After months of development, a few blog post updates and teasers, and a whole lot of, “ReX soon™” memes, we can finally say that ReX v0.0.1 will be releasing this Friday!
For those that don’t know, ReX Engine is a hard fork of Godot 4.5.1, where we don’t have any restrictions on what we can change with the engine. Unlike Redot LTS, ReX can have changes that break compatibility with projects made in Godot 4.5. This allowed the team to really dig into the engine and make optimizations and adjustments that had the potential to greatly improve the performance.
The picture on the left shows a survivors-like game running in Godot 4.5.1, and the picture on the right shows the same game running in ReX, with a difference of 86 FPS between the two. In this particular case, it’s the difference between a game being playable vs unplayable.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that every project will see the same performance boost in ReX, especially since many of the optimizations were for CPU workloads, but overall our testers have found ReX to be a more performant and stable experience.
ReX development
The end goal of ReX was for it to be a complete rewrite that would one day become it’s own engine and be capable of creating AAA games like Unity and Unreal. The ReX devs strongly believe that there should be a FOSS alternative for these engines that provides the performance and features that you would expect from a modern game engine, while also providing game devs complete and total control over the products they make.
Up until now, the ReX team was going about this through a Ship of Theseus method, where they would rewrite the engine one section at a time until they reached that complete rewrite goal. Throughout this process, the team realized that it’s not a feasible approach. Everything in Godot is connected to several other things, so when trying to adjust one part of the engine, you’d actually have to update many things at the same time. The ReX devs did a great job at this, but the process was much slower than we would like.
Since the end goal was a total rewrite and a completely new engine, the team decided that the quickest and most efficient way of doing this was to build a new engine from the ground up.
Enter Draconic Engine
Draconic Engine is a brand new engine that will be built from scratch by the ReX team. While we can’t share too many details, Draconic Engine will use:
- ECS
- C# for high level operations and the front end
- C++ for low level back end math and heavy loops
- BGFX renderer
- Jolt physics
- Avalonia for UI
- C# as the primary scripting language
Draconic Engine will be a 2D and 3D game engine with modern tools, performance, and features, and an intuitive UI. Our devs plan on making Draconic the go-to FOSS game engine, so stay tuned for more Draconic Engine updates as they come out!
The future of ReX
With Draconic Engine being the spiritual successor to ReX, you might be wondering what this means for the ReX engine.
The changes and progress that ReX has made will be absorbed into Redot LTS over the next few versions, and Redot LTS will carry the torch as far as ReX-like changes go. The ReX devs have done incredible work, and we won’t let that go to waste. You can look at the ReX release as a preview of what’s to come in Redot LTS.
As always, we’d like to thank you all for sticking around and supporting Redot, ReX and now Draconic. If you’d like to help out with development, you can reach out on Discord in the volunteer-apps channel, or donate to the Redot Foundation.
Header art by FlashfyreDev