Hello Riftbreakers!
We have released a substantial update for our Modding Tools. It is the result of weeks of work, both ours and the work of our community, who relentlessly hunted bugs and reported them to us. This update brings improvements, fixes, and features you requested, either on our Discord, Steam forum, or Github. We hope that thanks to these, we will see even more brilliant modifications for The Riftbreaker.
The single most significant addition in this patch is the Model Editor. It’s a tool that we did not include with the previous release. It had some problems that we needed to solve first. Now that we have brought it back to its former self, you can finally have a look at it. The Model Editor gives you access to the following tools:
You can open any .ent file in the game to view the model, its animations and any associated blueprints.
- The Attachment Editor - this tool allows you to create and edit attachments for in-game entities. You can then use those attachments to add effects to a unit. If you want to make Mr. Riggs into a Christmas Tree with hundreds of lights - this is the tool you're looking for.
If you are fascinated with watching looping animations over and over again, this is the tool for you.
- The Animation Viewer - allows you to preview what the animations look like for any given unit.
And if you like watching monsters get gibbed over and over again, this is the tool for you, as well!
- The Blueprint Viewer - lists all blueprints available in any given .ent file, along with their effects and destruction simulations.
This 'simple' tree makes all the in-game animations tick. Have fun figuring it out!
- The Animation Graph Editor - okay, we'll admit it, it's still totally broken and work-in-progress. It's a black magic tool for creating and editing animation graphs. No one knows how it works, though.
Please note that The “Model Editor” name might be a little misleading. It does not allow you to change the models themselves. We make them using a different set of tools (Zbrush for sculpting, Blender for further modeling, and Substance Painter for texturing, if you’re interested).
The Editing Tools are separated from The Riftbreaker main release version. To download them, go to your Steam library, check the 'Tools' checkbox in the list on top, then find and install The Riftbreaker Tools. If you are not a Steam user, the tools are also available on our official GitHub page, right here: https://github.com/exorstudios/riftbreaker-tools/releases/tag/0.1.4950
Apart from the Model Editor being added, there are a lot more changes in this release. Here is the full changelog, divided into sections for each tool.
The Riftbreaker Editor Suite Update #2, March 4th, 2022. TC#4950 Changelog:
Tools general:
- Unified the dialog windows backend for all editors.
- The editors should no longer crash when SegoeUI font is missing from the system.
- Unified the TextEdit controls in all editors with a colored border on focus.
- File > Exit menu option should work properly now
- The editor apps should throttle when they are run in the background to prevent them from wasting CPU cycles.
- The rendering framerate will no longer exceed the detected monitor's refresh rate to prevent your RTX 3090 from becoming a space heater.
- Added the 'About' section with all credits and legal information.
- The 'About' section will open all license text in a separate text file if clicked.
- Improved font legibility for users who had DPI scaling enabled in their display settings
- Added a 'clear' button for list/tree filter input fields.
- The 'undo' and 'redo' shortcuts now work across all editors.
- Launching any of the editors will no longer hijack your hardware RGB lighting schemes.
- Performance: The application update has been moved to the main thread
- Dialog Boxes are not forced to the foreground, so they are no longer lost behind the main window
- Added a native splash screen support that replaces the ugly black window during the editor initialization phase with a not-so-beautiful (programmer quality) splash image.
- ...and tons of backend changes for future updates :)
Level Editor:
- Converted and cleaned up most dialog windows to shared backend.
- Fixed the time flow for particle simulations.
- Prevent camera zoom in/out on mouse wheel when a dialog window is open.
- validate tile name on tile creation/load ( )
- Creating a new biome from within the editor is now possible.
- You can now pin tiles as your favorites in the Open Tile dialog window.
- Purged invalid references in `File > Recent` menu entry.
- Improve 'Play Game' dialog window. You can now select mission/difficulty before launching the game (Custom difficulty customization in the future). Press the green 'play' button in the top right corner of the window, and you're in the game! This is a great solution for testing changes quickly, as it skips the main menu sequence entirely and doesn't require you to place any zip packs in the game's main folder.
- Improved 'New -> Mission tile' flow.
- When creating a new mission, the editor will automatically create a custom 'time of day' file for you, containing settings about lighting and weather effects that you can tweak to your liking.
- The newly created tiles will use the 'Jungle Survival' mission as a placeholder for their mission logic.
- Fixed a crash caused by `project_resave_tiles` action when running in non-development mode.
- Creating missions from .mapdump files is now easier. If you play The Riftbreaker and stumble upon a map you like, you can enter the console and type in: 'dump_map_layout. You can then open that file in the Level Editor. The Editor will automatically create all the necessary files for you
- Fixed an issue where the prefab list was empty after new tile creation
- Added an option that allows the editor to auto-load the last opened project on app start.
- The 'Open Level' option in the Level Editor has been renamed to 'Open Tile'.
- You can now edit the lighting settings and save custom presets directly in the Level Editor.
Riftbreaker Editor:
- Fix a crash when deleting selected nodes with external requirements.
- Research Tree now displays centering guidelines.
- The Research Editor on campaign tree save will no longer generate an additional tree for survival mode, as the trees for both campaign and survival have been separated now.
- Creating a new ResearchTree will mark it as `custom,` and when found, it will be auto-injected into the game research tree as a separate tab.
- Added support for displaying the DPS calculation in the Weapon Editor.
- Added LocalizationEditor to ease localization lookup/preview (we are missing glyphs for non-ASCII characters, so they are displayed as ???)
- Added an experimental DARK theme (add `set editor/theme 0` to editor config for preview)
Workspace Editor:
- Copying files to the workspace shouldn't corrupt files any longer.
- Editor reacts a little better to external workspace directory changes.
- More colored icons!
- Reveal in Explorer/Edit file action should be now a little more reliable.
- Fixed issues with starting external editors.
- Added an experimental DARK theme (add `set editor/theme 0` to editor config for preview).
Mission Editor:
- Removed deprecated actions from graph nodes.
We highly encourage you to leave bug reports and feature requests on our GitHub. https://github.com/exorstudios/riftbreaker-tools/releases/tag/0.1.4950 That way, we can track them easily and update you on the status of the issue. If you find GitHub hard to use, we also pay attention to the Steam Forum and the Modding section of our Discord: www.discord.gg/exorstudios. Discord is also a great place to share your mods and ask for help if you find any aspect of working with our tools troublesome. TL;DR join Discord. This is the way.
If you haven’t seen the results of our Community’s hard work yet, we highly encourage you to check out these great mods for The Riftbreaker:
https://www.nexusmods.com/theriftbreaker/mods/150
https://www.nexusmods.com/theriftbreaker/mods/122
https://discord.com/channels/423424585954754565/736688063362891860/947875706690482216
Issues closed during this milestone:
https://github.com/exorstudios/riftbreaker-tools/milestone/1?closed=1
Can't wait to see more mods!
EXOR Studios