[Dev News] RimWorld Dump Unity Game Engine

[xSicKxBot]

RimWorld is a popular simulation indie game released all the way back in 2018 that was developed using the Unity game engine. With the release of RimWorld 1.7 they made a MASSIVE change… they dumped the Unity game engine for their own in-house Waylith Engine and the results were pretty profound.

The change is described on the Ludeon Studios blog:

Hey everyone, big news today!

We’re announcing update 1.7, which moves RimWorld from Unity to the Waylith Engine, our own in-house engine built by Ludeon Studios. The game looks and plays exactly the same, but in our tests performance is improved by 2-4x.

You can try 1.7 right now on the unstable beta branch – see “Testing update 1.7” at the bottom of this page for details.

Performance improvements

Compared to 1.6, 1.7 on the Waylith engine has faster startup time, game load time with big mod lists, map generation, world generation, general ticks-per-second, and just about everything else. Your colony of 40 colonists, 200 ducks, and 100+ mods will run much smoother.

We stress-tested a late game colony and saw 2.2x better performance on 1.7 compared to 1.6. A modpack with 1500 mods (!) went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load. (These are just our results; individual performance improvements may vary due to your specific PC or mods.)

Savegames, mods, and compatibility

You don’t need to do anything when switching to 1.7.

• Savegames: Your 1.6 savegames will load on 1.7, and 1.7 saves also work if you go back to 1.6.
  
  
• Mods: The vast majority of mods work on 1.7 without any changes from the authors. Some may show up in yellow as “potentially unsupported” – this is only because the version number changed.
  
  
• Older PCs: If your PC is more than 10 years old, 1.7 may not run on it. If this happens, please let us know on the official RimWorld development Discord – we may be able to make some changes to help.
  
  

For modders

Your mods shouldn’t need any changes to work on 1.7. However, once you’ve tested your mod, please publish a version marked as 1.7-compatible so the yellow warning goes away for players. If something doesn’t work the same way it did in 1.6, you can reach out for help on the development Discord.

Waylith also gives modders more to work with:

• You can use the latest C# language features.
  
  
• It’s easier to write complex mods without negatively impacting the game’s performance.
  
  
• Big visual changes and complex custom effects are more accessible.
  
  

Also, a big thank you to the over two dozen modders who helped prep RimWorld for Waylith’s debut by testing and sharing their feedback.

According to this Reddit post, the new Waylith Engine is built on top of the Brutal Framework, which is described accordingly:

Contemporary game engines are built with general-purpose solutions in mind, and every system is tuned for the average case.

Working around the engine is a losing battle. The further a game sits from that average, the more of its development goes into fitting it to the engine’s assumptions rather than working out what the game needs and making the foundation serve it.

Kitten Space Agency makes big demands: how positions are represented, how the renderer works, when memory is allocated. BRUTAL is the framework Ahwoo built so the game can answer those demands itself.

Key Links

RimWorld 1.7 Waylith Engine Announcement Blog

RimWorld on Steam

Brutal Engine Homepage

You can learn more about RimWorld dumping the Unity game engine and about the Brutal framework powering their new Waylith engine in the below.