The Riftbreaker News

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

Hello Riftbreakers!

The week from releasing The Riftbreaker has been a ground breaking and humbling experience for our small studio. More than two hundred thousand Riftbreakers decided to purchase the game and jump through the portal to Galatea 37. Thank you for supporting us!

This number has by far surpassed our expectations and will allow us to continue supporting and expanding the game with new features and content. The feedback that we've been receiving from all of you has been incredible and will help us shape the game for the better during the weeks and months to come.

We are currently working hard to address all of the issues that are being reported through all of our communication channels. Aside from the necessary fixes we are also working on a number of quality of life improvements including new ways of quickly repairing/upgrading large numbers of buildings, better weather event balancing, improved Hard and Brutal Campaign mode balancing and more. Our artists have already started work on a completely new biome that will surprise you with new creatures and gameplay mechanics.

Last, but not least, we can confirm that we are starting work on an online coop multiplayer game mode. This is a very challenging task and will take at least 6-12 months to complete. We will be sure to start early tests as soon as we we have it playable, so stay tuned for future community updates.

Thank you for all of your support!

EXOR Studios

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios