The Riftbreaker News

The Riftbreaker is a very open-ended game. There is no right or wrong way to play. As long as you can sustain the economy of your base and withstand the enemy attacks, you can do whatever you like. You are free to use any of the available power sources, protect the base with a variety of defensive towers, and run any side projects you might come up with, like cultivating plants. There are also plenty of cosmetic elements, allowing you to decorate your base and make it truly yours. However, we felt that we could do better in the decorations area - so this is what today’s update is all about.



The Riftbreaker Summer update brings you five distinct sets of decorative items (that's 124 individual new items!) you will be able to unlock by progressing through the game’s Story Campaign and Survival Modes. In this article, we will go over these sets one by one and explain what you need to do to unlock the new items. As usual - these are permanent unlocks that will stay with your player account forever. If you have already completed the unlock requirements for any of them, we will grant the awards to you retroactively. We also have a small competition for you - details further in the news.

[h2]SCI-FI STRUCTURES SET[/h2]



The first World Expansion for the Riftbreaker introduced Alien Structures. It was a set of buildings inspired by the X-Morph technology. It could be used as a reminder of Ashley’s visit to the Metallic Valley biome and her first encounter with extraterrestrial civilization. You told us that you liked those structures, so we decided to do a little follow-up. Sci-fi Structures are a set of buildings of various shapes and sizes. Their modular nature allows you to arrange them in any way you like. You can either fill an empty space in your HQ with just a couple of these buildings or create a megastructure to serve as the very center of your base. Sci-Fi structure sets come available in three colors. Once you unlock a set in a given color, you get access to all of its elements - there is no need to pick up all the individual elements one by one. You can unlock these decorations by completing all the Outpost missions in the Main Campaign. The Acidic Plains outpost will get you the green set, the Volcanic Area outposts will grant you the white set, and the Radioactive Desert - orange.

[h2]CRYSTAL STRUCTURES SET[/h2]



Cultivating and harvesting resources is one of the favorite pastimes of Riftbreakers, in breaks between saving the world and trying to survive the alien onslaught. Crystals can be cultivated as well, and since we already have potted plants, why can’t we have crystals as well? Well, now we do. Crystal Structures gives you access to a bunch of crystalline structures in various shapes and sizes. They are conveniently packed into square boxes, making them easy to arrange. The set is available in five colors, each unlocking after completing a Survival Mode run on any difficulty level. The Metallic Valley Biome will give you the blue set, the Tropical Zone - green, the Radioactive Desert - red, the Volcanic Area - purple, and finally, the Acidic Plains will give you yellow crystals.

[h2]CRYSTAL LAMPS SET[/h2]



We decided to give you these lamps as a reward for completing the Survival Mode in the Crystal Caverns Biome. Yes - you get the entire set, all at once, with all the colors available from the start. They look incredibly cool, in our opinion. At night, when the lamps activate, the light-emitting crystal starts levitating over the base of the lamp. When active, the crystals slowly rotate, breathing a little bit more life into your base. Please, keep in mind that these structures have to be connected to power in order to work.

[h2]CRYSTAL FLOORS SET[/h2]



Taking advantage of the fact that crystal structures look great when they have a chance to reflect some light, we decided also to make a set of floors in various colors! The surface of these floors is slightly uneven, allowing the light reflections to play as you move around. In conjunction with the lamps you’ve seen above, they are guaranteed to make your base look outstanding. The Yellow and Green sets of these floors are available in the common, white Bioanomalies scattered across all Galatean Biomes. You will find the Blue, Purple, and Red sets in Bioanomalies that match their color.

[h2]FUTURE CITY SET[/h2]



This is by far the most outlandish set of decorations we have come up with. Make Ashley feel at home on Galatea 37 with these buildings, featuring the latest urban architecture trends from Earth! Gaining access to this set will give you lamp posts, billboards, fences, and other elements that can turn your base into a proper city. Since most of these buildings light up at night, they must be connected to a power source, but the effect you can get is well worth it! We think that these go really well together with Crystal Floors, as well as Sci-Fi Structures. This set is unlocked by completing the main storyline.

