputation among gamers that games built with their engine are beautiful but unplayable on any normal hardware. Whenever I hear "CryEngine" I think of the "But will it run Crysis?" joke.

Maybe they should have rebranded it, but in any case they seem to have done something wrong about their business in comparison to, say, Unity.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#42
post #39
post #32

I never understood why CR choose CryEngine. Yes, it can Single Player games make look beautiful, but when it comes to Multiplayer, it never really could compete with Unreal Engine. Just look how much work RSI has to do, to get the netcode working - and so far, they still are limited to 24 players. In addition, the requirements of the CryEngine have always been high, the FPS drops and a lot of other performance proble…

IIUC they modified CryEngine to support a 64 bit coordinate system, and part of the reason this was possible was because they hired ex-Crytek devs to do it. Doing the same conversion in Unreal might not be feasible. I believe this is needed for the 'space scale' kind of stuff they're doing. So as far as why they chose CR, it might have been because they had access to devs that they didn't have in the case of UE3/UE4.…

I haven't used the CryEngine but often times if you think you "need" a higher bit coordinate system (don't you mean 128-bit? ala long double? Doubles are already 64-bits and 80-bits internally.) you may be thinking of the problem in the wrong way.

There's no reason you can't (in most games) have a segregated coordinate system. For example, where each star is the center, the (0,0,0) point. And when you warp from one star system to another, the new star is the new (0,0,0) point.

Floats are great for huge distances, and tiny distances. They are horrific at BOTH at the same time... like say... adding a tiny fractional velocity vector per frame to an object millions or billions of units away. (There is a minimum amount you can add to a float without rounding down to the same original number, and the minimum change gets bigger the bigger the number is.)

http://blog.reverberate.org/2014/09/what-every-computer-prog...

IIRC, KSP does the same thing and coordinates are to the nearest "planet of influence"--which has the affect of removing Lagrangian points for orbits but otherwise works great without needing custom math types which are much much slower than native types, and it doesn't require ripping out all of the assumptions that an entire engine (Unity in the case of KSP) runs on.

When I created my own 2-D KSP, I ended up encountering all of these issues first-hand, and simply adding more precision didn't help nearly as much as segregating my coordinate system when we're talking about "astronomical" scales.

So if they're actually using non-native types, or having to change the engine, then they better have damn good reasons to do it. You don't change something that fundamental unless you're insanely brash, or, you've got a very-carefully-thought-out hard requirement that cannot be worked around.

If they really "need" space ships to have huge precision at any point in the universe regardless of proximity to a star, I would rather create "false/invisble stars" (almost like a quadtree/octree tree) where ever they are needed. Like when a huge fleet is moving around in free space, it would have a coordinate system following the capital ship. And if two groups of capital ships are attacking, you merge the coordinate systems.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#44
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC they modified CryEngine to support a 64 bit coordinate system, and part of the reason this was possible was because they hired ex-Crytek devs to do it. Doing the same conversion in Unreal might not be feasible. I believe this is needed for the 'space scale' kind of stuff they're doing. So as far as why they chose CR, it might have been because they had access to devs that they didn't have in the case of UE3/UE4.…

I haven't used the CryEngine but often times if you think you "need" a higher bit coordinate system (don't you mean 128-bit? ala long double? Doubles are already 64-bits and 80-bits internally.) you may be thinking of the problem in the wrong way. There's no reason you can't (in most games) have a segregated coordinate system. For example, where each star is the center, the (0,0,0) point. And when you warp from one s…

No, he means 64-bit. Most games use 32-bit floats, (which pose far greater practical precision/range issues in many scenarios involving multiple scales and reasonable distances) and this is what most GPU hardware has focused on until relatively recently. Only newer, higher-end GPU hardware has native support for 64-bit double precision geometry with game-level performance. It's quite easy to run up against the limitations of single-precision floats. It's an issue where I work and we only deal with data at city-block scale, and far worse if you have to work at solar system scale like Star citizen, hence the need to move to 64-bit doubles. You can work around the problems using multiple reference frames and conversions, but it's a pita. I'm not sure if Star Citizen has gone down the route of a full 64-bit pipeline (limiting it's target audience GPUs) or if it's a hybrid system. I'm guessing that it will need a fairly high spec GPU to run anyway.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#45

Tldr: Crytek allows Amazon to create a cheap fork of CryEngine, then sues CryEngine users that switch to it.

The strongest claim is that the original agreement was positioning SC as a showcase ad vehicle for cryengine, but, with CIG moving to the lumberyard fork, this is clearly not happening. Basically SC was married to cryengine until death do us apart, but now crytek is lying sick in deathbed and CIG have run off with their sister (because, despite all metaphors, CIG are still a company, not a spouse) instead of sitting at their bedside, holding hands as long as it takes.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#46

Well that's a nail in the coffin of Cryengine. Who would want to deal with lawsuits just for using a (kind of) free engine, when we have Unity, Unreal, Lumberyard, StingRay, Source, Godot, Phyre, Blender?

You can scratch Stingray from the list unfortunately:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/stingray/learn-explor...

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#47

Well that's a nail in the coffin of Cryengine. Who would want to deal with lawsuits just for using a (kind of) free engine, when we have Unity, Unreal, Lumberyard, StingRay, Source, Godot, Phyre, Blender?

Source is pretty expensive due to the mandatory Havok fee.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#48

>22. On December 16, 2015, Defendants announced that "Squadron 42," a single-player video game involving space combat, would be sold separately from Star Citizen. >25. On February 14, 2016, Defendants moved forward with their plan for Squadron 42 notwithstanding their failure to obtain a license and began offering the video game for separate purchase. As a result, Defendants are intentionally and willfully using CryE…

What I'm confused about is this. I thought Star Citizen moved to Amazon Lumberyard, which I believe is a fork of CryEngine. What confidential information could they have that Lumberyard hasn't already put into the open?

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#49
post #48

>22. On December 16, 2015, Defendants announced that "Squadron 42," a single-player video game involving space combat, would be sold separately from Star Citizen. >25. On February 14, 2016, Defendants moved forward with their plan for Squadron 42 notwithstanding their failure to obtain a license and began offering the video game for separate purchase. As a result, Defendants are intentionally and willfully using CryE…

What I'm confused about is this. I thought Star Citizen moved to Amazon Lumberyard, which I believe is a fork of CryEngine. What confidential information could they have that Lumberyard hasn't already put into the open?

> 36. Section 2.1.2 of the GLA contained a critical promise from Defendants that they would not develop the Star Citizen video game using any other video game engines.

Re: Crytek sues Star Citizen devs for copyright infringement, breach of contract

#50

This will now make a lot of gamedevs stop and pause when considering Crytek goods, so Crytek must be really desperate to resort to this sort of PR-hostile measures.

How is that? Crytek aren't suing without reason. According to the complaint they lost money and tech from a breach of contract. It's a perfectly reasonable reason to sue.
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