Hey everyone,

again, the last weekly report was released slightly more than a week ago™ (or a bit more than slightly more...), so it's time for another one! Yay!

Let me know in the comments if you'd like to have more frequent weekly reports, I think due to the official cyubeVR roadmap on Trello it's always quite clear what I'm working on anyways, so I prefer to spend time primarily with programming and not with writing frequent weekly reports all the time :)

Those that closely follow development of cyubeVR on the official cyubeVR discord are always up to date with what I work on too, but I understand not everyone likes to be on a bunch of discords for every game you own! That's why I think writing weekly reports from time to time does make sense.

The cyubeVR discord is still nicely growing though, we're at over 400 people there now. That's great! Community interaction is most important for development of the game.

If you haven't seen it yet, a few days ago, Update 27 was released.

Also, I want to mention two great youtube videos that you should definitely watch if you haven't seen them yet! The first is this great Video from Aelgiz, showing his castle build in cyubeVR in the Snow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIX5iisJxgM

The second one is this new video from Wee Hours Games, it's always great to watch him play cyubeVR and show a lot of excitement about every new feature in the game :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXLP7zyG0I


One feature request I want to talk about a bit more in this weekly report is related to gathering of items using the bucket. Currently, you need to manually throw items into the bucket, or swipe with the bucket over the ground to collect items.

A lot of people seem to look forward to "easier" way of gathering items in the game - most importantly, the current way requires you to bend down, or sit down on the ground - you do somehow need to get at least one of your hands close to the ground. Not everyone likes doing that a lot.

The suggested improvement is often having a vaccuum bucket, which automatically sucks in items up to a certain distance.

Now, just replacing the current bucket with a vaccuum bucket would be a bit boring - a "manual" bucket makes sense to have at the start of the game, since giving the player a bit of progression and some better bucket to work towards is good!

So, one way this could be done would be that you can craft a different bucket, and replace the current bucket with that newly crafted bucket, once you have crafted it. But how would you craft a bucket that has such a vacuum effect? The game has a medieval/fantasy theme, with no electricity or other industrial themed things. That means it has to be magic! Magic is good, because it's magic!

So, the vaccum bucket will run on "magic". Now, we could make it so that you need to craft a new bucket using some new magic resource, but actually there's a better way! Why not just replace the current bucket with a bucket that allows you to use it both as a regular bucket, but also "upgrade" it by attaching something magic to it?

I know after so much text you finally want to see it, so let's take a look at a concept of the new bucket that I've recently worked on with a concept artist!



As you see, the bucket has an attachment point for a crystal on the side - the bucket can be used both with and without a crystal attached, and you can attach different crystals to the bucket for getting different effects. Who says that a bucket always has to suck items in - maybe you want a bucket that blows items away, to clean up some area of items that you don't want to collect anyways. This new design allows for that! Differently colored crystals can have different effects on the behavior of the bucket.

You see the bucket has some "magical veins" going around it, which glow (or pulse) when you have a crystal attached to the bucket - that will look awesome in the game!

Also, such crystals won't need to be limited to only the bucket - over time there can be a lot more things in the game that make use of such crystals to upgrade various behavior.

You will be able to find these crystals in caves, and the crystals will have some level of "charge", with that charge slowly being used up while the crystals are used to cause any magic effect, like the vacuum effect in the bucket.

Then there should also be some way to "recharge" crystals once they are empty, so that you are not forced to go searching for new crystals in new caves. Recharging crystals might work by having them lie outside at night in moon-light or something similar - I'm not fully sure about that yet, so if you have good ideas, please write a comment here or come into the discord!

This concept for the bucket with crystals was not something that I just decided would be good, it was something we did actually talk a lot about in the discord, and until now, this was the best solution we came up with in there :) This is why the community is so important! Getting feedback from many people on ideas is always best, and I'm super happy cyubeVR has a nice community for that!

So, that's all for this weekly report. Thanks for caring about the game! Let me know what you think about this new bucket concept!

Don't forget to follow and subscribe to the official Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter and YouTube so that you don't miss anything interesting about the game! There's also a community-diven subreddit about cyubeVR on reddit.

Cheers! :)

Hey everyone!

