The Riftbreaker News

[h2]Hello Riftbreakers![/h2]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2108630/The_Riftbreaker_Into_The_Dark/

[h3]Get ready to go spelunking! The Riftbreaker: Into the Dark DLC arrives May 29th, 2023, along with the second free World Expansion! They are jam-packed with awesome new features and content to explore. Let us walk you through all the additions to the game that we have been working on for the past couple of months.[/h3]



The biggest addition that comes with this update is the new biome - Crystal Caverns. Ashley and Mr. Riggs discovered an expansive network of caves, corridors, and caverns that span for miles below the surface of Galatea 37. They are rich in natural resources of all kinds, making them a prime target for our intrepid crew of explorers. However, we already know that Galatea 37 does not like sharing its riches with anyone. Our heroes will have to face a host of creatures they have never seen before and learn the inner workings of the complex ecosystem of Crystal Caverns.



All our players will be able to explore Crystal Caverns in the Survival Mode as a part of the free World Expansion update. It will allow you to make use of all the new game mechanics, including manual cave excavation.



[h3]The World Expansion II free content update:[/h3]

• Crystal Caverns biome - an underground network of caves and caverns for you to explore.
  
• A new Survival Mode scenario taking place in the new biome.
  
• An entirely new cavern-digging mechanic. Use Mr. Riggs’ drilling arm or explosives to clear out the space you need for expansion.
  
• Multiple new species of creatures, unlike anything you’ve seen before. Fight hordes of fearsome monsters lurking around every corner.
  
• More than 70 new research items and technologies to further enhance your base and Mr. Riggs’ abilities. Use drones to collect resources and valuable loot. Expand your energy grid using the Energy Relay Stations.
  
• New weapons and defensive towers. Build powerful weapons that will obliterate anyone threatening your base. Slice through your enemies with Bouncing Blades. Send a devastating barrage of energy projectiles with the Laser Gatling Tower.
  
• Numerous quality-of-life improvements, including the long-awaited Building Ruins feature.
  
• …and many more! The full update details will be revealed in the Patch Notes, arriving on May 29th!
  

The second major part of the upcoming update is the paid story-based DLC with a new portion of the Story Campaign. A series of anomalous neutrino bursts and unusual seismic activity will lead Ashley and Mr. Riggs to face a world-ending threat within the expansive Crystal Caverns biome.. Our heroes will have to progressively dig deeper underneath the planet’s surface to uncover the source of terrifying creature mutations.



[h3]The Riftbreaker: Into the Dark paid DLC:[/h3]

• Experience an exciting new branch of the Story Campaign taking place in the underground Crystal Caverns biome.
  
• Establish a unique subterranean Outpost by excavating soft limestone rock and shaping the environment to suit your needs,
  
• Expand your Campaign Mode technology tree by researching unique technologies that can only be acquired in this biome.
  
• Collect information on new creatures, vegetation, and other curiosities found only in this underground environment.
  
• Repel attacks from massive tunnel-digging beasts using new weapons and technology.
  
• Adapt your base-building methods to make the most of the terrain-shaping abilities and novel power-generation mechanics.
  
• Discover previously unknown details from Ashley’s past.
  
• The Story portion of this Expansion is integrated with the Main Campaign from the base edition of The Riftbreaker. The new branch and the contents of the expansion will unlock as you progress through the game. If you have previously completed The Riftbreaker Story Campaign, you can continue your adventure where you left off. The additional part of the Story will unlock immediately, giving you the option to explore the new part of the world.
  

The Riftbreaker: Into the Dark DLC will be available on the 29th of May, 2023, at $9.99. The free World Expansion II update accompanying the release of the DLC will be released the same time.

EXOR Studios

[h3]Hello Riftbreakers![/h3]

The deadline for the first Riftbreaker Modding competition is fast approaching! Many talented modders have already sent in their entries to get the chance to show off their mod-making prowess. They all have taken their shot at winning their share of our prize pool. Will you take your shot as well?

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3692427324337280428?l=english

If this is the first time you’ve heard about our contest, here’s a quick recap of all the important information:

• We’re holding a Modding Competition in cooperation with mod.io.
  
