The Riftbreaker News

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Hello Riftbreakers!

It is our greatest pleasure to announce that The Riftbreaker is officially out of Alpha! We have completed the entire game’s structure and it’s playable from start to finish, which makes it… A BETA! To celebrate this fact, we are rolling out a new update to both our testers in the closed Beta and the generally available Prologue. The update has some sweet new tech, some of which you have never seen before. Let’s dive into the contents of this patch.



First of all, we are thrilled to tell you that as of today The Riftbreaker supports the brand-new AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution technique (or FSR, for short). FSR is a technique that allows the game to render at a lower internal resolution and then upscales the image to your chosen resolution. FSR reconstructs the image to maintain as much quality as possible, and we think it does it really well. You can test it yourselves using one of 4 available presets - Performance, Balanced, Quality and Ultra Quality, all of which have different rendering resolutions. We’ve seen great results with this technique and encourage you to tell us how this option affected your FPS. FSR works on all GPUs, regardless of the manufacturer (AMD, Nvidia, Intel, or anything else that can run the game). This image upsampling technique is especially great if you want to run The Riftbreaker with raytracing effects enabled at very high resolutions or if you have a lower tier GPU that doesn’t run the game at 60FPS. Fidelity FX Super Resolution is available in both DX11 and DX12 rendering paths.



Another technological novelty that we are adding to the game is temporal anti-aliasing (TXAA). This technique uses temporal information to reduce the effect of ‘jagged edges’ that sometimes occurs during gameplay. The result is a very sharp, defined and detailed image at almost no cost. TAA is now the default anti-aliasing option for The Riftbreaker. It looks a lot better than FXAA that we used before and we think you are going to like it, too!



Apart from these new features, this patch also brings a lot of smaller changes to gameplay and balance. The full list of these changes is available at the end of this post. Please note that most of these changes affect only the Closed Beta version of The Riftbreaker, but the two most important ones - FSR and TAA are also available in The Riftbreaker: Prologue - available for free.

• We are super happy to announce that this version of The Riftbreaker supports the brand new AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution technique. We have 4 different presets available - try them out and see how it affects the framerates and image quality. We are very happy with the results, and adding this technique is highly beneficial to players with less powerful PCs. Oh - it works on all GPUs.
  
• Temporal Anti Aliasing (TXAA) - We have added a temporal anti-aliasing technique to the game. It looks infinitely better than FXAA. This setting is always enabled.
  
• Automated Crafting is back - you no longer need to go to the crafting screen in the middle of the fight to get more grenades. The armory produces them for you at a constant rate.
  
• Added Statistics screen with lots of gameplay stats. It's not the final version, it looks bad, but it's functionally sound
  
• The headquarters are indestructible when being built for the first time.
  
• Optimized CPU usage, especially for longer playthroughs.
  

• Advanced resource veins have been added to survival mission (Uranium, Palladium, Titanium, Cobalt). You are guaranteed to have all rare resources available to you during each survival run.
  
• Completely rebalanced weapon and building costs.
  
• Added working Power Fists, Spears and Hammers. They are OP and unpolished, but you can try them out!
  
• Reduced wind turbine cost and increased performance - 40 carbonium, 12 energy per second. They're viable now!
  
• Comms hub lvl 4 and lvl 5 added - you can now upgrade it and set up a new hub after each HQ upgrade.
  
• Building limit added to ammunition storage.
  
• Repair consumable cooldown is reduced from 30 to 25.
  
• Added support for different cost values in different game modes to balance the survival and campaign.
  
• New models for small buildings - wind turbines, solar panels, energy storage, pumps.
  
• Massive number of balance tweaks in weapons and weapon mods.
  
• All upgraded weapons consume more ammo to match their power.
  
• Mods and upgraded statistics are more balanced (damage output) - some have been buffed, some have been nerfed.
  
• Rare element mine is less effective.
  
• Bestiary has been renamed to database, as it contains much more info than just animal descriptions.
  
• Click-and-drag wall-building has been tweaked to support longer walls and to get around corners a little better.
  
• Changes to resource drop rate types for some props with new group features.
  
• Sword slash ribbon now follows the actual model and can be used in other types of melee weapons - it's parametric now.
  
• Attachments with level numbers added to many buildings for easier identification.
  
• A lot of missing particle effects have been added to buildings.
  
• Inventory Screen tooltips improved in many places.
  
• New version of damage resist - if the player tries to melee an enemy invulnerable to physical damage, they will get staggered.
  
• The player can get stunned if they're hit really hard. Watch out!
  
• Improved effect for invisibility.
  
• Minerals are now mined in smaller chunks - 1 unit instead of 5. The rate stays the same - you still get 1 unit per 1 second of mining.
  
• The save button is blocked when the game is saving already.
  
• Props now get highlighted when they are hit.
  
• The mech has increased ammo storage.
  
• Reduced ammo consumption in shotgun.
  
• Updated game credits screen.
  
• A lot of cleanup for flora familiarity, specimens and localizations.
  
• Added highlight if an item is scannable.
  
• Reduced the number of gnerots on normal difficulty in survival_jungle.
  
