You can see all the stages of the dissolving process in slow motion.

In the last article, we touched on the subject of the system responsible for fire and burning effects in The Riftbreaker. The dissolve effect that turns the vegetation into burnt husks is one of the several that we have implemented, each with a different use case. In this case, whenever a piece of flora catches fire, we start dissolving it by gradually changing the texture from regular to burnt.


Grass + fire = ...?

The first texture you see is what you encounter in-game when the plant is in its normal state. By mixing it with the second texture, we get an imitation of the model being engulfed in flames. As it happens, the vertexes of the plant light up bright orange - simulating smoldering. We also attach some fire effects, chosen on the basis of size. After some time, all that is left is what you see in the third picture - a completely burnt version of what was there before the fire.


The parts of the tree model as they appear in the model editor. Note that all the leaves are separate parts, too!

That is, of course, not the only misfortune that can happen to the poor plants that stand in your way. Mr. Riggs has plenty of weapons that can end their existence, and we are prepared for that. The plant models are cut into a lot of smaller pieces which spawn when their parent model is destroyed. The direction in which the parts will fly after being spawned is affected by the direction of the attack that destroyed the plant to some degree, but there is also an element of randomness to it. Additional particle effects appear to imitate splinters and leaves. After all of these things take place, only a stump is left in the ground.


The parts do not spawn in the same order every time, which adds to the variety.

That’s all we have for you today. Remember to join our Discord server - you can ask us anything at any time and give us your feedback and thoughts. www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/pl/poshanguishedhoneybee

Hi!

There are a lot of things that go into creating a realistic environment. We always want our game worlds to feel as if they were real and there were actual physical forces affecting everything around the player. Today we are going to show you what it takes to achieve such a feeling by taking a look at our vegetation and the systems that affect it. This is a larger topic, so we will divide it into smaller pieces. We highly encourage you to check out all the high-resolution versions of the GIFs, as you'll be able to see all the details more clearly!


HI-res: https://gfycat.com/oldfashionedmildagouti

First of all - the grass. While it might not seem like much, walking around the world filled with tufts of grass certainly beats a simple texture that only tries to imitate it. Our level designers have various models to choose from, but in general, they are divided into categories based on their size. We distinguish between small, medium, large and very large models. The size obviously changes the look and feel of the area the grass is placed in, but the size is relevant also because of the forces that we apply to it - wind, bending, and shockwaves.

Let’s take a look at each of those forces one by one, starting with the wind. Our engine currently allows us to place two kinds of wind forces on the scene - local and global. Local wind only affects objects in a specific radius. An example of such a wind force is a tornado. Here’s an example, where you can clearly see the limit of the tornado’s effect on the grass:


Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/deadbrilliantibizanhound

Global wind, on the other hand, affects all the entities on the scene. It is responsible for all the swaying that occurs naturally, without any outside interference. Regardless of the wind type, it is regulated by a whole lot of parameters, which allow us to simulate the flow of air. Without going into much detail, using a whole set of functions we can get a slightly different wind direction and strength in various points of the map. You can see these represented by vectors on the gifs.


Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/threadbarebiodegradableeuropeanfiresalamander

Shockwaves come into the picture whenever something explodes (and you know how we feel about explosions). Shockwaves come in two flavors as well. The first one is instant. It applies the force to all objects within a radius of the explosion. The amount of force and the radius depend on the size of the explosion. The other type of shockwave is called physical shockwave. It is a separate effect, and occurs after the instant shockwave takes place. It takes the form of a ring that increases in diameter over time, affecting the grass tufts further away from the center of the explosion.


Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/activegregariousairedale

The bending force bends the vegetation away from the source, which can be any entity that has the BendingComponent in its properties. We apply this component to things like the mech, enemies, and bigger projectiles, such as rockets. The strength of the bending force gets progressively weaker with the distance from the source. The example below shows you the vectors of the bending force and the affected sphere.


Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/diligentimprobablebettong

Of course, if we applied wind, bending and, shockwaves together at once we would only get a glitchy mess as a result, as they would clash against each other. Instead of that, whenever game logic gets updated, we take a weighted average of all the forces, giving them a different factor of importance. The result of this operation is then applied to the vegetation. Based on this, plants in The Riftbreaker can exist in 3 states:

Idle - no forces other than the wind affect the entity,
Bending - when a bending force is currently being applied by another object
Recovering - the bending force is no longer being applied and the object is returning to the idle state.

Science time!. In order to achieve the effects of the grass swaying in the wind and its springiness, we need to apply some math. We approximate the restoring force by using this function:


Source: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/qkuac3balu

The bending effect is, in turn, a vertex shader. It manipulates the vertex of the object and bends it according to a parametric square function. The values of bending and restoring vary between the different models, which gives each of them a unique feel.

We wouldn’t be ourselves if we did not give you the opportunity to set something on fire. That is where the FlammableComponent comes into play. Every entity with that component can be set on fire. We can tweak the probability of the object catching fire if it’s currently being affected by a fire source, such as a flamethrower, as well as the time it will burn once it is set ablaze. Every time the game logic is updated, the information is gathered which objects are currently in the range of open fire. Then, we perform a roll for each of those and if the result is positive, the object will catch fire. Some things are almost impossible to set on fire, while others need just a spark to burst out in flames.


Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/viciousfeistyblackwidowspider

Once the entity is on fire, we give it another set of properties - BurningComponent. The affected piece of vegetation becomes the source of fire itself. With this component, we can control the range to which an object can spread the flames. The bigger the entity, the further it can spread the flames. We also control the burning rate, which determines how often an attempt to spread the fire is performed. Apart from the BurningComponent we also apply the proper particle effects and start dissolving the mesh. What is noteworthy - the spread of fire is affected by the wind!

Here's a link to the compilation of all the GIFs used in this article:
https://youtu.be/F4tbyhkHAOg

That’s all we have for you today! Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, let us know in the comments or on our Discord! www.discord.gg/exorstudios!

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Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/similarwellmadearabianwildcat

Hello!

As many of you know, The Riftbreaker runs on the latest version of our game engine, The Schmetterling. The biggest difference between this version and the previous one is the implementation of physically based rendering, also known as PBR. It is a lighting model that tries to replicate the behavior between materials and light as it is in the real world. Making use of this technique opens up a lot of possibilities for us, one of which we are going to talk about today. Let’s take a look at the details behind the day and night cycle in The Riftbreaker.


Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/realisticcarefreeafricanaugurbuzzard

In order to achieve the feeling of the realistic passage of time, we have decided to specify four distinct parts of every day - dawn, day, dusk and night. They are defined by a couple of parameters, such as the color and intensity of light, environment skybox, shadow intensity, fog parameters, wind power, and other weather effects.


A look at our Scene Parameters control panel from the EXOR Level Editor.

Skybox is a set of textures in the form of a cube that tries to emulate your surroundings. What is important to note here is the fact that the skybox does not contain the light source but only the ambient part of the sky. It is a completely separate entity. To emulate sun behavior we use a directional light that is the main source of light for everything you see in The Riftbreaker. Its position and strength can be regulated independently of the skybox. What is important because we could not generate as many skyboxes which will represent every minute of the day. The two elements working together give us realistic lighting and almost infinite possibilities when it comes to setting up our time of day environment. By the way, checkmate, round-Earthers - the world is flat and the Sun goes around it! ;)


One of the skyboxes that was used for X-Morph: Defense.

Another aspect we can tinker with are the fog parameters. We can determine the exact distances at which the fog starts and stops being visible. Apart from that, we can also change the density of the fog. It is very useful for setting the mood of the scene. A delicate morning mist over grasslands feels a lot different than thick fog accompanied by heavy rain. With proper sound effects and wind strength, the feeling of immersion in the game world increases greatly.


Oh my, these mushrooms grow so fast!

On top of that, with time passing, each part of the day is blending with each other depending on what time it is. The sun direction reflects the position of the sun in the sky, and the length of the shadow is accurate. And at the end of that, we are not limited to only one set of parameters - we can create any number of presets and change between them on the fly - the engine blends them with each other to give us a smooth transition.


All weather effects can blend with any given time of day preset.

The fact that we can create multiple presets for each time of day means we can introduce variety into the cycle. Every night an algorithm randomly chooses the presets it is going to use for the following day, making it slightly different from the last one. This way some days are going to be sunnier than the other ones. We also control the weather effects, making the possibilities virtually infinite. Moreover, certain events in the game, such as tornadoes and acid rain, can trigger either local or global changes to the weather that additionally blend with the parameters of the lighting.


The Riftbreaker will feature multiple weather events, such as acid rain.