[h2]COMPETITION[/h2]



[h2]We can’t wait to see what you can do with these new decorative elements, so let’s have a little competition![/h2]

[h3]To enter:[/h3]

• Update your copy of The Riftbreaker to the latest version.
  
• Get access to some of the new decorations from this update. Follow the tips from the article to get them more easily.
  
• Give your base a makeover using the new structures and props.
  
• Make a screenshot or a video, upload it anywhere you like and post it in this thread for everyone to see: https://steamcommunity.com/app/780310/discussions/0/6960928795821616200/
  

[h3]The three best and most creative screenshots we receive will receive an EXOR Studios care package filled with EXOR Studios goodies and a Mr. Riggs plushie![/h3]

Don't ask how long it took us to get all of those Jurvines in their pen...

Legal stuff:
[expand]
You must be aged 18 or over at the time of entry in order to enter this competition. No purchase is necessary. You must enter the contest yourself. You must comply with the laws that apply to you in the location where you access the competition from. If any laws applicable to you restrict or prohibit you from entering the competition, you must comply with those legal restrictions or, if applicable, refrain from entering the competition. Prizes are not negotiable, exchangeable, or transferable and have no cash alternative. Physical prizes can only be delivered to locations covered by UPS. If a delivery destination is not covered by UPS, then it will not be sent out by EXOR.

The winner(s) will be selected by a panel of judges based on creativity, originality and the highest quality. The decision of the panel is final.

The Organiser does not claim any rights of ownership in your competition entry. By submitting your entry, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and irrevocable right to use, display, publish, transmit, copy, edit, alter, store, re-format, and sub-license the competition entry and any accompanying materials for our marketing or other commercial purposes.
[/expand]

That’s not all - this update also contains more fixes and optimizations (as always), so here’s the full changelog:

[h3]The Riftbreaker Summer Update Changelog:[/h3]

• Added a new set of decorations: Sci-Fi Structures. They come in three sets with different colors. You can unlock each color set individually by completing Desert, Acid and Magma branches of the Story Campaign.
  
  
• Added a new set of decorations: Crystal Structures. They come in five sets of different colors. You are awarded one color set after completing Survival Runs - one after each biome, except Crystal Caverns.
  
  
• Added a new set of decorations: Crystal Floors. They are available in 5 different colors. Each color is unlocked individually through Bioanomaly drops.
  
  
• Added a set of new decorations: Crystal Lamps. They are available in various colors. The entire set is unlocked after completing Crystal Caverns Survival.
  
  
• Added a set of new decorations: Future City. This set includes street lamps, vending machines, arcades, fences, billboards and advertising boards. The entire set is unlocked after completing the main branch of the Story Campaign.
  
  
• Added Crystal and Laser Gates of all levels to match their corresponding wall sets.
  
  
• Fixed an issue that could potentially block player's progress in Metal Terror DLC Story Missions.
  
• Changed the sound effects for discovering new species and completing research to differentiate those events from objectives appearing on the HUD.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused some Floating Mine launchers to place mines of the wrong type.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused Wall ruins to appear too tall and could be mistaken for being intact.
  
• Fixed teleport exploits on the Anoryx Worm boss arenas
• Fixed the lighting on some Boss level tiles
• Tweaked the Dust Storm and Fog weather events to work better with volumetric fog.
  
• Tweaked the lighting effects on some props to work better with the volumetric fog.
  
• Minor fixes and optimizations.
  

We are also working on the third World Expansion for The Riftbreaker. As the programmers take care of everything on the co-op front, the graphics and design teams are working on new content for you to enjoy. We don’t have a lot of information available at the time, but you can see what features you can expect from the World Expansion III on the Steam Page we have set up. It would mean the world to us if you added it to your wishlist. Click here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2506610/The_Riftbreaker_World_Expansion_III/?beta=0

EXOR Studios

We have just updated the experimental branch with the latest build that contains our Summer Update. It adds a multitude of new cosmetic item sets that will allow you to personalize your bases and give them a slightly different feel. The patch also addresses some bugs and things that we glossed over previously. The full changelog is available below.

This update is (most likely) incompatible with any current mods. Please remove all mods before playing. MAKE SURE TO MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR SAVE FILES! Make a copy of 'The Riftbreaker' folder from your documents and keep it safe.

