Shocking the article left out the last surprising note on the update blog: Ludeon Studios says Rimworld isn’t the only game running on the new, homemade Waylith engine. 😉
Probably because there’s no details and it probably won’t be out for years.
I was hoping for a new DLC announcement at least.
There are rumors it’s based on the engine that Kitten Space Agency’s (spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program) devs develop. So it would be that other game.
Dean confirmed on the KSA discord that they licensed BRUTAL (the framework that KSA’s engine is built upon) to Ludeon for Waylith.
Those are two games with extremely different needs…
From what I understand, BRUTAL (the thing that KSA devs made) is not a typical game engine. It’s very low level and more of a set of tools and libraries to make a game and its engine with, without completely reinventing the wheel. It doesn’t restrict game devs in any way and aims to give them maximum freedom (e.g. it doesn’t even have a concept of a “scene” that all engines like Unity or Unreal have). Obviously this also makes it very complicated to use compared to Unity, but makes it possible to custom-tailor it to any game and use case.
This is especially important for a game like KSA that doesn’t fit into Unity’s model at all, but I guess it also provides some benefits for RimWorld.
Yeah, imo the term “game engine” itself has kinda evolved over the years from “framework that contains common game/renderer code” to “platform to handle the entire process of implementing a game”.
It’s just code in the end, so even the “full platform” option can be used as if it’s just a framework, which it sounds like RimWorld was doing if it could switch engines without breaking mod support (another comment guessed LLMs were involved but IMO this goes way beyond what an LLM would handle well, as it would involve pretty much reimplementing unity’s framework). Though I don’t have any direct experience with Rimworld mods and how exactly they interact with the game; if they used a data-driven approach, then it could be possible to redo just that interface and keep mods working (though it would also depend on what exactly was running the mod code itself, as that part would also need to remain functional).
They’re both projects moving away from Unity and to something more tailorable to their needs at a lower level, so it’s not all that strange, really.
Don’t do that to me. Don’t give me hope.
Not a single of their dlc has spoken to me or my play style. So a new game sounds great to me.
I’ve dodged a couple (Royalty and Anomaly) but all appreciate they put the effort in.
Playing without Ideology is crazy, you’re missing out on so much RP
I have it. I didn’t finish a single playthrough since.
I personally don’t finish Rimworld playthroughs, I go until Randy decides I’m done with the colony.
I think this is how a lot of people play the game. I have 650+ hours in Rimworld and haven’t beaten it a single time. I usually don’t even start the quest lines.
900+ for me, I have beaten the game exactly once, just to say that I have. Even after qualifying for endgame, I keep the colony going!
If you finish, you didn’t up the difficulty enough
It’s so funny to be that Rimworld is basically copied straight from Dwarf Fortress all the way up to Ideology. Then they start coming up with their own content and everyone hates it.
I have liked all the DLCs. Probably royalty the least. Biotech and ideology tied for top and they go together really well. The most recent 2 are also pretty fun.
Ideology is my favorite, I couldn’t imagine playing without it
I wonder which games they will blatantly rip off this time
Every colony manager game is just a rip off of the Sims if you think about it.
It’s all Dwarf Fortress in the end
You must be new to the games industry. Ideas are cheap, implementing them properly and in novel ways is what makes or breaks a game. Developers have always been iterating on the ideas of others before them. Nobody in their right mind would call a game as accomplished as Rimworld a mere ripoff.
Wait, like…all mods? Even the multiplayer mod? how the hell does that even work?
If I recall correctly, very little of rimworld actually uses unity functionality. It’s just a “seperate” game viewed through unity
That would explain why it’s one of the few unity games that does not try to burn a hole into my laptop! Was always wondering how they achieved that. Usually when I see that a game uses unity, I can already guess that it won’t run well on my machine
interesting! for me that’s always the sign of unreal engine - fans set to max, and get prepare for input lag lol
I hardly play games that use the unreal engine, but I’d expect that to be similar, especially as unreal engine is usually used for more graphics intensive 3D games.
The thing that annoys me about unity, is that it performs like ass even for games that should easily run on an iGPU, like RimWorld levels of graphic. I’m not saying their graphics are bad, it has its own style and I like it, but 2D games should definitely be able to run on an integrated graphics card, and there are a lot of games using unity that don’t. Either the engine is shitty, or it’s making it too easy to create unoptimized games
unreal engine is usually used for more graphics intensive 3D games.
yeah and it’s optimized for shit. if you want a AAA gorgeous shooter, go unreal, otherwise, I dunno why anyone uses the fuckin thing. it’s a lot more work to beat unreal into a 2d app or rts than unity requires.
but hey, fuck unity too lol, they fucked around with developers and found out, glad to see rimworld leaving; I’m becoming a big fan of godot, the engine just springs open damned near instantly.
