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RimWorld switches engine from Unity to the devs' own, faster Waylith Engine, all apparently without breaking mods somehow
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.