• There are two categories in the contest - Custom Maps and Game Modifications.
  
• The 1st prize winner in each category will receive a custom-made gaming PC with The Riftbreaker artwork printed on the case.
  
  
• The 2nd prize winner in each category takes home an AMD Radeon 6800XT GPU.
  
  
• Runners-up from 3rd to 8th places in each category receive a Mr. Riggs plushie and a bag of EXOR Studios gadgets.
  
  
• EXOR Studios will pick the shortlist of candidates in each category. Then, the winner will be determined by the community in the form of a public vote.
  

[h3]Submissions close on June 10th, 2023, 00:00 AM GMT.[/h3]
So, what are you waiting for? Download The Riftbreaker Editor Suite from Steam or from our GitHub and give yourself a chance at winning as well. You’ve still got 1.5 months to blow us all away with your creativity and skills!

[h2]All the contest details are available in the announcement, which you can find by following this link.[/h2]

And here’s the link to the submission form.

If you have any questions for us, please do not hesitate to ask either here or on our Discord server at www.discord.gg/exorstudios - we will gladly help you find your way around our tools and achieve the results you want. You can also help us improve the Editor Suite by reporting issues and adding suggestions here: https://github.com/exorstudios/riftbreaker-tools/issues.

EXOR Studios

As you know, along with the release of Into the Dark, the second Story Expansion for The Riftbreaker, we are also releasing our second World Expansion. The World Expansion is free for everyone and brings a lot of changes and improvements for the game. Apart from giving you access to the Crystal Caverns biome in Survival mode with all of its features, new tech and equipment, you will also be able to enjoy a lot of changes and improvements for the base game. One such feature is the “Building Ruins” feature we talked about last week. Today we will tell you about another addition we are implementing to improve your gameplay experience - new map tiles we prepared for the Acidic Plains biome.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2108630/The_Riftbreaker_Into_The_Dark/
(✿◠‿◠) WISHLIST NOW TO MAKE DEVELOPERS HAPPY (◠‿◠✿)

First, let’s do a little recap of what map tiles are and what role they play in The Riftbreaker. Maps in The Riftbreaker are randomized to give you a slightly different experience every time you launch the game. Our procedural generation algorithm stitches a full map together from a set of pre-designed tiles handcrafted by level designers. This ensures a natural look and feel of the world and also guarantees that maps will contain all the elements necessary to play the game - resources, spawn points, and many more. A typical survival map is a square composed of 36 such tiles. You can read more about this process in this article.

Mr. Riggs likes making an explosive entrance.

In the current version of the game, the Acidic Plains biome maps are generated from a set of just nine different base tiles. The number might seem small, but thanks to rotation, randomization of props within the tiles themselves, and specific mission generation rules, you can still get decent results and guarantee that each map feels different. However, the more you play, the more patterns you start to notice. We were not really satisfied with that, so we decided to expand the tile pool.

We expand the tile pool to give you more nice places to line with the bodies of your enemies.

The World Expansion update will give you access to ten new tiles, bringing the total up to nineteen (more than double the original number - yay!). If we do a little bit of math (a little simplified math, to be exact - we have parameters to control the generation process to get the results we want), that gives us almost three thousand possible 6x6 base map layout variants. The new tiles also feature elements that we previously had to avoid. One such example is tall rock structures that obstruct the camera view. Now, with the introduction of the camera object culler, tall structures are no longer an issue, so we can use them more freely.

We could spend a long time describing each tile, but we will let the images speak for themselves:

Holes and canyons are a big part of our new tile design approach. You can say the caves influenced us. Objects beneath the main surface of the tile are often covered by the distance fog, making the caverns feel more mysterious. It's spring, so here's a nice flower. Naturally, our first thought was to throw a grenade in there to see what happens. Some tiles are more classic. This example still offers interesting natural protection options. Not all map tiles have to be square. By making a tile like this we can, for example, create large rock structures several hundred meters in length. New tiles are not any less dangerous than the old ones, so be careful while exploring. Who made these circles? Probably aliens. Tall objects will be a much more common occurrence with the camera culler system. Here's how the culler works during building.