I don’t know what the other user is talking about it being a “separate game.” It is heavily data-focused though. It’s mostly C# code. As long as that doesn’t make calls to Unity functions, it’s fine, but also I’m certain they, and other mods, have. However, you can still handle this, similar to how WINE can run Windows applications without running Windows. You have a compatibility layer that routes all the calls that would have gone to Unity to your own systems that behave as close to identically as possible. If you make a call to “UnityEngine.Vector3”, for example, you just create your own “UnityEngine.Vector3” that replicates the functionality.
Way to show how it is done. If only Notch could have updated MC just fucking once without breaking every mod everytime.
I really cannot comprehend how Minecraft collected such a mod base while also being this unbearable.
So many players just end up playing old versions because mod developers cannot reliably keep up with this nonsense. The last version to have decent mod support is probably 1.21.1, and there are so many mods dead after 1.7.10, 1.6.4, or even earlier.
Some of the mods, like Better than Wolves, have it literally in their name.
It’s pretty simple: Notch was never a great coder and the game never had any mod support or APIs. He didn’t support the idea of mødding the game at all.
Modders literally have to decompile and reverse engineer most of the game to add mods. Only last year did they remove obfuscation so the community didn’t have to make up their own naming for everything.
In 2019, not last year. In 2019 they started releasing deobfuscation mappings so that any modder can get the deobfuscated code if they want by applying the mappings. That was the big change. Last year they stopped obfuscating the code in the first place, but that didn’t change anything, just removed a simple step to modding of not having to use their mappings anymore.
just removed a simple step to modding of not having to use their mappings anymore.
There’s an argument to be made that this step presumably required an update every version, one that was presumably offloaded to the modloader, which might also become more significant when you consider all the drama related to Forge being bloated with too much stuff packed into it.
I honestly think Forge is utter shit, it has so much fucking bloat and it also does some things a modoader should not (tf you mean you fixed some bug with particles??) it also used to use OpenGL to draw some stuff (the loading screen and i guess some things in the main menu) so mods like the Vulkan Mod could not work on Forge (and NeoForge) at all; honestly i hope people start considering more to use Fabric…
Mødding, automatically read that with a heavy swedish accent. Thanks 😂
Swedish doesn’t have that letter.
I know, but they sure sound like they got the letter.
That’s the Danes
And norway-ians
Oops, written from mobile. Gonna leave it
I developed a mod until a year or so ago. Updates just come out too fast for it to be worth my time. If I want to fix one bug I have to apply it to 5 different game versions
Designing stable interfaces is hard, they’re just a smol bean $4.5T corporation.
IIRC, many, maybe most, Rimworld updates broke mods too. This one hasn’t though. That’s because this one seems to essentially just be a compatibility layer or something. What they must have done is routed all calls to Unity things to their own engine’s alternative. At least that’s my educated guess, because there’s no other reasonable way this could work.
This is still amazing. I’m not diminishing that. It isn’t changing the way the game functions though. It’s just changing how it functions.
What a fantastic indie story RimWorld continues to be!
It seems like a good strategy to improve time-to-market by leveraging an existing engine, and then if you’re successful enough then maybe you can afford to create your own.
I think it would be quite rate for something like this to be feasible at all. Decisions like this are set in stone before development starts, and tend to dictate the development direction.
If you’re a megacorp sure, don’t think that applies to most indie games tho lol
Few indie devs have the resources to achieve byte compatible and bug compatible clones, AND getting better performance at the same time. It’s really only feasible if the original game used a well specified subset of functionality from an inefficient engine. If you did any messing with the internals of the engine, etc, it gets expensive fast.
Yeah because gaming companies are notorious for delivering what they promise with no deviation.
I’m not going to say you’re wrong, but it also adds a ton of complications. Presumably they wrote an entire compatibility layer to map from Unity calls to their own engine. That work doesn’t need to be done at all if you start from scratch with your own engine and targets.
You are right that they probably couldn’t afford to make their own engine originally though, and this presumably lets them not pay royalties on future sales. I wouldn’t say it’s a good strategy, but if you end up with a boatload of cash and a game with a long tail then it’s a good tactic. It’s just not something you should plan on doing.
Even if they didn’t plan for it and build that compatibility layer, that boatload of cash gives them a lot of options.
It seems like a classic time-to-market and “don’t step over good to get to perfect” example to me. Get a product out, start getting revenue, then make it perfect.
I passed on rimworld because I didn’t want to get the DLCs and I felt like the game would need them.