Update 27 is live, adding independent settings for the length of day and night, a setting for saturation, a way to individually reset every setting to the default value, a great new texture for light processed wood and many important fixes!

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in this update, with more details below:

• Added settings for length of day and night
  
• Added setting for saturation (especially useful on WMR headsets)
  
• Added reset button next to every setting in the settings. It allows you to individually reset every setting to its default value.
  
• Added new texture for light processed wood
  
• Fixed sledgehammer not causing damage on wallstone
  
• Made sledgehammer also cause damage on all types of wood. It makes sense that a hammer can't only be used to destroy stone, but also wood!
  
• Fixed texture of blue and green flowers. The texture for them was broken, resulting in them having the same texture like regular grass.
  
• Made picture frame brighter in torch light
  
• Further reduced SSAO by 35% on "Off" and "Low" bloom
  
• Fixed rain sounds. The rain sound was broken since Update 26.
  
• Fixed cloud movement speed being significantly too fast
  
• Fixed text box in inventory always saying "Processed Wood (Light)", even while being in settings
  
• Fixed block movement breaking after mesh object placement mode has been selected (like chest)
  
• Fixed evil bug that caused game to crash when loading any world with a sledgehammer existing anywhere in the world (e.g. on a wall mount)
  
• Fixed potential crash

By default, day in the game is roughly 5 times longer than night. This is a good default, but you might prefer a different distribution for this, so now you can have that! You can make day and night both very long, both very short, or make one very short and the other one long or any other combination.

So these settings don't just allow you to change the relative distrubution of day/night, but also wjat is the full length of the day/night cycle.


There previously was no way to know what the default of a setting was after you changed it, now there is! This was added now because it would likely have been very hard otherwise to get back to the exact defaults for the day/night length settings.


This is a very simple setting that allows you to modify the saturation of the game - either you want to modify this due to personal preference, or you might want to make the game in LCD VR headsets look more similar to naturally more saturated headsets with OLED displays. I think I've read multiple times that WMR users like to have saturation settings, and it definitely doesn't hurt to have a setting for this!


As shown in the screenshot on the very top of this announcement, there is a new texture for light processed wood! I couldn't stand the old texture any more, it was too ugly and totally not 8K. New one looks much better and so much more high res! You'll now bump your nose against the wall before seeing any pixels of that texture. That's how textures should be!


As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 7 separate beta builds! If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!
Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) We're more than 400 people strong there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord.

Also, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features!

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 26 is live, adding a great copper sledgehammer tool which causes a lot of area damage, a new block-move feature that allows you to move any blocks you placed even after they are placed, and a lot of significant optimizations, bugfixes, and other improvements!

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in this update, with more details below:

• Added copper sledgehammer
  
• Made it possible to move blocks after they have been placed
  
• Optimized how destroying blocks is handled internally
  
• Improved when "can't modify world yet" warning is shown
  
• Fixed snow on chest, deer, and rabbits not being occluded correctly when indoors
  
• Increased delay between damaging blocks and "self-healing" for block starting
  
• Made self-healing process of blocks slower
  
• Optimized navigation code
  
• Optimized generation of instant loading files
  
• Optimized deer and rabbits, nice CPU time reduction every frame
  
• Other general performance optimizations
  
• Fixed location of attachment points of nugget items
  
• Fixed snow or rain appearing in caves sometimes
  
• Adjusted out of focus warning to more exactly mention in which ini it can be disabled
  
• Adjusted min spec warning in main menu to not detect i5 8th or 9th Gen as below min spec

(This is a gif made from this Twitch Clip, from a stream of Kroy testing the sledgehammer in the cyubeVR beta build)

There's now a Copper Sledgehammer in the game! It's a nice, big sledgehammer. It very quickly breaks all hard blocks like stone or ores with a lot of area damage, so every hit will damage up to 25 blocks at once, with damage getting less the further away a block is from the block you hit. Using the copper sledgehammer is a lot of fun!

The sledgehammer causes a lot of damage and is great for quickly clearing a big area - the blocks it breaks drop significantly fewer items though compared to mining them with a stone or copper pickaxe, so for efficiently mining a lot of resources it's not very useful.

