Cloud Imperium Games announced today the company is using the Amazon Lumberyard game engine to create its ground-breaking space sim games, Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Both games are currently in development and are backed by a record-breaking $139 million crowd funded effort.

Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA, cross-platform, 3D game engine that empowers game developers to create the highest-quality experiences, connect their games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch.

Chris Roberts, CIG’s CEO and creative director, said:

“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 just released 2.6 Alpha update for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.”

Dan Winters, head of business development for Amazon Games, added:

“Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are incredibly ambitious projects which are only possible with great engine technology paired with the transformative power of the cloud. We love how CIG’s bold vision has already inspired a massive community, and we’re thrilled to see what they create with Lumberyard, AWS, and the Twitch community. We’re excited that they’ve chosen Lumberyard and AWS to provide the performance and scalability they need to bring their games to a massive audience.”

Roberts concluded:

“We are delighted to be working with a partner with the strength, vision, and resources of Amazon Web Services. We are looking forward to developing our relationship with AWS and the Lumberyard community in the future.”

Star Citizen was previously powered by Crytek’s CRYENGINE. For what is worth, Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine is based on CRYENGINE. According to its official description, Lumberyard is made up of proven technology from CryEngine, AWS, Twitch, and Double Helix.

“Lumberyard is made up of proven technology from CryEngine, AWS, Twitch, and Double Helix. We’ve hired some of the best game technologists in the world, who have already made over 996 additions, fixes, and improvements to Lumberyard. For example, we’ve integrated a brand new networking layer, GridMate, so your engineers can more easily build low-latency multiplayer games with large numbers of players. We’ve introduced Cloud Canvas, which enables your engineers and technical designers with little to no backend experience to build live online game features, such as community news feeds, sharing scores, and server-side combat resolution, in minutes using Lumberyard’s visual scripting system.

We’ve also integrated Lumberyard with Amazon GameLift, so you can deploy, scale, and operate session-based multiplayer games. We’ve built a new component entity system so that you can easily populate and define the behaviors of the game world by creating entities and defining their behavior by adding components using drag-and-drop workflows in the Lumberyard Editor, and added a new code generation system to allow you to annotate your C++ code and generate the code you need. We’ve advanced the engine to include support for mobile devices, including support for Metal.

We’ve created a new launcher and project configurator so your team can get set up without engineering help.

We’ve also created new workflows so your artists can iterate faster and create higher-quality content, including a new particle effects editor, new FBX mesh importer, 2D/UI editor, and cross-platform asset pipeline.”