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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, like…all mods? Even the multiplayer mod? how the hell does that even work?
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.
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.
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.
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.
