The Riftbreaker News

Hello Riftbreakers!

First of all, a massive THANK YOU to everyone who decided to try out our experimental branch. We have managed to catch a lot of bugs early and fix them before they became an issue on the public build.

That being said, the update still needs some thorough testing and a couple of days of trials before we can call it ‘ready’. We have decided to patch the experimental branch first, to ensure that the next patch does not cause you any critical issues. If you don’t find any significant problems with it over the weekend, this will be the next public patch that we are going to push out early next week.

To join the experimental branch:

1. create a backup copy of your save folder (Documents/The Riftbreaker)
   
2. disable Steam Cloud save backup
   
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.

• Weather events such as acid rain and hail storm are now more localized and no longer deal damage to all structures. Their time has also been reduced.
  
• Added more neutral weather events to the event pool to reduce the chance of a negative event taking place.
  
• Streaming options have been enabled for the Campaign Mode.
  
• Fixed a crash that occurred while changing items in equipment slots.
  
• Fixed a crash in the SetCurrentTarget method that occurred if the targeted entity was destroyed during aiming.
  
• Fixed a crash that occurred when 'cheat_set_player_health' and 'cheat_add_resource' commands were used with invalid arguments.
  
• Fixed a crash in WeaponSystem that occurred when the owner died in the same frame as the weapon dropped.
  
• Fixed a crash that occurred when the player used interactive streaming options while on a different campaign mode map than the HQ.
  
• Fixed a crash that sometimes occurred when a Necrodon was trying to revive a unit.
  
• Fixed a crash that sometimes occurred when entering text in a Text Box.
  
• Fixed text boxes cutting off the initial characters of all entered strings.
  
• Fixed invalid memory access on the Planetary Scanner screen which could have led to memory corruption and crashes.
  
• Fixed display problems with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution while running the game in borderless window mode.
  
• Fixed Energy Connectors refusing to connect buildings to the energy grid.
  
• Fixed inventory corruption and mods disappearing when disassembling weapons with mods attached.
  
• Added support for parts and decals sinking and dissolving on quicksand.
  
• Attack Drone Towers have been tweaked to be more useful and effective.
  
• Improved collisions for many destructible props - a lot fewer props now block player movement and projectiles.
  
• Fixed destruction levels for Attack Drone Towers, Heavy Artillery, and Magnetic Stabilizers.
  
• Tweaked Corrosive Gun projectile lights to be smaller and less performance-hungry.
  
• Added auto-fire to Grenade Launcher and Floating Mines.
  
• Fixed some errors in Korean and Japanese localizations.
  
• 'Steel' will no longer appear in announcement voice lines.
  
• Added 'debug_player_inventory command to debug inventory problems in real-time.
  
• Inputs in the Inventory screen will no longer be blocked when the player has the map open and the 'cheat_minimap_teleport_on_click' command is enabled.
  
• 'cheat_minimap_teleport_on_click' now works with the minimap, too.
  
• The building destruction system has been moved from Lua script to C++.
  
• Additional developer logs have been added to state transitions requested by ControllerState to track and find the Exor::[World]::FindSystem crash.
  
• Energy lines will now connect to buildings even if they are built in an invalid spot (edge case)
  

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,
EXOR Studios

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Hello Riftbreakers,

First of all, we would like to thank you for your never-ending enthusiasm and overwhelming support for The Riftbreaker! All the bug reports, suggestions, and feedback are much appreciated and monitored daily. We're doing our best to introduce fixes and improvements as quickly as possible, but we will need some help to do that effectively.

Starting today, we are opening an official 'experimental' Steam branch of the game. All the latest patches will first make their way to the experimental branch before being pushed to the default public branch. We are doing this to ensure that the changes we introduce are safe and make the game better, not worse.

Testing the experimental branch is not for the faint of heart. Before you start messing with it, we recommend:

1. creating a backup copy of your save folder (Documents/The Riftbreaker)
   
2. disabling Steam Cloud save backup
   

These steps are meant to prevent you from losing your progress in case something goes wrong. If you are sure you want to take part in the test, go to your Steam Library, right-click on The Riftbreaker, 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. Please remember that this is entirely optional and untested! If you are unsure how to manually backup your saves and switch branches, we advise against testing the experimental branch.