Since damaging so many blocks at once is quite different to the previous tools that only ever damaged one block, the block damage system also had to be optimized quite a lot. These optimizations benefit all tools in the game and will be especially useful for all things in the future that will cause area damage on blocks.

One change you will notice with all tools is that the delay between you damaging a block and it starting to "heal" itself is twice as long now compared to before, and the "healing" process is also taking twice the time until it's done. So, damaged blocks stay damaged significantly longer than before.

The sledgehammer crafting recipe is now the biggest recipe in the game, requiring 35 items. Go search for it now! :)




You can now move existing blocks!

With the block place mode selected, when the front of the place tool is inside of a block and you hold the trigger button, you can move that block now.

Previously, if you were building something and you accidentally placed a block at an incorrect location, you had to switch to the "tool" mode, select the correct tool, destroy the block, collect it, select the place mode again and place the block at the correct location. This whole process is no longer needed now, you never need to switch away from the block place mode! You can keep the place mode active and just move the block to the correct location, and then keep building.

Moving blocks only works with blocks that were placed by the player, that prevents that you could take an ore block and "move" it across the whole world - you can move every block that you manually placed.

I'm quite excited about this, it really feels great to move blocks around. Try it out yourself!


Previously, only when you fully destroyed a block the visual representation you see was updated, so depending on how fast and busy your CPU was, it could happen that a block stayed visible for something like 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 seconds after you already destroyed it. That didn't feel as good as it could.

Now it's changed so that once you damage a block, the chunk is updated already internally, while you still see a temporary representation of the damaged block. Once you finished destroying the block, which is likely at least half a second later, only that temporary representation of the block disappears, and the actual chunk has already had the block removed, which means the block will disappear instantly (the exact frame you destroyed it). Even if you're running the game on a way too slow CPU like an i3, or having Prime95 run in the background, destroying blocks should feel completely instant now! It was actually quite some work to get that working nicely.

One side effect of this is that once you damage a block, it will look slightly different (slightly brighter) compared to when it's undamaged. Before, the damaged block only had the damage texture applied, now the whole block also has a slightly brighter color.


This is an update that (again) improves performance in general. From time to time, it's good to spend a bit of time on performance! Some things were sped up very significantly:

- Optimized one function in the UE4 source code responsible for AI navigation, causing hitches from time to time. The code in there was not ideal, so it was possible to make it 13 times quicker

- Made Chunk LOD generation twice as fast by optimizing memory access pattern (meaning, more cache friendly code)

- Hugely optimized generation of instant loading chunk mesh files, it's 4400% faster now while resulting in same file sizes

- Significantly optimized deer and rabbits, this results in some nice CPU time reduction every frame

- Other small optimizations


As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 7 separate beta builds and made sure possible bugs are were fixed before this update gets released in the stable branch! If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!
Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) We're more than 390 people strong there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord.

Also, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features!

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 25 is live, adding most importantly dynamic weather, including snow and rain! Also, it's cyubeVRs 1st birthday today, so you can expect to see some nice birthday hats. There's a lot of other things added or improved in this update, so keep reading!

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in this update, with more details below:

- Added dynamic weather system
- Added new weather: Rain
- Added new weather: Snow
- Added weather settings
- Added best feature ever: You can grab bunnies now. Then they're fidgeting. You can carry them around!
- Added birthday hats to deer and rabbits, only on 26th and 27th January
- Added graphics setting for Antialiasing Strength
- Improved functionality of resolution slider in the graphics settings
- Improved feeling of tool physics
- Adjusted 8K screenshots to take second screenshot at "Low" bloom instead of "Medium"
- Made getting wood from tree with stick more predictable, exactly every 6th hit will now spawn a wood item
- Improved various rendering related things that made cyubeVR not work on Pimax
- Added a small, second needle to the compass that shows you your elevation
- Fixed issue that caused recipes to not show up correctly for some people using Windows 7 or Windows 8
- General performance optimizations


There's now a system for dynamic weather changes in the game. The weather will smoothly change between normal, snow and rain. If you dislike some weather, you can actually disable it in the settings menu of the game - there are settings for both rain and snow, you can set either of them to "Always", "Natural", or "Never". So you can easily say you want it to constantly snow while it's winter, or never rain.




