RimWorld dumps Unity for in-house Waylith engine, boosting performance 2-4x
RimWorld 1.7 moves from Unity to Ludeon's in-house Waylith engine
Ludeon Studios announced RimWorld 1.7, which replaces Unity with its own Waylith engine. The game looks and plays the same, but runs 2-4x faster: a 1500-mod pack loads in 6 minutes instead of 14, and a late-game colony sees 2.2x better performance. Savegames and mods remain compatible, and the studio teased another game built on Waylith.
A modpack with 1500 mods (!) went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load.
- skeaker
Notably they were able to, in one update, essentially double performance and cut load times to a quarter of what they were while also maintaining both backwards and forwards compatibility for save files and without breaking 99% of the mods on the workshop. Genuinely impressive feat.
- dasKrokodil
Wow, that's really cool! And rather unexpected (at least from my side, but I'm also not really keeping up with RimWorld news).
And then, at the end of the announcement, it says:
"RimWorld isn’t the only game on Waylith. We’re working on something new! It may be a little while before we can share more details, but we couldn’t resist telling you."
Exciting!
- stratos123
I think they're being a bit too optimistic about mod compatibility - from a cursory look, a lot of Rimworld mods do at least import UnityEngine (mostly for small utilities), so it'd take at least a recompilation. The fact they test with hundreds of mods does suggest they don't plan on leaving modders hanging, though.
- rasz
>Older PCs: If your PC is more than 10 years old, 1.7 may not run on it.
surely not AVX-512 (2015), so what exactly? AVX2 (2015)?
- basedpolymer
It's a shame they didn't mention the use of AI and how they used it. It's impossible to make such changes so quickly without a swarm of agents.