[h3]With all these warnings out of the way, here’s how to access the experimental branch:[/h3]

1. create a backup copy of your save folder (Documents/The Riftbreaker)
   
2. disable Steam Cloud save backup for The Riftbreaker
   
3. go to your Steam Library
   
4. right-click on The Riftbreaker
   
5. select 'Properties,’ then 'Betas,’ and use the following password: IknowWhatImDoing
   

After that, you will be able to choose 'experimental' from the drop-down menu. Download the update, play the game, and let us know if you encounter any issues. We also have a channel on our Discord: #rb-experimental-feedback - we highly encourage you to join in and share your feedback.

[h2]The Riftbreaker World Expansion II Experimental Summer Update Changelog:[/h2]

• Added a new set of decorations: Sci-Fi Structures. They come in three sets with different colors. You can unlock each color set individually by completing Desert, Acid, and Magma branches of the Story Campaign.
  
• Added a new set of decorations: Crystal Structures. They come in five sets of different colors. You are awarded one color set after completing Survival Runs - one after each biome, except Crystal Caverns.
  
• Added a new set of decorations: Crystal Floors. They are available in 5 different colors. Each color is unlocked individually through Bioanomaly drops.
  
• Added a set of new decorations: Crystal Lamps. They are available in various colors. The entire set is unlocked after completing Crystal Caverns Survival.
  
• Added a set of new decorations: Future City. This set includes street lamps, vending machines, arcades, fences, billboards, and advertising boards. The entire set is unlocked after completing the main branch of the Story Campaign.
  
• Added Crystal and Laser Gates of all levels to match their corresponding wall sets.
  
• Changed the sound effects for discovering new species and completing research to differentiate those events from objectives appearing on the HUD.
  
• Updated Intel XeSS to version 1.2 - improved image quality, reduced upscaling artifacts
  
• Fixed an issue that caused some Floating Mine launchers to place mines of the wrong type.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused Wall ruins to appear too tall and could be mistaken for being intact.
  
• Fixed teleport exploits on the Anoryx Worm boss arenas
• Fixed the lighting on some Boss level tiles
• Tweaked the Dust Storm and Fog weather events to work better with volumetric fog.
  
• Tweaked the lighting effects on some props to work better with the volumetric fog.
  
• Minor fixes and optimizations.
  

Hello Riftbreakers!

With each of the World Expansions we release, we try to address some of the problems and quality-of-life concerns you tell us in the comments and on our Discord. One such issue was the lack of technology that would allow you to supply your smaller outposts with power from your main base. We decided to give you the tools to fix that problem in World Expansion II. Let’s talk about Energy Pylons today and why we decided to intervene in this case.



Before the introduction of the Energy Pylons technology, the only way of powering outposts using your main grid was by building long power lines using energy connectors. It was not the most convenient solution. Sometimes, a random pack of Kermons (or any other aggressive creatures) would get absolutely enraged by the mere presence of your connectors in their territory and go on a power line-killing rampage. Then, you would have to go and look for the exact spot where the line got broken and repair it manually. Because such things happened quite often, you could feel like your power lines need constant babysitting. That’s a play pattern that we would rather avoid.



Some players chose to make their outposts independent. They built localized power grids to support both factories and their defenses. This solution requires a lot more work and resources since you need to protect everything you’ve built from any creatures that might come knocking at your door. Even then, having many disconnected outposts might be a liability. If you are unlucky enough and an attack wave finds your small outpost on its way to your headquarters, a basic defensive setup might not be sufficient, and installing advanced towers is often not an option due to energy requirements.



The Energy Pylon technology allows you to have the best of both worlds. This structure allows you to connect to the main power grid of your base regardless of the distance on the map. You simply set up one Pylon in your main base and additional ones wherever you want to receive the power. All buildings that you connect to that secondary Pylon will automatically draw power from your main power grid, allowing you to set up an outpost with all the necessary facilities and all the defenses on top of that without worrying about the power. This makes outposts much smaller in size and easier to defend since even the most expensive towers, like Laser Gatling Towers, drawing 500 energy per second or more, will become a viable option.