Yay! It's winter! There's snow now!

Snow is white stuff slowly falling from the sky. No one knows where it comes from. But it's white! And it looks great!

The longer it snows, the more white the landscape will become, and it's not just the landscape! The animals will be white, the trees will be white, everything will be white! Of course, snow is only outside, in your house or in caves there will be no snow.

You should keep bloom at low, otherwise you'll probably die from blindness, as snow is pretty white.

The world feels completely different with snow, it feels like winter. Great winter atmosphere! Best winter atmosphere! It's winter! I'm very excited about snow!




There's Rain now!

Rain is wet water falling from the sky. Rain causes splashes on the ground, and the ground becomes wet. Really wet. Rain sounds like rain. If you have a roof over your head, rain will stay outside!

The rain sound is nicely 3D - if you're in a building with one opening to outside, you will hear the rain sound coming from exactly that opening. That feels very realistic.

Since rain falls from the sky, the sky will look different when it rains. The sky will be very cloudy, and the clouds don't let as much light through as without clouds. That means it will get darker, even during the day. Also, clouds absorb certain wavelengths of light more than others - which means the light that reaches the ground has a colder color temperature. That's also the case for snow!

And rain comes with wind! Wind is moving air, and moving air collides with trees - wind movement of trees is significantly stronger when it rains!

While it's raining, you can actually end up in the rain clouds of you are somewhere high up on a mountain - the higher your elevation is, the foggier it becomes. You'll have the clearest view in valleys.




Today, it's cyubeVRs 1st birthday! Depending on timezone, the game came out either on 26th or 27th of January 2018. We need to celebrate this in the game! This is why all deer and rabbits will wear birthday hats on the 26th and 27th of every year now. They are happy about the game's birthday :)




This is really the best feature ever. Well, no, snow is better. But this is so much fun!

You can now grab bunnies with the hand and lift them up. Then they're fidgeting. You get haptic feedback from the bunnies! You can carry them around. Maybe they don't like it? Or maybe they like it. No one knows! You can also grab a dead bunny. Those are not fidgeting. They are dead. Because you killed them. And those have realistic ragdoll physics! So you can throw them around and have fun with them :) Or you keep them alive and enjoy the fidgeting. Alive bunnies are better than dead bunnies!


There's a graphics setting for Antialiasing Strength now. It's a slider that allows you to choose between strong AA, which results in a more "stable" image that has less flickering, but looks more blurry, and on the opposite end an image with little AA that has flickering around edges, but also significantly sharper.


There have been some low-level rendering changes to make cyubeVR work better on the Pimax 8K/5K+ headsets. It's still not fully working, but at Small FOV, the game should be perfectly playable now, which is a big improvement already. Still working on making it work better on Normal and large FOV, unfortunately having to wait for one bug in UE4 to be fixed for that.


Previously, when you hit a tree with the "stick" tool, a piece of wood spawned with a probability of 1/12. Now, I changed it so that exactly every 6th strong enough hit will spawn a piece of wood. Based on peoples reactions in videos, it seems the system with the probability was quite confusing to some people, since having it based on chance, it was a possibility that you could hit a tree 50 times and still not get anything, which would feel like the game is not working correctly. That's why it was adjusted now to feel completely predictable instead.


There's a second small needle in the lid of the compass now which shows the elevation you are at. It moves between 0 and 800 (that's the max block height in the game). Now you can know how high you are!


This update has slowly grown in the beta branch of the game for a long time already, in a total of 13 beta builds. As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who test new features and make sure possible new bugs are always fixed before an update gets released in the stable branch! If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) We're more than 370 people strong there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord.
If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!

Also, don't forgot there's an official roadmap with voting features now!

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Today I have something special for you - a public roadmap for cyubeVR, on trello, with voting features!


Roadmap on Trello

I have created that roadmap to make it more clear what the upcoming features in cyubeVR will be - previously, people that followed discussion on the official cyubeVR discord closely usually knew quite exactly what I'm working on and what the next things were, but for anyone who wasn't checking the discord every few days, the cyubeVR development process probably didn't feel as transparent as it could be. That should be different now with that public roadmap being available! :)

You see the roadmap is structured in a way that it's clear what priority ever feature listed on there is - things are tagged as "Highest Priority", "High Priority", "Medium-High Priority", "Medium Priority", and "Low Priority". You also see which features and fixes were done in the last few updates, and you see what new things there are in the current beta branch that's available for our great beta-testers in the discord!

