I guess Amazon just started to understand they have no clue about how gamedev industry works. They invested heavily in this, but nobody wanted their proprietary tech with cloud lock-in.

Now they changed strategy to compete with Epic's Unreal by making the engine actually royality-free and open source. It's very logical step that to compete with source-available product you need one under proper open source license with patents grant.

There are countless free game engines, now.

As a long time industry veteran: the important portion is how the asset pipeline works and whether I can port existing assets or acquire new ones.

Assets are all that matters.

Countless free as in free beer ones, but very few are under real open source license. And of open source ones very few are production-ready.

For once there is chance that Amazon is big enough to make porting to consoles less of a pain in the ass.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it a complete rewrite. The renderer (called Atom) is completely new, but many other things stayed the same. Our Lumberyard Gem required some work to port over, but that was mostly replacing old CryEngine stuff with the equivalent in the Lumberyard/O3DE API.

> renderer (called Atom)

Dumb.

From https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/

> The core engine modules and any add-ons or plugins are collectively known as “Gems”

So, so dumb.

Browsing through the code, there's a pretty sizeable chunk of old CryEngine stuff (CryCommon and CrySystem), it's in a directory called "Legacy", but I guess that doesn't mean that it isn't needed anymore.

Isn’t StarCitizen using a special version of CryEngine?

In the beginning yes, and a little while ago they switched to Lumberyard, maybe they'll switch to O3DE next, who knows :)

Well we have time! With a bit of luck we have real spaceships by the time it is done ;)

I wouldn't be surprised...