Cloud Imperium Games has announced that its long-awaited space simulator, Star Citizen, has just undergone a major change: The game now runs off Amazon.com Inc.’s Lumberyard game engine.

A game engine is a software framework that gives developers all of the tools they need to create a game, from graphics rendering to networking to artificial intelligence and more. Cloud Imperium originally created Star Citizen using its own fork of CryEngine, which is probably best known as the engine used in the Crysis series.

Normally, changing game engines midway through development would be a monumental task that could end up scrapping years of work. But because Lumberyard is actually a fork of the same build of CryEngine that Star Citizen had been using, the transition was relatively smooth.

“We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon,” Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts explained on the game’s forum. “Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team).”

While Lumberyard shares many of the same under-the-hood features as CryEngine, Roberts highlighted Lumberyard’s built-in Amazon Web Services cloud computing support as one of its major advantages, particularly for a game with the extreme network requirements of Star Citizen.

“Looking at Crytek’s roadmap and Amazon’s we determined that Amazon was investing in the areas we were most interested in,” Roberts said. “They are a massive company that is making serious investments into Lumberyard and AWS to support next generation online gaming. Crytek doesn’t have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are. Because of this combined with the fact we weren’t taking new builds of CryEngine we decided that Amazon would be the best partner going forward for the future of Star Citizen.”

Roberts explained that Cloud Imperium had actually already been working with Amazon for over a year, but the studio made an agreement with Amazon not to announce the partnership until it released the first game build that used Lumberyard and AWS.

Image courtesy of Cloud Imperium Games