VxEngine 1.0 enters production

VxEngine started as an argument about frame times. In 2019, our Unturned server was doing things the engine was never designed to do — persistent vehicles, hundreds of interactive props, a city that never quite finished loading. We could keep patching around the limits, or we could build the thing we actually needed.

This week, we marked VxEngine 1.0 as the production engine for Project 夜龙 and all future Horizon titles. It is the same engine our tools team uses every day, the same engine our artists have shipped assets into for the last two years, and the same engine that will power the next decade of this studio.

What “1.0” means

It means the architecture is locked. The renderer, world streamer, networking layer, audio graph, and asset pipeline have all crossed the line from “promising prototype” to “do not redesign this while a game is in production.” It does not mean we are done. It means the foundation is stable enough to build a city on.

The headline features shipping in 1.0:

• Frame-first rendering with a dynamic resolution and temporal reconstruction pipeline tuned for mid-range hardware.
• Real-time global illumination that responds to time of day, weather, and destruction.
• Seamless world streaming with hierarchical cell loading and a hard pop-in budget.
• Server-authoritative replication with interest management and deterministic prediction.
• Native editor tools for levels, materials, dialogue, and live data tuning.

The benchmark that matters

We do not optimize for the best GPU on the market. We optimize for the one in your machine. Our internal target is a locked 60 frames per second at 1440p on a four-year-old mid-range card, with a 1% low within 15% of the average. That is a harder target than a cinematic 4K demo, and it is the one we hold ourselves to.

In our Night Dragon vertical slice, the current build averages 73 fps at 1440p on an RTX 3060-class GPU, with 1% lows at 64 fps during a 40-player siege. On integrated graphics at 1080p with the performance preset, we hold a stable 30 fps. Both numbers are still improving.

“Anyone can make a beautiful frame. The job is making the next one arrive on time.”

For partners

Later this year we will open a small VxEngine partner program for teams building persistent online games. It will be invitation-only, hands-on, and limited to a handful of studios per year. If that sounds like you, start a conversation.

To everyone who has been asking: yes, the engine is real. It is in the room. It is making a dragon.