The last piece to this puzzle is making the night look interesting. It’s an alien planet, after all, and pitch-black won’t cut it. Therefore, we put our affector system to use here. We mentioned it briefly when we talked about bioluminance here. At night, our shaders change the way they behave and giving way for all the emissive lights on plants, stones, and wildlife to shine. Combined with the building lights, base lamps and spotlights mounted on Mr. Riggs and defensive towers, it creates a beautiful, rich atmosphere even in the dark of the night.


Other light sources take over when the Sun is not around.
Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/quarrelsomemelodicblackandtancoonhound

And that is all we have for you today. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment below or chat us up directly at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. Thanks for reading and see you next week!

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Hey there!

Exactly one week ago we asked you to participate in the first of many voting events that will shape the future of The Riftbreaker. We presented a couple of Ashley’s outfits and the summaries of the stories they are connected with. Here is the picture again:



The option D won the contest by a wide margin. It is a light recon armor, a very advanced protective suit that grants the user protection and support during dangerous Riftbreaking missions. It looks sick as well, and you seem to appreciate both the style and function! :)

As we promised, we are going to describe the armor in greater detail through a story that will reveal a little more about Ashley’s past. It should appear by the end of the month, but take that with a grain of salt - we’ve got a lot going on right now. ;)

Everyone who voted also automatically entered a giveaway. One of our Discord users - Skylord - won an EXOR swag bag, filled to the brim with our gadgets and a signed copy of X-Morph: Defense Limited Edition for the PS4. Do not worry if you missed it, though! There’s going to be a lot more in the future!



This event is the first that we will carry out as a part of our ‘Community-Driven Design’ philosophy. We want you to feel that you have a real impact on how the game turns out. We are making it for you, after all! You can expect to have many chances to decide the future of The Riftbreaker.

Our Discord server is the best place to leave all the feedback and suggestions for us. Reading messages from the community and discussing ideas is a great source of inspiration and knowledge. We would love to have you there! Visit www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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We said many times that we want the development of The Riftbreaker to be community-driven. We want to make choices together with you, let you shape the game and make this project something unique and engaging. Today, we ask for your help with making one of the choices.

Ashley Nowak is the main character of The Riftbreaker. Although we don't see her in-game outside her Mecha-Suit, she still is the most important character and will appear on most of the artwork we make. We decided to have a little bit of fun and design a couple of clothing styles for her to wear as a default. Each of those tells a little story of its own. Your votes will determine which story you'd like us to describe in greater detail, revealing more about Ashley's past.



A - an infiltration suit, designed to make moving as effortless as possible. She used this one while doing recon on illegal mining operations during her years in the Academy.
B - a casual outfit, a little adventurous, inspired by pilots and thrillseekers of the 80s cinema. The jacket used to belong to her grandmother and reminds her of home.
C - a scientist suit, a callback to Ashley's scientific training and background. This outfit survived its fair share of accidents and explosions, yet still holds together.
D - light recon armor, providing protection and life support on dangerous missions but without overburdening the user.
E - full heavy assault armor, for the times when Mr. Riggs' protection was not enough. Every Riftbreaker cadet has to complete a 10 mile run in one of these.

If you would like to take part in the voting, join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. You will find the vote in the #vote channel of The Riftbreaker section once you've joined. Everyone who participates will get the chance to win a bag of EXOR Studios goodies. We ship worldwide, so everyone can join.

If you take part in the vote you get the chance to win an EXOR Studios swag bag including A SIGNED COPY OF X-MORPH: DEFENSE COLLECTOR'S EDITION for the PS4, and other cool gadgets! We ship worldwide, so everybody can join. The voting starts today, July 10th, and ends in exactly one week.



We will pick the winner among all the participants. If the option of your choice does not win the vote, you can still get lucky and win the prize.

Good luck!

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Hello!

Just a quick update this Saturday, as we’re really busy with preparing the Zombie Driver launch on the Nintendo Switch and some other things for the upcoming trade shows. Hope you can forgive us :)

As you know, we want the world of The Riftbreaker to be as varied as possible. It is quite a difficult task, because each biome will need its own set of props, fauna, flora, unique weather conditions and other elements that fall under the ‘look and feel’ category.

Last time we showed you the general process of creating props. They all start as simple, hand-drawn illustrations. Some of them never make it into the game, others do, but in a completely different form than originally anticipated. Today we would like to present to you some more pieces of concept art. Some are already in the game, others wait for their turn.