The Acidic Plains biome is not the only biome that’s getting special treatment with the World Expansion 2 update. We are also preparing more tiles for the other biomes - we’re just not quite ready to show them off just yet. We can tell you, though, that some of them have a special purpose… If you would like to find out what it is, be on the lookout for future news and join our discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios, where you always get access to the news first!

Have a great weekend!
EXOR Studios

Today we will look at a much-requested quality-of-life improvement that will come to you as a part of the second free World Expansion update - the free part of our upcoming Into The Dark expansion. The feature in question is building ruins. Many of you let us know that rebuilding the base after a large attack is difficult and time-consuming. It is not easy to remember the exact placement of all structures, and setting everything up manually when under time pressure makes matters even less pleasant. We hope that this feature will remedy that.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2108630/The_Riftbreaker_Into_The_Dark/

You could previously see the prototype of the ruins feature during our developer streams (every Tuesday and Thursday, 3 PM CEST, www.twitch.tv/exorstudios). The premise is really simple - once a building is completely destroyed, it leaves behind a pile of wreckage. The wreckage can be identified either by selecting it in build mode, where it will display the name of the original building, or by the visuals. Each building has a custom-made wreckage model to make identification a little easier - more on that later.

Testing destruction features is always the most fun.

Once a building is destroyed and wreckage spawns in its place, you have two options. You can use the deconstruction tool to remove the rubble completely and recover the space, or you can use the repair tool to rebuild the original structure for its full price. You can also use the mass repair/deconstruction tools to take care of multiple pieces of wreckage all at once. If you want to reconstruct multiple buildings, a tooltip will appear, informing you of the total cost of repairs. If you can’t afford the total cost of repairs, the game will try to repair as many buildings as possible instead, so you can bring your base back into shape piece by piece. Ruins have an unlimited lifetime, so you can simply come back to them whenever it is convenient for you.

Less time spent on repairs = more time spent on upgrades!

Naturally, modeling ruins for all buildings in the game would have taken a long time, and using a generic model for all structures would make identification very difficult. To speed the process up, we used Houdini. It’s a tool suite that uses procedural generation to let artists quickly iterate on their models, create visual effects, and much more. In our case, one of the artists created a specialized setup that can remove large parts of building models from The Riftbreaker in a matter of minutes. Here’s how it works.

We swear, this is work, it's not just fun.

First, we import the Blender building model into the specialized Houdini setup. The base part of the setup is a very large cube (large enough to cover all individual building models we have in the game). The bottom surface of the cube is irregular instead of flat. That is because the bottom surface is where the actual ‘cutting’ process will take place. When the bottom of the cube reaches the top of the building model, polygons are automatically removed.

Before and after the procedurally-generated destruction.

The artist can control at what height they want to cut the building. Houdini automatically generated the new geometry that covers the wreckage surface. That surface is then covered with a ‘burnt metal’ texture. When the artist is happy with the result, they export the new wreckage model to Blender for a final touch-up. Thanks to all this, a monotonous process that would take weeks for all buildings in the game can be completed within a couple of days.

As we slide the cube further down, more parts of the building disappear.

This feature will arrive to you as a part of the next large free game update. It will work even on saved games made earlier, so you can continue your campaigns with this new option available to you. We hope you will enjoy playing with it and that you will suggest even more improvements to us. In fact, this idea came from our suggestion board: https://riftbreaker.featureupvote.com/suggestions/332558/ghost-buildings-to-show-where-destroyed-buildings-were. Don’t hesitate to post your own ideas - we carefully consider all of them! If you want to contact us directly, reach out on Discord: www.discord.gg/exorstudios.


Have a great weekend!
EXOR Studios

When we started developing our games, EXOR Studios had few choices regarding picking the right game engine. In early 2008, the commercial solutions were out of our reach because of their prohibitive costs, while free engines offered only some of the features we needed. Thus, we decided to develop our technology based on multiple open-source solutions, including the OGRE 3D render system. This allowed us to build games precisely how we wanted to. As years progressed and we moved from one project to another, the Schmetterling Engine slowly began to take shape and eventually evolved into the complete framework we use today.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A making-of video of our first game, Zombie Driver. You can see how it all started for us those 15 years ago!

