Why would they write a custom engine that also breaks mods? It shouldn’t be surprising that they wrote it so mods keep working.
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
I passed on rimworld because I didn’t want to get the DLCs and I felt like the game would need them.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It does not need the DLCs. I have them and I play vanilla when I play
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.
The only “must have” one is ideology. But even then you don’t need it and could replace it with about 5 mods.
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.
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.
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.
Mødding, automatically read that with a heavy swedish accent. Thanks 😂
Swedish doesn’t have that letter.
That’s the Danes
Oops, written from mobile. Gonna leave it
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. 😉
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.
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.
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.
Dean confirmed on the KSA discord that they licensed BRUTAL (the framework that KSA’s engine is built upon) to Ludeon for Waylith.
Don’t do that to me. Don’t give me hope.
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.
Damn am I going to have to play Rimworld again next?
that is impressive, but not entirely suprising considering there aren’t any reasons for most mods to ever touch the engine