The experimental branch will be updated irregularly, sometimes a few times a day and sometimes once every few days. To start off the process we have already uploaded the latest patch that we are working on, and it is ready to be tested.

[h2]The Riftbreaker - Experimental Branch - October 26th, 2021 Executable #350, Package #72[/h2]

• Added new environment tiles to the Radioactive Desert and Acidic Plains biomes improving the richness and variety of these environments.
  
• Lots of fixes and optimizations for the ResourceSystem. They can reduce CPU performance costs associated with calculating energy grids and other resources, especially in large bases, by up to 15x.
  
• Several optimizations for Acidic Yeast. It should have less of a performance impact now and take up less space in saved game states.
  
• Improved component packing and unpacking speed (improved CPU performance).
  
• The process of creating labels and bars now uses CommandBuffer to increase CPU performance.
  
• Fixed how the "Walk in the park" is triggered.
  
• Acidic Yeast and its parts got a texture upgrade.
  
• Added support for removing and recreating LuaComponent to make save files smaller.
  
• Added debug_recreate_buildings command. Use it if you encountered a bug that disconnected all your buildings from the energy grid. This command will remove and recreate all buildings and connections in your base.
  
• The game will wait for the user profile to finish saving before exiting to the desktop to prevent data loss.
  
• Added more constraints to ResourceVolumeRenderable to prevent resources from spawning in wrong spots.
  
• Initialize uninitialized member variables to prevent some issues with loading the game.
  
• Fixed camera_enable_zoom crashes with raytracing enabled.
  
• Added debug output for render window creation to give us more information in case something goes wrong.
  

Hopefully, this workflow will let us stay in touch better and show you what fixes we are currently working on. We will also start publishing daily changelogs again on our Discord to keep you up to date with the current workflow. Join us not to miss a thing: www.discord.gg/exorstudios

Have a good week!
EXOR Studios

Hello Riftbreakers,

Thanks to your feedback we managed to catch and fix another batch of errors that you've been encountering. We hope that thanks to these fixes and improvements your stay on Galatea 37 will be even more pleasant. Please remember that if you encounter a crash then send in your crash report - they really help us to efficiently fix all of the encountered errors.

• Fixed crash: Ogre::D3D12HardwareBufferManagerBase::createVertexBuffer.
  
• Improved raytracing implementation to prevent D3D12 SwapBuffers error.
  
• Fixed objectives ignoring higher level buildings - you can now build Cultivators level 2 and 3 in the rare resource missions.
  
• Added more Cryoplants to the Volcanic Area Reconaissance mission to prevent issues with finding enough specimens. If you load a save file from an older version of this map, additional Cryoplants will spawn in.
  
• Fixed crash while using Power Jump skill.
  
• Acidic Yeast Root is now untargetable by defensive towers during scanning with Research Station.
  
• Fixed campaign flow getting stuck if a player had built the Rift Station Foundation before that objective was activated.
  
• Fixed crash that would sometimes occur when spawning a new objective.
  
• Fixed deadlock that would occur if the player entered the inventory screen while the Headquarters upgrade popup was on screen.
  
• Fixed crash in SetCurrentTarget method.
  
• Fixed crash in logic flow that happened when an objective got duplicated.
  
• Launcher: added the option for textures quality change to improve performance on machines with less VRAM.
  
• Autosaves can no longer be removed.
  
• Fixed crash in OnEquipmentSlotChangedEvent
  
• Fixed infinite loading when 'Continue Game' button was clicked several times.
  
• Fixed multiple crashes on GUI scene transitions.
  
• Fixed memory corruption on equipment disassembly that would cause a crash at a random moment later during gameplay
  
• Show proper error message popup, instead of "You are trying saves that belong to different user" so we can track/fix it
  
• EffectSystem: deffer EffectComponent removal to system update, where we can be sure that no additional effects were created
  
• Fix possible logic flow data race when logic graph was disabled by external sources
  
• Audio: fixed memory corruption in AudioManager that caused the game to crash.
  
• Fixed save corruption when user deletes their old save or the whole campaign while being in-game.
  

We hope this patch will bring a noticeable improvement for those of you who have been having the above mentioned problems with the game. Our efforts are not over, though - we are still working on multiple fixes and quality of life improvements. We expect to ship the next patch at some point next week.

Thank you!
EXOR Studios