Developing your engine comes with many difficulties. You can’t refer to any documentation or expect bugs to be fixed by someone else - you’re on your own. On the other hand, you are free to implement solutions that your game will benefit from. We have already told you about some of the new additions to the Schmetterling Engine we implemented for The Riftbreaker. Raytraced Shadows and Ambient Occlusion, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS are just a few of them. Today we would like to discuss a significant improvement coming to the engine - Tiled Deferred Shading. This cryptic-sounding technique opens the door for improvements and new features in The Riftbreaker. We’d like to talk about how this new technique works, but first, we need to discuss some basics about shading in general.

[h2]Deferred Shading[/h2]

There are several ways you can approach computer graphics rendering. The available ideas and techniques vary considerably, resulting in unique requirements, advantages, and disadvantages for each one. Our earliest project - Zombie Driver, used forward rendering. In this technique, the scene is rendered by drawing each object in the scene one by one. Each object is rendered with its own set of material properties, such as color, transparency, and reflectivity. Lighting is applied to each object in the scene as it is rendered, calculating the contribution of each light source to the final color of each pixel on the surface of the object being rendered.

In Zombie Driver we used forward rendering. We were limited to using only one light per scene. None of the particle effects you can see in this picture emit any light. We faked the highlights with additive alpha particles - smoke and mirrors ;)

It sounds simple enough, but it has a major disadvantage - to ensure correct results, contributions from all lights need to be taken into account per each pixel on the screen. If the scene is lit by only one light source, it can be quite quick. However, when you add more lights, things can get complicated. Even if a pixel is fully occluded and is not lit by any of the light sources on the screen, the forward rendering method will calculate the lighting for that pixel anyway. We will learn that it is occluded only after computing the lighting for that pixel, and all that computational time will be wasted. This is why we have been using a more efficient technique called Deferred Shading in our later projects, X-Morph: Defense and The Riftbreaker. It excels in handling multiple light sources, which allows us to create scenes with many dynamic lights without sacrificing performance.

The primary advantage of deferred shading is treating the scene geometry and its lighting separately. In the first stage of the shading process, only the 3D geometry of the scene is rendered. The resulting information about each pixel's position, surface normal, and material properties is stored in the geometry buffer - or G-buffer, for short. In the shading stage, the lighting and shading calculations are performed using the information stored in the G-buffer. Lighting is calculated using the previously collected data stored in the G-buffer. With all the geometry data available at this point, lights are computed only for those pixels which they actually affect. We can also calculate complex post-processing effects such as ambient occlusion, temporal anti-aliasing, and upscaling thanks to all the information stored in the G-buffer.

The use of deferred lighting in X-Morph: Defense allowed us to use multiple light sources. In night scenarios, scenes are only lit by additional lights - there is no directional lighting present on this scene.

The current G-buffer layout in The Riftbreaker looks like this:

float3 GBuffer0 // Albedo (xyz),
float3 GBuffer1 // World Space Normal (xyz)
float3 GBuffer2 // Occlusion (x), Roughness (y), Metalness (z)
float3 GBuffer3 // Emissive (xyz)
float3 GBuffer4 // SubsurfaceScattering (xyz)
float2 GBuffer5 // Velocity (xy)
float GBuffer6 // Depth

However, deferred shading also has some limitations. Reading and writing to the G-buffer takes some time, which can be a major downside when it comes to lower-spec hardware. It also does not scale well with high numbers of lights on the scene. Still, the most glaring issue for us regarding The Riftbreaker is transparency. Deferred shading can’t handle transparent objects. The fact that the technique relies on the g-buffer information means that all things that are not opaque can’t be used for lighting calculations since the buffer doesn’t store any information about non opaque geometry. This is one of the reasons why we decided to upgrade our renderer to use Tiled Deferred Shading.

[h2]Tiled Deferred Shading[/h2]

Tiled Deferred Shading is an evolution of the Deferred Shading algorithm. The screen is divided into a grid of tiles, in our case, 16x16 pixels each. Each screen tile holds information about light indexes that affect that tile. This data is later used for light computation for opaque and non-opaque objects.