This is of course just a small fraction of the things our graphics designers are working on. We can’t wait for the results. Would you like to see them too? Join our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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It is not so easy to design an alien-looking set of decorations. The years of observing the nature here on Earth have left all of us with pretty solid images in our heads. We all know what features we should expect from a tree, a flower, a mushroom. Luckily, the nature has a few tricks up its sleeves. A little imagination combined with some more exotic references can lead up to pretty interesting results. Let’s take a look at some space mushrooms!

There are several approaches you can take here. The first is to take some ordinarily looking Earth mushrooms and give them a fresh paint job.



These already look more interesting than an ordinary deathcap, but adding some more vibrant colors, together with bioluminance can work wonders here!



Another way of going about creating such a model is looking for references in places the most of us do not usually get to visit everyday. This way you can adapt an Earthly species into a completely otherworldly prop.



This winding mushroom is essentially a mix of 3 different species found in various places on Earth. We do not have a 3D model for this one just yet, but you can already see how many variations you can get from just one concept.

It is, of course, possible to let your imagination loose and design something completely out of the ordinary. In that case, our graphics designers usually draw a concept art first in relation to Mr. Riggs. This way we can get the sense of scale of the prop. Once it’s done, a simple 3D model is prepared, this time to show us what it may look like in game. After receiving feedback and implementing changes (if necessary), the designer creates textures for the model, so that it can finally become a part of Galatea 37 ecosystem. Here’s a couple of examples of this process:


We start with a hand-drawn concept.


Then, each size from that concept is modeled and presented in scale.


With each stage the mushroom starts to differ from what we see on Earth...


...up to the point where you wouldn't say it's a mushroom at all!


This is another fun concept.


We can hide the bulbous bottom part underground. Who knows, perhaps you'll be able to rip them out?


The tentacles expand even further.


Here we are - a mixture of a cactus and an octopus in a mushroom form. I'm not even going to try and name that thing.

Once the model is ready, the level designers are free to use them in whatever context they like. Additionally, they can easily change the scale and orientation of the models, which changes the look and feel by a lot!

Which concept do you like the best? What other alien-looking species of plants, animals or mushrooms do you think we should incorporate in The Riftbreaker? Let us know here and on our Discord server - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.

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Hello!

Welcome to the fourth and last installment in our series about the defensive towers in the Riftbreaker. In the previous parts, we uncovered some of the mysteries behind the basic operations of all towers, as well as specifics regarding the sentinel towers and the artillery tower. In this part, we are going to cover two wildly different structures, representing what we call charged up firing and continuous weapons.

The mode of operation of charged up weapons can be divided into two phases - charge and discharge. The Railgun Tower in The Riftbreaker is a perfect example of this. It fires an energy bolt once in a while that is followed by a lengthy cooldown period. This might seem disadvantageous at first, but the Railgun’s ability to pierce through multiple targets compensates for that. A look at the code will reveal more interesting things, check it out:


The Railgun Tower as seen in the EXOR Model Editor



Pew, pew!

The first thing that is different from the other towers we’ve shown you is the aiming mechanism. In order to snipe as many enemies at once, the railgun chooses the farthest enemy as its primary target. We can tweak the size of the energy burst to ensure that targets on the sides will get hit as well. The only caveat is that we had to limit the maximum number of units that can be affected by the railgun to 32 because of performance reasons, but the massive amount of damage dealt by the tower should offset this drawback.

Each shot fired by the railgun tower consumes a ton of energy. It is a steep cost, and in large numbers, they can generate massive power spikes. However, thanks to the burst operation mode and the lengthy cooldown between shots it is possible for your power plants to refill the deficits in your energy storage, at least to some degree. Balancing the fire rate, fire cost and damage is going to be one of our priorities in case of the towers operating under these principles.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have continuous weapons. They operate on a completely different principle, turning on as soon as an enemy comes in range and staying on until there are no more targets in the area. An example of such a tower is the flamethrower tower. The principle here is quite simple - the tower incinerates the area in front of it, sweeping from side to side until there is nothing left. The fire does not deal a lot of damage outright, but it is spread over time, meaning that it will not instantly kill all enemies, but over time it will be devastating to large groups of smaller targets.


The Flamethrower Tower

Spatial simulating of flame behavior is quite difficult, and the sweeping motion of the turret does not make it any easier. Our solution to this problem is to create three boxes of different sizes in front of the tower. The further the box is from the muzzle, the bigger it is. The visual effect is limited to the bounds of the box. Right now, the flames pass through the objects on their way. In the future, we will add a force feedback mechanism that will stop the flames when they meet a solid, physical object on their way.


