Roberts Space Industries has announced a somewhat bizarre new development for their long-running, crowd-funded space simulator Star Citizen.

The game will drop Crytek’s CryEngine (following the news that company isn’t doing too hot) in favor of Amazon’s Lumberyard engine. This means they’ve taken a considerable amount of time simply rebuilding the game in an entirely new engine – four years into development.

“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,” said Star Citizen creative lead and studio head Chris Roberts.

“Lumberyard provides groundbreaking technology features for online games. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard.”

It’s worth mentioning Lumberyard is based on the architecture of CryEngine, while also giving developers access to Amazon’s various Web Services and even build or host their games on Amazon’s servers. There’s also built-in support for livestreaming via Twitch, which Amazon also owns now.

Despite the aforementioned news that Crytek has shuttered five of their international studios, Roberts previously stated this would not affect their work on Star Citizen.

The entire project has been expanded to include other projects like Star Marine, a massively multiplayer shooter set within a persistent universe, parallel to Star Citizen. Some of the various game modules and models are currently playable and ready to buy, which continues to fund the entire project.

With no release date in sight and continual development expansion of the game, it remains to be seen when we’ll see the full launch of Star Citizen, which remains the single-most crowd-funded video game in history.