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:
- creating a backup copy of your save folder (Documents/The Riftbreaker)
- 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.
The Riftbreaker - Experimental Branch - October 26th, 2021 Executable #350, Package #72
- 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