Poland has long been described as an increasingly prosperous country for game development, with developers such as CD Projekt RED, Techland, Flying Wild Hog, People Can Fly, 11-bit Studios and Bloober Team, often cited as the best examples thanks to their worldwide successes. word. However, there is also an interesting indie scene that thrives in the country, and among these Exor Studios it is definitely worth highlighting.
Exor Studios, originally formed as a modding group in 2003 (the first project was DIPRIP, a total conversion mode for Valve Software’s Source Engine), has Zombie Driver HD and tower defense / two-stick shooter game X-Morph: Defense made. , who scored a 7.8 score from Dave a few years ago.
X-Morph: Defense has already featured impressive technology for its destruction elements (powered by NVIDIA PhysX), but the studio’s upcoming survival game / action RPG goes beyond supporting multiple DirectX 12 Ultimate features such as Ray Tracking and Variable Rate Shading. Both features, implemented in partnership with AMD, are also available for NVIDIA cards, as you can see in the video analysis below where Keith compares AMD and NVIDIA cards in the game’s preview.
Earlier this month, we reached out to Exor Studios CEO Paweł Lekki to discuss the Riftbreaker ahead of the launch, which would take place sometime in 2021. Watch the transcribed interview after the break.
How long do you expect Campaign Mode to be in The Riftbreaker?
We estimate the campaign is about 40 hours of play for an average player.
Have you considered adding a co-op mode? Can it still happen as a DLC?
Yes. This is the number 1 feature most asked to add to the game. It’s a technically challenging task, but we plan to start as soon as we release the game. We plan to add an online coop mode as an update after the release, but it may take 6-12 months after it is released.
As far as I know, The Riftbreaker may be the first title played from an isometric point of view to implement jet tracking technology. Do you think isometric view may be more or less suitable than ordinary third-person / first-person views to show the benefits of ray tracing?
We also have not seen any other isometric perspective games with ray tracing, so we had to come up with many solutions that are specific to this perspective, without any prior inspiration. The isometric perspective and an open world environment enable us to perform many personal optimizations, e.g. We know that in 99% of cases the sky is clear, so it makes no sense to shoot rays at it. This enables us to make a much more efficient implementation of radiation-transient occlusion. This effect is usually much more expensive in computer games with first or third person perspectives. With Raytraced shadows, we can also override the calculation of cascade maps, because we can achieve perfect shadow resolution, no matter how close or far away an object is placed in relation to the camera.
You mentioned AMD FidelityFX variable rate shadow support. Can you explain if this feature, which is in the DX12 Ultimate specification, will also be available for NVIDIA cards with VRS hardware support?
This feature is already available on NVIDIA cards. The thing we like most about all FidelityFX features is that it works on all GPUs that meet the required DirectX standards. Intel GPU users can also take advantage of this technology.
Do you plan to also support jet tracking on the next generation versions of The Riftbreaker? If so, how will it act against ray tracing on the computer in terms of quality?
Yes, we plan to make radiation trace effects work on next-generation consoles, but we do not have the final performance results of all the console models. For example, we will be aiming to activate all radiation detection effects on the XSX, while the XSS may have it in a reduced capacity.
Some developers have said that the Xbox Series S may be a problem because of the lower minimum specifications compared to Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, especially the memory. What do you think about it?
Yes, the XSS needs additional optimization. Although we were able to simply assemble the Riftbreaker for the XSX and it ‘just works’, the XSS needs additional optimization. Still, it does not look like it will take that much work to be able to work well on 1080p on the XSS. The best thing about the current architecture is that the CPU power on both Xbox models is virtually the same. Scaling up graphic effects is much easier than enlarging the game. The amount of available memory is in many cases a determining factor when we talk about the size of a game world or about how many things can happen in it at a given time. The size of the memory available in the XSS is the real determining point for the entire console generation, as game functions must fit to the lowest specifications. From a developer’s point of view, it would be much easier if there was a single XSX SKU, but given the circumstances, I think Microsoft made good choices to create a much cheaper console, which can still do the following walking – generation games.
Are you planning to support the unique features of the DualSense controller in The Riftbreaker on PlayStation 5? If so, how?
We have not thought about it in detail yet, but we strive to utilize all the hardware capabilities at our disposal.
You can also download the game on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. What kind of technical compromises do you have to make to make the game work on these old generation platforms?
Latest generation console versions are currently optional in our plans. We plan to work on that after launching the game on next-generation consoles. This will definitely scale down the amount of creatures that the player can attack and reduce the texture solution to save memory. Making changes that affect the game is very time consuming and can best be performed when the entire game is finished and already balanced. We do not want to limit the game on next generation computers and consoles, so we leave the older generation as an additional task after the release.
Do you think the Riftbreaker can also be transferred to the Nintendo Switch? Is this something you will try in the future?
We do not think this is realistic. This is of course possible, but it requires a lot of big game and world size changes. The Schmetterling 2.0 engine has also been modified with the assumption that it has at least 4 CPU cores at its disposal. It would be difficult to re-optimize it for a dual CPU scenario. It will be very close to a complete game recovery, so we do not think it’s worth it.
If you are going to look ahead to your next game, what kind of positive impact on game design would you expect to have no more dealing with the old generation platforms, and use the much greater CPU, SSD and memory capabilities of the next generation hardware ?
The Riftbreaker is already designed as a next-generation game, with possible game changes when transferred to older consoles. The things that we think will be adopted even further are the version of the rays. We are still very early in the process of using raytraced technologies. We can see many improvements in terms of lighting and effects like reflections or liquid bites further down the road. I think the biggest game changer in terms of game is planning a much bigger memory budget. It allows us to get really wild with the amount of objects being simulated simultaneously within the game world.
Our engine is also very parallel to support the living world of The Riftbreaker. Many computer users still have 4 CPU cores, and the game works great in that scenario, but the 8 CPU cores that occur in the next generation of consoles can give us a lot of extra breathing space to simulate physics and make additional calculations . for supporting beam detection.
Thank you for your time.