This technology is also very convenient when the building space is limited. Energy Pylons do not care about any obstacles between them, allowing you to use them even in areas with tall cliffs, trees, or even underground. They are a great way of powering up distant resource factories in the Crystal Caverns biome. Best of all - there is absolutely no limit to how many Pylons you can place. You can build up new ones wherever you want. Just make sure to have enough power generation going in your main base, as the upkeep cost can ramp up pretty quickly if you are not careful. Energy pylons use up quite a lot of power themselves, and placing them is an investment. You don’t want your investment to go down in flames, don’t you?

What do you think about Energy Pylons? Do you think they are priced well? Should we consider any improvements? Or perhaps they’re too powerful? Let us know in the comments. We’re also waiting for your feedback and ideas on our Discord server at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. See you there!

We have just published a small patch containing fixes for issues reported by the players. This version of the game contains a large portion of the game's code refactored with multiplayer in mind. While the co-op update is still away, we want to get that code out to players ahead of time.

[h3]The Riftbreaker Maintenance Update, 24th July 2023. EXE: 839 DATA: 446. Changelog:[/h3]

• Fixed an issue that caused some units to ignore the player or disappear completely in the NavMeshMovementSystem flow fields generation. Flowfields don't cull cells if the distance is too large. Before the fix it took the lowest possible collision, which generated problems if we had terrain underground.
  
• Fixed creature spawn in liquid volume spawners that overlapped terrain e.g. in the Morphium Lakes mission.
  
• Improved the GraphicsCmd memory allocator, resulting in lower GPU memory usage.
  
• Added LifeTimeComponent to fallen tree trunks, making them disappear after some time.
  
• Fixed an error that caused dialog texts not to scroll in some languages.
  
• Fixed a problem in TransformSystem that caused the player's weapons to sometimes spawn in the 0,0 location.
  
• Fixed a crash in GUI when displaying a certain font style.
  
• Fixed a crash in GuiScrollList::CreateButtons method.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented players from accessing the Mods menu due to a text popup about Mod.io integration.
  
• Fixed problems with in-game videos threading.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the TimeOfDay system to get desynchronized when jumping between maps, causing all lights to be off at night.
  
• Modding - moved all DLC2 boss content from the DLC2 package to the main package to make it available for modding.
  
• Optimizations and fixes for many small elements of the game and its engine.
  
• Reduced the install size of the game by about 500 megabytes.
  

EXOR Studios

Once again, it’s time to share some news about the development of The Riftbreaker co-op mode. When we released the last article, we told you about the major breakthrough that allowed us to test this game mode with more than two players simultaneously. We told you our next optimization targets and how we aimed to reduce the data transferred between the game’s server and its client PCs. This time we will tell you what we have been doing over the past few months, what improvements we made, and what comes next.

Our previous articles are available here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3381659291157676103?l=english
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/780310/view/3701435238673426124?l=english



[h3]EntityComponentSystem Optimizations[/h3]

Much of our work has gone into optimizing the EntityComponentSystem, or ECS, for short. It is responsible for storing data about all in-game objects. The properties of almost everything you see in The Riftbreaker are stored within the ECS structures - the amount of HP enemies have, the light emitted by particles, the destruction system of buildings, and many more. It is a genuinely massive part of the game, so it is no surprise that we can find many places to improve within its code. Our current form of ECS in the game has been created with single-player gameplay in mind. The data for all entities are stored at all times. When an entity is visible or otherwise relevant to the gameplay, it is held in memory for immediate access. If an object is temporarily not used for any calculations, its data is packed and kept for later reference. The Riftbreaker is a huge game, so the amount of data the ECS has to handle is quite substantial. As we told you last time, large data structures are not desirable for multiplayer, where every byte of transfer and every millisecond count.

Thus we began the great work of rewriting the EntityComponentSystem, one component at a time, to optimize it for co-op scenarios. We have been working tirelessly, deciding which components have to stay on the server and be synchronized with the client PCs and which elements can remain solely at the client PC’s discretion. As we told you last time, we aim to keep things that are irrelevant to the gameplay state on clients only. However, with as many as 291 components to check, verify, and potentially rewrite, it still is a massive undertaking. However, we have made a lot of progress already, and we are sure that we will be able to enjoy the benefits of it very soon.



