Game Engine Rebuild - Complete!
We’re very happy to announce we have launched the new game engine that has been in development for the last 2 years. This is a complete rebuild from scratch switching from Javascript to Rust.
This sets the foundation for all our future game engine development and will allow for a much more rapid pace of development. We’ve aimed for a like-for-like replacement of the existing game engine, so many of you might not notice much difference right now but just wait and see what new features we’ll launch over the next year.
On the web version you’ll be defaulted to the new game engine and if you’re a desktop App player you can download the new app here.
Why the rebuild?
If there’s no difference then why spend all that time rebuilding it?! Let me tell you - there’s two main reasons.
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It’s a common occurrence with software development where you build a new product and all the code is very nicely structured and organised. Then you add a new feature here, bolt on an upgrade there, update a framework over there, add a few more features there, fix a bug here and before long the structure is a mess and half the code is on a different version of something. It becomes increasingly hard to develop new features. So then it’s common practice to refactor the code or take a more extreme measure to completely rebuild.
We chose the rebuild and we’ve future-proofed it by designing the structure upfront to allow for a bunch of new development in drill creation and configuration options. So we have high hopes that now this rebuild is live we can power on with launching new and improved features in record time.
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Performance:
We expected the new Rust app to have better performance on the desktop app, but on the web version we expected the same performance due to browser limitations outside of our control. Here’s where we’ve ended up:
- Desktop App - Improved input lag and stabilised very high frame rates
- Web (dedicated GPU) - same input lag and frame rate
- Web (integrated GPU) - same input lag, reduced frame rate
I’m on an integrated graphics card and getting poor performance
Have no fear - we have left an option to use the old game engine. You can find it in the legacy settings here:
We will not develop the old engine any further and newly created drills (when we launch the new creator) will not work on the old engine, but you’ll be able to continue all your old favourites.
Custom drill compatibility
We didn’t replicate all features, only those that are commonly used. Over time we’ve added loads of things and some just aren’t great, but they may be included in a drill you like. So to clean up the code and save development time we’ve not ported these over. Sorry!
What’s next
Here’s a sneak peek at the new drill editor that’s being worked on - live updates to enable much faster tweaking and experimentation with drill settings!
Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or suggestions. Come find us on Discord.
Happy aiming!
The Aiming.Pro Team