I'm not conflating. Your argument sounds like you don't have any working knowledge of how the engines actually work. "Old engine = bad visuals" is not an argument. Its an opinion, a wrong one..but one nonetheless. Architecture, data structures, rendering pipelines, those things are thousands of times more important than what year an engine fork was created. StarEngine isn't "too old" to do what it does. It's hyper-specialized for your comparison to be remotely valid. StarEngine is a near-complete rewrite optimized specifically for things UE5 can't do out of the box or probably without a gargantuan effort of many years Here is what Star Engine is specifically designed to do.. 64-bit world coordinates for planetary-level precision Continuous streaming of interiors, exteriors, planetary terrains Rendering of hi-density assets across kilometers, not meters Custom GI/atmospherics/volumetrics built from the ground up for massive scale Server-driven visibility & replication for a truly seamless shared world UE5 is a fantastic engine for most generic genre games, but it was not designed to handle a literal solar system, let alone 3 that we have now moving up to 5 at launch layered into a single seamless experience. That's why every UE5 demo looks so insane but exists within such a small pocket of the map. StarEngine is streaming entire planets, with cities, with ships on those planets, with players exploring all of it in the same address space. StarEngine has a different problem to solve than UE5. StarEngine isn't "sub-par" because it's old; it's been custom built for something no other engine could do can't do. It's like saying a deep sea submarine is inferior to a sports car because the car has flashier headlights. Both are great tools, but you're comparing them without comprehending what they're individually capable of. If engine age was all that mattered to visuals, UE5 would not have floating point precision problems: At ludicrous scale. When implementing world partitioning. When firing raytraced shadows across the horizon. When rendering real time volumetrics across an entire planet. StarEngine has none of those problems because those things are required for it to function. That's why you can fly across an entire planet and the graphics don't suddenly drop in fidelity inside a single valley. You're not wrong if you say UE5 is a great engine (most of the time). You're wrong because you can't objectively apply those standards to StarEngine without acknowledging the limitations you require it to work within. You say there are better games than Star Citizen; im sure there are but they are nothing like Star Citizen. The only game that is even remotely close to Star Citizen is Star Wars Galaxies. There has been nothing like either since.

You’re conflating the subject. Every engine uses occlusion culling. That means if you don’t look at it or the camera can’t see it, it’s not rendered. StarEngine is no different so the “scale” doesn’t matter as far as “pretty screenshots” go. The geo count is the same.

Cloud Imperium Games officially stopped integrating CryEngine updates into Star Citizen with Alpha Patch 3.8 in late 2019, Since 2016, the game has run on StarEngine, a heavily modified, proprietary version of the engine. It was originally forked from Amazon Lumberyard (which itself was based on CryEngine), but has since been rewritten with bespoke, next-generation features

"You guys realize Star Citizen has taken so long because it’s not built on some other company’s engine." It's certainly built on "some other company's engine". Heavily modified sure, but still an existing engine. And a LOT of the limitations and weirdness in the game is due to the original engine really not designed to do what CIG is doing. StarEngine is basically a fork of Lumberyard About the "$5000 ship not being for you", the problem here is that those buying into that concept will, as we have seen so many times now, set their own incorrect expectations and get really loud about it if CIG try and mak ethe ship which comes with their pledge ends up not being "soloable". CIG will compromise and design the game around that being possible. The biggest problem with CIG's business model being a storefront first is that is set limits to how they can develop the game. It sets boundaries they can't cross even when doing so would otherwise be goor for the game overall. They have painted themselves int a corner in a major way. CIG tend to overthink solutions and generally arrive at the worst possible idea. A prime example is the correct "claim pledged items" system, which is just utter trash and is probably due to the fact too many teams work alongside each other while never wondering how/whether what they come up with will impact other teams. They game is overloaded with half baked "for now" solutions and mechanics which only add to the massive mountain of technical debt which needs to be cleared before all these vertical slices and start coming together as a game. SC is not a "game" yet, it's a collection of systems and mechanics without any or at best very little glue to tie it all together. And frankly, this brings us back to the engine, which is being kept together with shoestrings and duct tape.

No, a full in-house engine example is REDengine, which powered Cyberpunk 2077. StarEngine started as a fork of CryEngine 3, then switched to Amazon Lumberyard (another fork of CryEngine heavily modified for the cloud, which is why Star Citizen runs mainly on AWS). CIG has hired former Crytek employees to maintain the engine. What's true is that they have moved forward CryEngine to an entirely new level, and that's remarkable and has its own merit, but you can't call a fork an original work. Fun anecdote: Once at my company, a coworker and I were jiggling when a demo person from a known VS Code fork said, "It's a fork made from scratch".

Technically, CIG's StarEngine is based on CryEngine but has been heavily modified. The actually hired several former CryTek engineers to help modify the engine. What they have been able to achieve has been truly astounding.

Not only cool gameplay, but new, bespoke systems that they have developed to enable the gameplay, creating StarEngine to do at scale planet generation, population and simulation including natural weather, flora and fauna. Dynamic server meshing. This is good for gaming's future.

#アストラルパーティー ＃AstralParty #StarEngine 人在大半夜坚持细化不睡觉就会开始后悔

You can watch the latest episode of SOL Citizens “Revisiting StarEngine” here! loom.ly/zQCnacE #Squadron42 #StarCitizen

This week the SOL Citizens review the progress of StarEngine since it's presentation at CitizenCon 2024 tomorrow at 8:00pm ET at Twitch.tv/solcitizens and YouTube.com/solcitizens #StarCitizen

This week the SOL Citizens review the progress of StarEngine since it's presentation at CitizenCon 2024 this Sunday, April 5th at 8:00pm ET at Twitch.tv/solcitizens and YouTube.com/solcitizens #StarCitizen

2026.03.21 ShangHai Aniversary StarEngine 선생님 고마워요~(@Yasal_170) Character:蓝海晴 #cos #cosplay #yasal

2026.03.21 ShangHai Aniversary StarEngine 다음에 또 봐요, 수고하셨습니다(@Yasal_170) Character:Blue Sea Clear #cos #cosplay #上海 #角色扮演

Yes. Starengine raw already looks amazing

Did you know that the game engine used by #StarCitizen and #Squadron42, known as #StarEngine, is a heavily modified version of #CryEngine ? 🎮 starcitizen.tools/CryEngine

Do not forget to mention the time developing StarEngine that runs this impressive looking game.

If you hold the camera perspective toggle and then press left alt you can enter the free roam camera mode and just experience the game like they did in their StarEngine Demo!

The Future of Gaming: StarEngine (4K) #StarCitizen rumble.com/DelnorinGames youtu.be/nWm_OhIKms8?si=pvrF… via @YouTube

UNBOXING, EKSA StarEngine BT, compatibles con todos los dispositivos, Gaming Headshets hasta 100h de uso con una sola carga... youtu.be/dtXXuVOTsaA?si=TDJo…

I feel like we're tech testing for CIG. So in the future Chris Roberts can sell StarEngine to a gaming developer. All that BS hype talk from last years CitCon and nothing achieved. We're sold ideas and dreams while testing the tech so the company can sell everything someday.