[h3]Minimap Rework[/h3]

One of the main problems we encountered while playtesting the Riftbreaker in co-op mode was something that you could see during our dev streams (yeah, we stream co-op gameplay fairly regularly! Tuesday and Thursdays, 3 PM CEST at twitch.tv/exorstudios. Co-op streams don’t happen every time, but we try to show off our progress as often as possible.) was the broken minimap. The map would only show the player what they discovered themselves. Whatever your co-op partners found or built would not show up until you went there by yourself. Moreover, some objects outright refused to show up entirely - for example, resource deposits. This seems like not a big deal, but in reality, it made terrain orientation really tricky. It was also almost impossible to tell where attacks would come from, as their markers did not show up either. The only means of communication and marking places of interest was placing Rift Portals. While placing Portals next to valuable spots is generally okay, more was needed for players to enjoy the game.

With that in mind, we decided to rework the minimap from the ground up. The new minimap will collect data individually gathered from all players, combine all information into one on the server and then distribute a copy for each player. This way, we can ensure that every party member has access to the same knowledge at all times, making coordination and planning much more manageable. Reworking the minimap system also allows us to introduce performance optimizations. The minimap might not be the most breathtaking feature, but it’s resource-intensive. Every object marked on the map is a separate draw call for the GPU. With thousands of units, hundreds of bullets, and dozens of buildings appearing simultaneously, the cost of rendering the minimap grows quite drastically. Luckily, now is when we can make significant changes and reduce the strain on your PC’s resources.



[h3]The Sound of Silence[/h3]

When it came to sounds in our early tests of The Riftbreaker’s multiplayer, the experience was hit-and-miss. During one session, you would hear all sounds playing back fine, and during others, nothing. Sometimes, you would hear sounds only if another player was hanging around in the vicinity of your screen. The problems resulted from the way we handled spatial sounds. The implementation was fine - but again, it was made with single-player gameplay in mind. Here’s a short breakdown of how the sound system in The Riftbreaker works and what we did in order to fix the problems we encountered.

We used so-called ' ears ' to simulate the effect of various sound effects coming from different parts of the screen (or entirely off-screen). Think of those ‘ears’ as a set of microphones attached to the game’s camera, each recording the sounds from the direction it is facing. When a sound is being played, we check whether it can reach one of the ears. Then, the sound’s distance from the ear would determine its volume and placement in the dimensional mix of the entire soundscape of the game. It is also worth noting that the mixing algorithm depends on a user’s sound system - it’s different for stereo headphones and for a 7.1 surround sound setup. In a multiplayer setting, the information coming from the ears of all the client machines mixed and resulted in various errors. The solution that we used in single-player was clearly insufficient.

To combat this issue and reduce unnecessary data transfers, we decided to handle sound information on the server side and send complete sound mix information to the client. Based on the position of each client’s ears, the server prepares information about all the sounds that should be audible for that player and sends it as a complete set of instructions. The only thing that’s left for the client to do is to play back the sounds from the disk. This means we won’t have to play with no sounds during our Twitch streams soon!



[h3]TurretSystem[/h3]

While looking for potential candidates for further optimizations, the TurretSystem caught our attention. This system handles all the operations of defensive towers you place in your base during your gameplay. It takes care of aiming, shooting, and checking if enough ammo or energy is available for the tower to take a shot. We discovered that the calculation costs related to this system rose unexpectedly high when the player had many towers in their base. We expected the system to take up more resources for huge bases with hundreds of towers, but the numbers we saw did not match up with our calculations. We dug deeper.

Upon further investigation, we found out that the TurretSystem was optimized well, and we did not spot any immediate errors or places where we could make improvements. Clearly, it was not where the problem lay. Then, we decide to check all the systems that interact with turrets. This is finally when we got to the root of the problem. It turns out that the ResourceManager, the system that was responsible for checking if the towers had enough ammunition to operate, would take up as much as 10 milliseconds of calculation time per frame due to a bug. This problem was introduced when we refactored the resource system to handle resources appropriately for multiple players (e.g. each player’s ammunition is handled separately). When we fixed that bug, the time dropped from the dreadful 10ms to a much more reasonable 0.4ms. This is a great example of how expanding the game engine to support multiple players can drastically decrease performance and what we have to do to combat this type of problem. While working on adding multiplayer support, one of the most difficult, most time-consuming, and always ongoing tasks is to optimize the code in such a way that it runs at least as fast as single-player code.