It does not need the DLCs. I have them and I play vanilla when I play
I’ll echo everyone else in that you don’t need them but also go further and say don’t get any of them to start. The learning curve is a little steep and a vanilla play to start is a good idea. Then you can pick up some quality of life mods and whatever else floats your boat. The game is disgustingly customizable. You can get nuclear power and missiles, dropships, robots, custom furniture armor and weaponry, genetically engineered catgirls, literally anything. It’s infinitely replayable with mods alone.
I pirated the whole kitten kaboodle. After playing an amount of hours that I don’t like admitting to, I then bought the whole kitten kaboodle. I’ve since played an additional amount of hours I don’t like admitting to.
I have a gaming PC that could play anything, yet I play a game with duplo block people.
It’s just that good. 😗👌
Kit and caboodle
A kit - is set of objects, as in a toolkit, or what a soldier would put in his kit-bag.
A caboodle (or boodle) - is an archaic term meaning group or collection, usually of people.
Oh. Okay. I see.
I’m going to try and save face by saying I was ACTUALLY talking about the drag queen, Kitten Kaboodle.
Yep.
Face saved successfully. You rock
I choose to believe you
After playing an amount of hours that I don’t like admitting to
Fess up you coward! Lemmy wants to see your shame!
And this is only the playtime after I switched to the steam version (much easier mod management) - I’m glad I can’t know how many hours I spent in the DRM-free version…
(to save anyone doing the math, that’s 8 hours a day for 344 days. Yep.)
I’ve gotten some good mileage out of it with no DLCs, just wish it had layers like Dwarf Fortress, doesn’t even have to be as many but it’s weird that you can’t at least build vertically for a few levels. I believe it’s possible to pirate the DLCs as well, but I don’t really know enough about pirating software safely to try that. I’m certainly not paying another $60 to get them.
Rimworld is literally one of the easiest games to pirate, especially for how expensive it is.
It’s just a directory, and it’s only a couple hundred megabytes compressed.
And despite all that, I still bought it in the end. All of it. It’s just that good.
And here I am, a living Rimworld commercial. And all because I pirated something.
Yeah, and I’m pretty sure they know levels would have been nice because they added them (with strong limitations). They added bunkers and caves that are below ground and have multiple layers. You can freely build them, or even freely travel through them (it acts like a new map), but they exist. Hopefully the next game they’re working on has levels, if it’s a colony manager, because it adds a lot more variety to how you can build things.
It really doesn’t and it’s pretty fun and cheap. There are so many mods, like literally thousands. I personally have about 30-35 installed.
A lot of people are recommending Ideology specifically here, and while that would also be my own recommendation, I feel like I need to throw in a caveat.
Ideology is an entirely hit-or-miss DLC, because the entire point of most of it is giving your colony various limitations for roleplaying purposes. If you don’t care about roleplaying then it’s probably one of the last DLC you’d want.
Though it does come with the advantage of being the cheapest DLC.
I like them all. Odyssey lets you build a spaceship and fly around the world. I’ve never looked back. It’s ruined all other games for me.
I bought a couple DLC and have the rest pirated (waiting for a sale), and I also enjoy them all. I haven’t gotten around to playing with gravships yet, but I do really enjoy the new biomes and landmarks Odyssey adds. Probably the last DLC I’ll buy though, because I’m not super interested in nomadic playstyles.
The cool thing about having your own ship is you can build your entire base on it. Nomad becomes a lot easier at that point. It’s not just moving and setting up base over and over. You’re moving your entire base with you. The way it works also makes base design somewhat more interesting too, at least the first time. You’re significantly more limited on space, so it’s a puzzle how to fit things in in a way you like. I imagine this is less fun when it’s solved though.
Regardless, yeah, I don’t think it’s the right way to start playing. It’s something you add to change things up.
You can make a home base on a space station or asteroid at some point. There’s no hard rules with Odyssey.
I like the changes of environment. It certainly lets you see all the different biomes and land features they added.
I’m thinking about starting a slave mine on an asteroid.
“No one escapes from Rura Penthe.”
The only “must have” one is ideology. But even then you don’t need it and could replace it with about 5 mods.
IDK, I can’t imagine navigating Ideology without already being pretty familiar with the base game. Royalty might be okay in that it’s the most basic of the DLCs? But if you don’t already know about how to manage moods or set up a freezer, you’re going to have a really frustrating time with memes like raider (let alone tree connection or transhumanists).
I had the DLC’s bought for me but I still just play the original unless I play mp/co-op.
I have them but I bought the game before it was even on steam. Then I got each DLC as it came out.
Game is great without them so don’t worry about not having them. Then if you like the game you can collect them over time if you want to.
