With its latest 1.7 update, RimWorld has officially switched its game engine. For the last eight years, RimWorld has been running on the Unity engine. Now it's running on Ludeon Studios' own in-house Waylith engine, and it seems to be thriving.
Officially announced via a new blog post on the Ludeon Studios website, RimWorld has just swapped out its Unity engine for Ludeon's in-house Waylith engine. While RimWorld reportedly "looks and plays exactly the same" according to this latest Ludeon blog post, the new Waylith engine is said to have improved technical performance by "2–4x." To switch over to the new engine right now, RimWorld players on PC will need to download the game's 1.7 update via the unstable Steam branch. Save data will carry over from 1.6 to 1.7, and vice versa if players decide to switch back to using Unity.
Ludeon Studios' blog post sheds a bit more light on what exactly has been improved with this new Waylith engine. Startup times are generally faster, load times are also faster across the board, including for map generation and world generation. Even a RimWorld game with hundreds of mods installed is said to run much more...