• More resources on Hard and Brutal in Survival mode (removed negative multiplier) to compensate for fewer possible resource spawns.
  
• Minimum range added to artillery and heavy artillery towers.
  
• Reduced death penalty (funny every time)
  
• -- weapons dropped on hard 2 -> 1
  
• -- weapons dropped on brutal 3 -> 1
  
• Reduced environmental creatures' difficulty scaling on hard and brutal.
  
• Added new projectiles and effects to many new creatures.
  
• Dropped weapons are now autoequipped in the same slot they were dropped from upon pickup (if possible).
  
• Flora cultivator requires 10 water to operate.
  
• Updated crafting costs of most tech. (added advanced and rare resources to costs)
  
• Added new front drill animation to the player character (for treasure drilling)
  
• Sunrise and sunset tweaked slightly for performance reasons.
  
• Research descriptions added to all research items. Wildlife descriptions added to the database.
  
• Reworked a lot of the pipe resource system - should be a lot less buggy now.
  
• Excluded unused textures form the demo to save space.
  
• Heavy artillery now needs charged plasma to work. RIP Vinnymeta.
  
• Removed heat resistant floor from research (feature dropped).
  
• Light bloom effect has been optimized to consume less memory.
  

• New Footsteps and sounds for the mech (different floor types result in a different sound).
  
• New sounds for a lot of creatures.
  
• Mech servo sounds added.
  

• Prevent empty research queue announcement if comms hub is not built yet.
  
• Fix for frozen mech dash pose.
  
• Detect and do not load incompatible game saves in order to avoid conflicts and crashes.
  
• Fix saves with non ascii characters in the file path.
  
• Print error code in save error popup instead of an error message.
  
• Creature navigation has been cleaned up - it now works much faster and consumes less memory.
  
• Limit character number in save names.
  
• Fix minimal time value in streaming options for consistency (from 30 to 15).
  
• Fixed damage in proximity and nuclear mines - advanced, superior and extreme. They used to do the same amount of damage.
  
• Fix building after loading while saved when building. Sounds weird, but if you encountered it, you know what it was.
  
• Hundreds of bigger and smaller fixes for various issues and crashes.
  

As always, we encourage you to join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios and our stream at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. It's the best way to get fresh info on the game's development and also to get a chance for a Beta access key. (We're live right now, wink, wink)

EXOR Studios

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios

Hello Riftbreakers!

During the development cycle of the game, the schedule has to remain flexible. Some tasks take more time than others, new priority issues come up, and you never really know what the next week is going to be like. This often causes delays, which unfortunately made us miss our initial release window. On the other hand, being flexible allows us to fix things before they become an issue for end-users. It is a double-edged sword and today we’re going to tell you one such story.

Apart from being oriented the wrong way, these numbers simply didn't work really well.

The most commonly used buildings in The Riftbreaker have got separate models for each advancement level. Let’s look at them and talk about why we decided to do it.

New and improved windy bois - they got a buff, too!

The stats from almost all gameplay sessions in The Riftbreaker show very clearly that some buildings are placed en masse, far more often than others. These include basic walls, basic power plants, as well as energy storage buildings. None of them take up a lot of space on their own but seeing dozens of them in one scene is a common sight. In fact, when those buildings appear, they usually cover most of the area on the screen. That is not a problem on its own, though - it’s just the nature of these things.

There were a couple of designs for solar panels, but we decided we wanted a much more simple solution.

An issue arises when we add building upgrades into the mix. We decided not to introduce separate models for each level of a building in The Riftbreaker - we want our buildings to be easily identifiable, and if they changed their appearance with every upgrade it would be quite easy to get lost amid the chaos of your own base. Instead, we added small attachments with a level number on top of the original model - that way you can easily identify buildings that you have upgraded already. It’s easy to do in the case of large buildings, but what about the smaller ones, like walls or towers?

This is the final design of solar panel levels - really simple and effective.

All of a sudden, after upgrading your renewable energy sources, you were greeted with a field of ‘2’s or ‘3’s, according to the building level and it did not look great. In the vast majority of cases, there was no way to attach the numbers to them, so we decided to make separate models for all walls, gates, and defensive towers. Attaching numbers to Solar Panels, Wind Turbines, and Energy Storages was doable, but their tendency to appear in large groups came to bite us.

The energy storages get beefier with each level, giving you a much better sense of their capacity.

Luckily, our graphics department runs on a more relaxed schedule than the rest of us. That meant they could squeeze in a couple of extra models of buildings into their plans. It was important for us to make sure these were done in the spirit of the original models so that you could tell at a glance what the purpose of any given building is. That’s how we managed to avoid the ‘number spam’ and still allow you to know what level your buildings are with just a glance. While we were at it, we have also redone the liquid pumps, so that they get more massive with each level.

Pumps didn't really need a visual update, but hey, since we're already doing it, we might as well show them some love.

The final result. Yay or nay?

Join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios for more behind-the-scenes stories and developer insights. We also stream twice a week, where we try to answer as many questions as possible. Join us Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 PM CEST at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios.

See you next time!

www.twitch.tv/exorstudios