Mod compatibility is remarkable and much appreciated!
I happen to know a bit about the game's guts because I've been working on a RimWorld-based IDE [1] for the last few months. The C# side has grown to 75k lines of production code, much of it depending on Unity/Verse.
So when I saw the Waylith news, my first thought was "well, now it's either a complete rewrite or legacy forever". Migration took one night and introduced only a dozen regressions, mostly in low-level interfaces that no "sane" RimWorld modder would ever touch.
Along the way, these pains and hacks went away:
- Ancient net472 instead of cute net10.0.
- Mono-specific networking workarounds.
- Mouse wheel-event queue stuff.
- Unity font and atlas stuff.
- Semicolon key handling. Don’t ask.
- Unity/Mono WebSocket bugs. Probably gone. I still use a custom implementation; haven’t tested the new built-in yet.
- Harmony is in NuGet now.
Some weird bugs have migrated to the new engine. Like the game freezing forever on Alt+Tab in "Borderless window" mode, on both X11 and Wayland. Fortunately, Unity hacks still work.
Now to the headliner: performance. I haven't measured round-trip terminal latency yet, and loading times (X11 window to interface) actually got worse in my case.
But before the Waylith migration, an idle, focused SlopWorld window in Eco mode (colony sim stopped, some resources unloaded, map hidden, rendering in 60 FPS VSync) ate 50-60% of one CPU thread. After migration it's 15-18%. So roughly 70% less load for free, before any gameplay or mod optimizations.
[1] https://slopworld.space A shameless plug, hopefully useful for the community.
I happen to know a bit about the game's guts because I've been working on a RimWorld-based IDE [1] for the last few months. The C# side has grown to 75k lines of production code, much of it depending on Unity/Verse.
So when I saw the Waylith news, my first thought was "well, now it's either a complete rewrite or legacy forever". Migration took one night and introduced only a dozen regressions, mostly in low-level interfaces that no "sane" RimWorld modder would ever touch.
Along the way, these pains and hacks went away:
- Ancient net472 instead of cute net10.0.
- Mono-specific networking workarounds.
- Mouse wheel-event queue stuff.
- Unity font and atlas stuff.
- Semicolon key handling. Don’t ask.
- Unity/Mono WebSocket bugs. Probably gone. I still use a custom implementation; haven’t tested the new built-in yet.
- Harmony is in NuGet now.
Some weird bugs have migrated to the new engine. Like the game freezing forever on Alt+Tab in "Borderless window" mode, on both X11 and Wayland. Fortunately, Unity hacks still work.
Now to the headliner: performance. I haven't measured round-trip terminal latency yet, and loading times (X11 window to interface) actually got worse in my case.
But before the Waylith migration, an idle, focused SlopWorld window in Eco mode (colony sim stopped, some resources unloaded, map hidden, rendering in 60 FPS VSync) ate 50-60% of one CPU thread. After migration it's 15-18%. So roughly 70% less load for free, before any gameplay or mod optimizations.
[1] https://slopworld.space A shameless plug, hopefully useful for the community.