The reason Star Citizen will take forever to make

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Pemalite said:

You don't need to rebuild an engine for any of that.
Plus the games engine supports voxel based global illumination, which is pretty good... If DXR/RTX Ray tracing is to be implemented it will likely be used to replace screen space reflections or enhance shadowing.

8K support already exists, people have been downsampling the game from 8k for ages.

HDR support is also in.

Once the next gen consoles are out and ray tracing becomes more standard on PC, Chris Roberts won't be able to resist to overhaul the whole rendering pipeline to get the most advanced lighting. You do need to rebuild the engine for that. He won't settle for his game looking like a last gen game.

He's probably not all that different from Kaz at PD. Too obsessed with the minute details, got to rebuild everything from scratch to get the correct Ferrari red in full HDR for 10K nits tvs that don't exist yet. He needs to redo the character models as well by now. Things are starting to look outdated.

No, you don't need to rebuild an engine for that. - Game engines tend to be fairly modular, it's not uncommon for engine developers to overhaul a singular aspect of a game engine... I.E. Physics whilst leaving the rest of the engine the same... Bethesda does it all the time.

But like I said... Lumberyard, the game engine that StarCitizen operates on already has support for voxel-based global illumination which is a form of Ray Tracing... And it has done so for years now. - Ray Tracing isn't a new thing... And just like everything else you listed, StarCitizen already supports it, it is literally the closest thing to a next-gen game today.