[h3]Saves Work Too![/h3]

One more thing that we have been working on is the save system. After a couple of hard weeks of work, we implemented our first version of this system into the co-op version of The Riftbreaker. In its current form, it is quite simple and far from what it will be in the final version - please bear that in mind. Currently, the server saves only the state of the world and the ongoing missions. It does not store any information about the players, meaning that when we load a saved game on the server and connect to it with one of the clients, we are treated as a completely new player. Saving player progression and establishing an interface for reconnecting players is something that is still left to be done..

One of the main problems with testing unfinished products is the lack of stability. The server can crash anytime for any reason, ending our playtest on the spot. While some crashes happen 100% of the time, and there is nothing we can do about them apart from fixing them, others occur randomly. When you test software, you want to avoid being held up waiting for a fix to an issue that does not occur 100% of the time. While we can’t load player progression at the moment, even the current state of save/load implementation is of great help to us during development. If a crash occurs, we can simply come back to the latest saved game state and try again. If we crash again, we have a great way to reproduce a bug and make it easier for a programmer to track it down. If the game doesn’t crash, we can continue looking for more potential issues and speeding up our work.

There’s still a lot of work remaining to get the save/load system to where it needs to be, but we can already claim a major milestone as the core of the mechanism is already functional.



[h3]Conclusion[/h3]

Over the course of the past few months, we managed to complete quite a few tasks and reach milestones we set for ourselves on our road to a functionally complete multiplayer build. Our programmers have laid the groundwork for the introduction of new technologies and optimizations that we have been planning for The Riftbreaker.

We have already mentioned the first of them in this article - the general-purpose optimized octree finder algorithm. An octree is a data structure where each node of the tree has exactly eight subnodes. Those subnodes can be divided further and further into more nodes. Octrees are an extremely useful tool when dealing with large, rather unorganized data sets. Dividing the data into smaller subsets significantly speeds up queries. We are currently making improvements to our current general octree search implementation that will allow us to see significant gains in various areas - both data transfers and performance. The new optimized octree organizes entity data into linear structures based on their spatial positioning. Most spatial entity queries look for entities that are close to each other, so having them close to each other within memory improves read speed and reduces CPU cache misses. Furthermore, the new algorithm is capable of returning entity component data along with the entities that are the result of the original query. Our current implementation has to divide that into separate operations, which is quite expensive. The new algorithm is very promising. However, we have to propagate its usage along all of our in-game systems to reap the benefits. It is one of the major tasks that are ongoing at the moment, and we hope to be able to report the results to you soon.



Another ‘big thing’ our programmers are working on is an entirely new dependency system within the EntityComponentSystem. Right now, when two entities make use of the same data, each of them has to create a copy of that data for ‘personal’ use, essentially wasting memory. While we are talking about sub-kilobyte numbers here, this number quickly adds up in a game like The Riftbreaker, where we often deal with hundreds of thousands of entities on one map. With this new system in place, entities will be able to share data with each other without the need to make a copy beforehand. This will reduce the amount of RAM needed by the game, make data reading quicker, and will positively impact the network transfer volumes.

We know that most of you would only like to hear the answer to a single question - when is coop going to be ready? The honest answer is that we don’t know yet. Looking back at the amount of work that we’ve poured into the online co-op, we can easily say that it already equals making a small game, and there’s already quite a bit of work to be done and a lot of unknown factors at play.



Our “immediate” goal is to achieve a stable multiplayer build with most of the game’s single-player functionality working in multiplayer through a local network. The biggest tasks that are required to achieve this milestone is - improving multiplayer CPU performance, reducing data transfer, and achieving full stability and feature parity.

As you can see, we have a clear vision and plans on how to make the co-op mode in The Riftbreaker a reality. The only thing we are asking in return is patience - we are doing our best to let you play the game with your friends as soon as possible. If you want to monitor our progress closer, visit our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios and talk to us! We’re here to answer all your questions. You can also check out our streams every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 PM CEST over at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios - we try to stream our co-op tests as often as possible.

EXOR Studios