With debug options enabled you can see what the aiming process looks like in real time.

The flamethrower towers use fuel as their ammunition. The turret fires continuously, which means it will consume some ammo every second. To avoid running out of ammunition you must build refineries that will turn non-renewable energy sources, such as biomass, into flammable fuel.

That is all we have for the defensive towers series at the moment. We hope that this series of articles shed some light on how we create defensive systems. All of the towers we presented will require a lot of tweaking, but we hope that with your help we can make The Riftbreaker a game you want to play. Join our Discord! www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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We're proud to announce that our all-time classic - Zombie Driver Immortal Edition is coming to the Nintendo Switch on July 25th!

https://youtu.be/YLqfRemwcpw
It's been almost 10 years since the game's original release on the PC and the game has seen a lot of changes through the years. This latest edition has been ported to the Schmetterling engine which some of you might know from X-Morph: Defense. The new renderer is about 10x faster than the old one that we had in Zombie Driver (we've learned some things over these years). Thanks to this improvement the Nintendo Switch version of the game has the same gameplay features as the PC or Xbox One versions with even slightly improved graphics and runs really smooth even during very intense action.



All previously released DLC extensions have been incorporated into the Immortal Edition. The Apocalypse Pack, Tropical Race Rage, Burning Garden of Slaughter, and Brutal Car Skins have been included in the game as rewards for completing gameplay objectives.



If you'd like to ask us any questions in regards to the game you can always find us on our Discord:
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Hi!

Thanks for joining us once again in our series about the towers in The Riftbreaker. The previous two parts covered the general rules that apply to all the tower types, and the characteristics of the most basic defensive building in the game, the Sentinel Tower. We highly encourage you to check out those posts first, if you haven’t done so already. You can find them here and here. Today, we are going to show you the first of the advanced tier of defensive towers - the Artillery Tower.



The Artillery Tower is not available to the player at the beginning of the game. Getting access to this technology will require the player to carry out research first. We achieve two things thanks to this. The first one is streamlining the early game. There is no need for the player to choose from multiple towers at the beginning of the adventure, making the early game and the new player experience much more accessible (not to mention that advanced towers have a ton of requirements, more on that later). The second thing is the balance. We want the Artillery Tower to be considerably powerful and having access to it right away could be detrimental to the gameplay overall.

Greater power comes at the cost of greater need for resources. The Artillery has to be connected to power to remain operational but does not consume energy every time it shoots. Instead, it uses explosive ammunition, the same type that the player can utilize with Mr. Riggs’ rocket launcher. The amount of ammunition available is limited by your storage capabilities. It is also worth noting, that the more Artillery Towers you build, the more ammo they consume. A salvo of 15 shells at once might be splashy, but it will churn through your resources quickly. Moreover, ammunition is not easy to come by. You need weapon factories to do that and they, in turn, require a lot of energy and carbonium, so the cost of using the artillery is quite high.




Moving on to the more technical parts, here’s what the turret description looks like. If you read the previous part of the series, some of these elements will look familiar to you. What is different, though, is the way the projectiles fired by the tower behave. Instead of following a straight line, they fly in a parabolic pattern. In real life, the shell fired by artillery climbs very high before eventually hitting its target. In order to make thing a little bit more spectacular, we strengthen the force of gravity for the shell. This way, you can follow the whole flight pattern, from the moment of ignition to the final explosion.

Another trick that we use when it comes to our Artillery Towers is connected to the target visibility. We do not want the towers to waste your precious resources by firing at a target they can’t possibly hit, and that is what would happen if we used ray tracing in this case. Instead of that, the whole projected flight pattern of the artillery shell is divided into small pieces. Then, we check each piece of that line for possible collisions. The tower will fire only if the whole path is clear. This also allows the artillery to fire over terrain obstacles.



The last property that makes the Artillery Tower a really devastating weapon is its range. Just like in real life, our towers can shoot farther than you can see. At first, there is little advantage to it, since the fog of war will not allow you to decimate the enemy forces from a safe distance. However, the Artillery Towers can help you if you are exploring the world of Galatea 37 on your own and happen to find a group of monsters within the artillery range. Building radar stations is another way to increase the effectiveness of the artillery.

We hope you enjoyed this article and that you learned a thing or two. Make sure to join us on our Discord server to learn more about The Riftbreaker before it launches. We are waiting for your feedback and ideas. www.discord.gg/exorstudios

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