If you have something that you think is missing on the roadmap, please join the discord and mention it there, or create a post in the Steam Discussions about cyubeVR! Of course the roadmap is always evolving and not static - things will change on there, and more new things will be added over time.

I hope you love the new roadmap, don't forget to vote on the features that interest you most so that I can easily see what's import important for the community :)

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game, and if you like it, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review if you haven't done that already! Even if its just a few words, writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 24 is live, adding most notably a completely new UI design made by an experienced UI designer, and a special new way of rendering the UI which makes it independent from the game resolution, making it always render the UI with extreme clarity. There's a also a ton of other things added or improved in this update, so keep reading!

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in this update, with more details below:

- Added new, awesome looking UI design in the game!
- Made UI use very special render path for extreme clarity and readability (might even be the first SteamVR game to do this?)
- Added high-res video capture mode that allows you to create great looking videos of your builds
- Added "Off" bloom option and adjusted what "Low" bloom option does
- Improved hit-detection for tools, making it more realistic
- Improved feel of head-based smooth loco by preventing movement when leaning over blocks
- More reliable world saving/loading - the game now keeps two copies of every chunk
- Added INI option for disabling the out-of-focus warning
- Made out-of-focus and "close to edge of generated world" warnings also use the special render path with extreme clarity
- Added sound when unlocking new recipe
- Fixed a rare bug with recipes not being detected correctly
- Disabled regular shadows on flowers/grass, seems those were accidentally enabled with a previous update, they just cost performance for little visual effect
- Fixed a bug with grabbing items in a chest when using both hands at the same time, and in general fixed a bug that could cause items to disappear when grabbed
- Various other performance improvements





There's a vastly improved new UI design now in the inventory briefcase, actually designed by a UI designer. The old UI was boring and really didn't fit the design of the rest of the game. The new UI is in a nice wooden/medieval design and significantly more "interesting" than the old UI which was really just different shades of grey. Instead of thinking "this game looks awesome, and it has an ok-ish UI" now everyone hopefully thinks "this game and it's UI looks super awesome" ;)

Apart from the new design, the UI now also uses a very special rendering path. The UI is rendered to an "image", that image is sent to SteamVR with its coordinates, and then SteamVR is rendering the UI through its own compositor - it's no longer the game that's responsible for displaying the UI, but actually SteamVR. If you're familiar with the technical terms, the games UI now is rendered as a SteamVR Overlay. That means the UI is rendered completely independent from the resolution of the game, the UI is always rendered as if you'd run the game at 400% Supersampling, which makes it incredibly sharp. The UI is also completely unaffected now by any post-processing effects in the game, so there is no bloom or anything else applied on top of the UI!

I'm not aware of any other VR game that uses this special way of rendering UI, since it's way more work to set up than just rendering the UI regularly in the game. But in cyubeVR, only the best solution should be used of course! Now everyone playing cyubeVR will hopefully be blown away by the clarity of the UI :)


There's an "off" bloom option now. At that option, bloom is 100% off. Previously, only a "low" that was "almost off" existed. Now, there's a total of 4 bloom settings, of which "Off" and "Low" also adjust the strength of SSAO. All bloom settings now do result in consistent texture contrast, which wasn't the case before - so they now do what they should do, adjust how "sharp" of an image you want and how much "glow" around objects you like.

These bloom settings now exist:

Off: All Bloom is 100% off. This results in an unrealistic look, especially regarding the fire of torches, since they don't have any glow around them. SSAO is also reduced by 33% on this option.

Low: This looks almost exactly same as Off, and also has the same SSAO reduction, with the difference that some very bright objects glow, but nothing else does. So regular objects don't have any bloom, but torches do. This setting is very realistic, so this is closest to how the "real world" looks like, where you get a noticeable amount of glow around very bright (light-emitting) objects, but not around any other objects.

Medium: A healthy amount of bloom around all objects. So this is not limited to very bright objects, everything will receive some bloom to give the game a nice, soft look. I think this is the setting that most people want to play on, since it's making the world look nice without actually making it look "blurry".

Default: THIS.. IS.. BLOOOOOM! Everything gets a lot of bloom, you are in a nice fantasy world where everything looks super nice. The world looks so friendly, you never want to leave it. This is how the game is designed to be played, this is cyubeVR.


A high-res video capture mode! This new mode can be enabled in the games INI and fully renders the game a second time for the mirror on the monitor, so it's no longer just a cropped view of one eye. It's very expensive, so its only really useful for when you want to do some short videos to show off awesome things you built, while having it look awesome.

These two new settings were added to the Game.ini file:


You can find the INI file at


Set the first setting to 1 to enable it (and remember to set OverrideDefault also to 1, otherwise your ini is completely ignored). With the second setting, you can adjust the FOV the game is rendered with on the monitor.

In the high res mirror you also get lens flares, since it's basically emulating you having a GoPro with adjustable FOV strapped to your head. Regular graphics settings still apply the same for both the in-HMD rendering and the mirror window on the monitor, so medium bloom looks nicest for making videos. Since its super expensive to render anyway, you should also set the graphics settings to highest while doing that, your fps in-HMD will be bad no matter what you do ;)

It's actually rendering the game a second time at 2880x1620 and downscaling that to 1080p, so you get a very, very crisp 1080p image out of that.

For capturing video using this, you just normally use software like OBS or Shadowplay to capture your screen.

The reason for adding this special video capture mode was this awesome "CyubeVR Castle Walktrough" video by Aelgiz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su-A6V4JmyM

If you haven't seen that yet, definitely watch it! That video was created before this new high-res video capture mode was added, so you see it's looking more low-res since it's "just" the captured view from a cropped eye of the regular VR rendering, which results in a res somewhere below 720p - but that castle looks super awesome, so I wanted it to be possible in the future to capture videos like that in full 1080p resolution - which it is now, thanks to the new high res video capture mode! :)


If you've played cyubeVR, you know there are 3 different ways in the setting how smooth locomotion should work - one is based on the center of the room, the second one is head-based and the third one is head-based with falling.

Head-based means if you step forward in the real world, and there's a block in the virtual world, you will step up the block in the virtual world - that's very realistic, but it often caused issues previously when you're leaning over blocks, since you were moved up the block then, which made it annoying to grab items on the ground.

When you lean over something in front of you, you are no longer "moved up" now. The "move up" only happens now if your eye position in the real world is more than 150 cm above the ground, so since "leaning over something in front of you" automatically makes you lower your head position, it doesn't happen anymore.

This had to be improved now since with the survival stuff coming, head based smooth loco with falling should at some point be enabled by default, its part of survival that you have to pay attention to not fall down and die. And if that has to be the default, it has to work fine enough for you to never wish to go back to non-head-based smooth loco, which is currently the default.


Improved hit detection for axes, pickaxes, and stick. Hitting blocks with the handle will no longer cause any damage on the block - it's more realistic now and harder to accidentally damage a block while having a tool in your hand. For example, only the sharp side of the axe will actually cause damage on a wood block now.


The world saving/loading is more resistant to crashes now. The game will always keep two copies of every chunk, so the world folder will have twice the size compared to before, which isn't really an issue since the world files are small. When the game saves a chunk, it now first copies the old chunk file to a Backup folder, and only then update the old chunk file. If the game detects on loading that a file is missing or corrupted, it looks in the Backup folder instead and loads the file from there.


By default, cyubeVR starts in fullscreen and asks you to put its window in focus, which is due to how the windows thread scheduler prioritizes the currently focused application for performance. This has been made more clear in the wording of the warning now so that people are hopefully less confused about it.
Also, sometimes you don't want that behavior since it makes it harder to run something like OVRDrop, so new INI settings were also added to the game to adjust that:


You can find the INI file at


Also, the out-of-focus warning and the close-to-edge-of-current-world-gen warning now both also use the very special rendering path that the UI uses, so they look significantly sharper!