Nah there’s plenty of game without the DLCs imo, it’s not like a Paradox game. Even without mods it’s a lot of fun, if you like these types of games.
That being said if you’re willing to pick just one it can add a lot to the game. I put in like 400 hours with just Ideology.
Why would they write a custom engine that also breaks mods? It shouldn’t be surprising that they wrote it so mods keep working.
Many of their previous updates on the unity engine broke mods - for something as fundamentally massive as changing the entire game engine, it’s an incredible achievement to have done so while preserving the functionality of the tens of thousands of 3rd party scripts.
I mean, it seems simple - just make the new engine compatible with the old mods…
but changing engines is hard work. building your own engine is exceptionally harder. lots of things to break.
3rd party mods are often not supported and may rely on quirky unity behavior. I don’t know how much of unity they used but that sounds very impressive to me that they managed to keep mods working as supposed to all mods needing a minor update.
that is impressive, but not entirely suprising considering there aren’t any reasons for most mods to ever touch the engine
I’m also surprised that they transition this sooner… Ohh wait, is it later?
I don’t know, but at least everyone wins.
It’s hardware Vulkan graphics only. A friend I played the multiplayer mod with doesn’t have Vulkan. I myself for a while played on a computer that doesn’t have Vulkan (well, technically does but most of the things I’ve tried to run just black screened because of missing functions).
Speaking of the multiplayer mod, it’s no simple text file shit. I built it by downloading dotnet from marcoshaft. I wonder how mods like these (in general, not this specific one) are claimed to be compatible, I guess they rewrote Unity builtins or something. In the modern day and age, sounds like something that would be LLM assisted… We will see if it sucks I guess.
All graphics cards from the last 10 years have vulkan support on Linux, i would think it isn’t that expensive to find something that supports Vulkan.
10 years is not that long ago, it’s 2016!
They have Radeon HD 6xxx series, circa 2011. OpenGL 4.5 certified, which is basically the latest ignoring 4.6 which is just 4.5 but with some Vulkan features shittily backported.
I had Intel Graphics 4400 (Haswell refresh) circa 2014. And also NoVideo Gayforce 820m, 2013. Both ran the Unity game just fine. Well, just barely, but 60 FPS (capped, never tried vsync off). I would consider 24 FPS playable, so that’s a win for sure.
Besides, some devices still sold today which may run Unity RimWorld at least with enough fuckery (like ARM Chromebooks) only have GL 4.5, with the oldest chip designs themselves being exactly from 10 years ago.
Both of those cards are unfortunately the last cards from AMD and Intel to not support Vulkan. Both the 7000 series (2012) and Broadwell (2015) support Vulkan.
I understand the frustration, but those are very old and very slow devices. A discrete GPU or a used laptop that supports Vulkan is likely less than $100-200 on eBay.
Worst case scenario, you could use llvmpipe software rendering on Linux, but it would be very slow.
Not everyone would to pay 100 american freedoms for a game. Gaming is usually a way to relax from debt (ignoring CS:GO/2 players), would be weird to pay for that.
Fair, but PC games have always required upgrading hardware to play the latest games. I have upgraded GPUs 4 times since 2011.
I can even see GPUs that support vulkan on my local online marketplace for $20.
You can not realistically expect developers to keep supporting obsolete hardware that has been without new drivers for over a decade.
Imagine someone demanding in 2005 that a new game should run on hardware from 1995. Yes, hardware lasts longer than ever before and it is annoying if you have no other option, but let’s keep things reasonable.
ARM Chromebooks are also not gaming hardware. The game never supported them officially (as implied by your “fuckery” remark) and expecting developers to take tinkered solutions into account is even more absurd.
without new drivers
You said “Linux”. Everything userland for that uses https://mesa3d.org/ . The current version supports everything mentioned. I am still sad they removed loaders for nuggets like SiS chips, though.
Imagine someone demanding in 2005 that a new game should run on hardware from 1995.
This nugget released in 2005, believe it or not, and runs on 1995 computers.
Also, if one had access to a Unix workstation or server+client, they could build WarMUX or something similar. This game specifically died around 2012, been in dev since a while (2004? close enough), and the most popular release is 0.9 is from 2009 (1.0 around 2010 I am guessing). It may also run on a boring old x86 box, and I have 86box the emulator, but can’t be bothered to test just for this argument.
The game never supported {ARM Chromebooks} officially
Doesn’t mean there’s not a single soul running Unity games on them (as much as I hate Unity, Rimworld is one of the best examples of a good Unity game).
Yeah there may well be some fairly reasonable hardware configs that are powerful enough to run the game but end up unsupported because of the vulkan requirements.
But you can always stick to 1.6 if your hardware can’t run 1.7, so its not too bad.
