In past statements about the move to 64-bit, it has been said that much of the CryEngine code base has to be modified in order to support the change. How will this affect being able to receive updates from CryTek to the engine, or will the changes be pushed back to CryTek?asked by Beer4TheBeerGod

So this is where the skills of a producer come in. If we don't know the answer, we go and find it. So we actually sought the answers from a few of our Crytek guys - Sean Tracey, Paul Reindell, and James Wright. I've got that answer for you guys here, so forgive me for reading from it, but I think you guys'll find it pretty informative.So Sean actually wanted to say, he actually thought it was a really good question, and an astute observation that changing many of the base implementations of data types like "Quad T", Matrix 4434, and even double precision integers, make integration significantly harder and time consuming, no doubt. So in some cases it can actually be automated which can help mitigate it, but the toughest times will be when and if Crytek introduces a new feature that specifically uses data types, and we have to update that feature completely. Sean also goes on, and James goes on, to say that our 64-bit change is actually a very targeted change of all world space positions and transforms. It is not a blanket and blatant 64-bit change, so while it does raise the difficulty of taking integration from Crytek, it is not impossible. In fact before we complete our first integration from our large-world branch to our main branch, every integration the large-world team took was like taking an integration from Crytek in many ways. So we have had a lot of practice at this point.So on the Crytek front, it's basically quite far away from the base engine at this point and once the 64-bit switch is done it will be even further. But this is not uncommon with games that start with an engine license as middleware. The point of most of this middleware is that you will end up customizing to your games needs, and let's just say that the technical needs for Star Citizen are beyond those of any game that's been done using this engine.

So that information comes from Paul Reindell, who's our lead engine programmer, Sean Tracey who's our CryEngine tech director, and also from James Wright who is also the guy who's actually heading up the 64-bit conversion for a lot of the world space transforms.