2020 Development Recap Video, and Plans For Ryujinx in 2021
Before we jump into the big recap showing off everything we accomplished this year, we'd like to take a moment to ask for your help to take Ryujinx development to the next level!
As 2020 drew to a close, the Ryujinx Team collectively discovered that in order to implement the laundry list of features & bugfixes necessary to keep Ryujinx on track, we simply need more resources. Specifically, we need funds to purchase modern computers to develop efficiently on; funds for Switch consoles to replace those that died along the way; funds for random hardware we're aiming to increase compatibility for or expand the emulator's architecture to include; ultimately, funds to free up our developers to work on Ryujinx development full-time!
In coming to the conclusion that we needed to increase Ryujinx's monthly Patreon income, we quickly realized that our Patreon incentives/benefits left a lot to be desired. Therefore we have restructured the subscriber levels in hopes that those who decide to help Ryujinx feel that they are appreciated & valued as project contributors. We also added a couple of specific, attainable monthly income goals that will help us gauge whether we will be able to move as quickly as we'd like to in accomplishing our plans in 2021.
We want to emphasize that we remain firmly committed to providing a 100% free emulator; we will not hide any new features or bugfixes behind a pay wall.
Ryujinx is currently bringing in approximately $700/month total in donations. We've added two goals for tasks that are already on our to do list for next year, but will be able to fast-track if we can meet the below objectives:
$800/month (almost there!) - Amiibo Emulation
ETA once goal is reached: ~1 month:
Allows emulated scans of a selected Amiibo and subsequently unlock exclusive content in games which support this function.
$1500/month - Vulkan GPU Backend
ETA once goal is reached: ~6-8 weeks:
This one is a biggie. Vulkan will significantly improve performance for and reduce the amount of graphical glitches on AMD GPUs and intel iGPUs. Moreover, SPIR-V (Vulkan shader language) is faster than GLSL (OpenGL shader language) so, even without a disk shader cache, there would be significantly less stutter on first run than on native OpenGL.
Patreon Benefits:
We now have four membership levels with increasing benefits.
$1 (Supporter):
- Access to a dedicated contributor channel on our Discord server.
$5 (Early Bird):
- Early access to progress reports.
- Access to a priority support channel and dedicated contributor channel on our Discord server.
$10 (Patreon Backer):
- Your Patreon profile name/nickname will be mentioned as a contributor in the emulator's Help > About section. If no profile name is present, your Firstname (Lastname initial) will be used e.g. John D.
- Early access to progress reports.
- Access to a priority support channel and dedicated contributor channel on our Discord server.
$20 (High Roller):
- Access to an exclusive Discord channel for an inside look at in-flight development projects, the future of the emulator, and other sneak-peek opportunities.
- Your Patreon profile name/nickname will be mentioned as a contributor in the emulator's Help > About section. If no profile name is present, your Firstname (Lastname initial) will be used e.g. John D.
- Early access to progress reports.
- Access to a priority support channel and dedicated contributor channel on our Discord server.
We've released the November & December progress report for Early Birds and higher patrons, so head on over for an in-depth retrospective on what we were up to the last two months!
And now without further ado, have a look at the major improvements & updates Ryujinx saw in 2020; special thanks to Aphelion Gaming for their help in the making of this video (we recommend full screen)!
Thank you to all contributors to the project: past, present and future! Our new Patreon goals may seem elementary, but we are hopeful that we'll be able to reach them quickly and subsequently add more significant goals later on. If we see continued success, our ultimate goal of a developer or two working on Ryujinx full-time could be a real possibility. But we need your help to get there; please consider becoming a Ryujinx patron in 2021!