A debug view of a scene from The Riftbreaker with Tiled Deferred Shading enabled. The tile grid is visible. In this view, the color of the tile tells us how many lights affect the tile. The closer it is to red, the more lights affect a tile. It's essentially a heatmap.

We didn't joke about the heatmap thing.

The benchmark scene we used to test this technique. You can see how lights change in real time.

The algorithm for this process is:

1. G-buffer pass - Draw all opaque geometry.
   
2. Compute tile frustums - prepare frustums individually per tile depending on the buffer minimum/maximum depth.
   
3. Culling lights pass - use frustums to check if the light overlaps the tile and insert its index to the light index list.
   
4. Compute light shading for opaque objects - Use G-Buffer and prepared lights list for a single pass screen space light computation.
   
5. Compute light shading for non-opaque objects - Draw each non-opaque object and compute light shading per pixel only for lights that belong to the tile.
   

In higher resolutions the tile grid becomes more dense, allowing more precise calculations and much greater granulation.

The main advantage of this approach over the Deferred Shading we used up to this point is much higher efficiency. Traditional Deferred Shading has to access the G-buffer individually for each light source during the lighting pass The Tiled Deferred algorithm allows us to read the G-buffer only once for all light sources.

For contrast, in lower resolutions, the grid loses its precision.

The additional processing required for culling lights can add some overhead to the rendering pipeline on scenes with just a few light sources. In The Riftbreaker’s example, this is typically overcome in situations with more lights, such as bases with large numbers of defensive towers. The increased speed of completing the lighting pass becomes clearly apparent in those instances.

[h2]Results[/h2]
In recent tests we conducted on The Riftbreaker, we observed that implementing tiled deferred shading resulted in a significant increase in performance. Specifically, tests we ran on various hardware revealed considerable performance improvements when it comes to scenes with many additional dynamic lights. On average, The Riftbreaker ran 20% faster in scenarios with many towers, explosions, enemy units, and building lights on the screen compared to the traditional deferred shading approach.

[h3]Test case 1: static scene, adding lights manually one by one.[/h3]
Test platform: Ryzen 5600X, 32GB DDR4, Nvidia RTX 3080, Win11, 4K

This is what the synthetic multi-light test scenario looked like.

Synthetic multi-light benchmark scene results. In scenarios with more than 100 lightsources Tiled Deferred Rendering provides an almost 100% FPS boost!

You can see the tiles changing color as we turn sets of lights off.

[h3]Test case 2: In-game CPU benchmark mode.[/h3]
Results presented are the average of 2 runs.

The test scene without the debug overlay.

"Benchmark CPU" testing results on three sample configurations. This benchmark is not perfect for testing this rendering method because it focuses primarily on CPU overhead. However, even in this case, we can report visibly better performance results.

[h2]Conclusions and future works[/h2]
Tiled Deferred Rendering has allowed us to save a lot of CPU processing power in The Riftbreaker. This technique will make it easier to maintain high, stable frame rates, or if you’re already running the game above your monitor’s refresh rate, it will reduce the strain on your GPU and will lower your electricity bill - everybody wins! You will be able to start enjoying its benefits as soon as the World Expansion 2 free update reaches your hard drives.

Thanks to the changes we have introduced to the Schmetterling Engine, exciting new possibilities have become available for use in The Riftbreaker and our future projects. With tiled deferred shading, we can now add support for transparency and particle light shading or even go for something much bigger like volumetric fog support. We believe that these improvements will positively affect the player's reception of the game and give our artists more creative freedom when it comes to designing levels and effects.

We hope you enjoyed this deeper dive under the hood of the Schmetterling Engine and The Riftbreaker. We are really excited with the possibilities unfolding before us, and we hope to start using the new tech as soon as possible. Join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios to keep up with all the development news. Remember to post your ideas and suggestions at riftbreaker.featureupvote.com!

See you next time!
EXOR Studios

P.S. During the last developer stream on Twitch we managed to finish a full Survival run in co-op, running a dedicated server in headless mode. We're making progress! Join us on Tuesday at 3PM CEST at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios for the next one!