This update has slowly grown in the beta branch of the game for quite a while already. As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord that test new features and make sure possible new bugs are always fixed before an update gets released in the stable branch! If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) We're more than 320 people strong there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord.
If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone,

The last weekly report was released more than a "week" ago, so it's time for another one!

There have been less updates than usually recently, but that was really only temporarily, we're back to regular update frequency now which is roughly one update per week :) That means, in just a few minutes Update 24 will be released!

Those that closely follow development of cyubeVR on the official cyubeVR discord are always up to date with what I work on when, so if you think I write a bit too few weekly reports here on Steam:

1. You are right about that, and
2. Be assured that you can talk to me at any time on the cyubeVR discord if you want to know more exactly what exactly I'm working on, when the next update comes and so on :)

The cyubeVR discord is nicely growing and we're at over 320 people there now. A healthy community is extremely important for me, and creating that discord server was one of the best decisions I ever made working on cyubeVR. Without that discord, the interaction with the community would be so much harder that a lot of features being released would be less thought through, more buggy or just missing in general because a lot of things I add are based on ideas from the community, often expressed in discussions on discord.
It's incredibly helpful for me that I can upload a new feature into the beta build of the game, tag @Beta-Testers on the cyubeVR discord and get feedback on that new feature within almost no time. So really, the community there means everything to me and I hope it will only get better, especially once multiplayer is added to cyubeVR.

The updates will be mostly about survival-aspects soon, for example I've spent quite a while recently with thinking about how exactly "player dies and respawns" should work, especially regarding the inventory aspect and how the items in there should be lost and recovered. My current idea for that is this: When you die, you lose all your items in your inventory. You respawn somewhere in a radius of ~1km around the point where you died. When you get back to the point of death, you see a small golden chest there. Since you might die somewhere with very limited space (like a corridor only 1 block wide) that won't be a regularly sized chest, but more of a miniature chest. That chest will contain all the items you had when you died.
For picking up the items, one thing that I find very important is that you should be able to choose which ones you want to pick up and which one you don't. The exact same mechanics for picking up your own items should be usable for multiplayer when killing and looting other players - and you likely don't want to pick up everything someone carries.
So, you'll be able to click on that golden chest and that will open a floating "3d representation" of items above. Very similar to items in a real chest. There you can just grab stacks of items then and throw them into your bucket, or alternatively clicking them will automatically add those to your inventory.

That idea is not final yet, but we're getting close. If you see any issue with that, let me know :)

So, that's all for this weekly report. The next one will come sooner than you expect! Thanks for caring about the game!

Don't forget to follow and subscribe to the official Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter and YouTube so that you don't miss anything interesting about the game! There's also a community-diven subreddit about cyubeVR on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyubeVR/

Cheers!

Hey everyone!



If you're a VR content creator, you have probably heard of LIV, a great free tool that makes it very easy to capture high quality mixed reality footage of yourself in VR!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/755540/LIV/


The LIV developers recently released a completely rewritten version of their Unreal Engine integration that makes LIV work really well in UE4 games like cyubeVR.



(This is Kroy, playing cyubeVR with LIV)

The LIV integration in cyubeVR was tested for multiple weeks now actually, and different things were adjusted in multiple versions until everything worked perfectly - you should not notice any issues anywhere!

For performance reasons, the LIV support is available through a seperate build that you can select when right clicking cyubeVR in your Steam library and then going to the "Beta" tab:



You can use LIV with all headsets the game is compatible with (Vive, Rift, WMR).

Also, by default cyubeVR starts in fullscreen and asks you to put it's window in focus, which is due to how the windows thread scheduler prioritizes the currently focused application for performance. Streamers sometimes don't like that behavior since it makes it harder to run something like OVRDrop, so two new INI settings were also added to the game to adjust that:


You can find the INI file for that at


You also need to set OverrideDefault=1 in that INI for the changes to take effect.

These INI settings allow you to run the game in a minimized window while still normally playing the game.

Looking forward to seeing the pictures, videos or streams you'll create with cyubeVR + LIV! :) Let us know in the official cyubeVR discord, or tag the official Stonebrick Studios Twitter Account!

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game!
If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!

Looking forward to hearing what you think :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 23 is live, adding an awesome new feature: resizable and movable picture frames that allow you to use custom JPG, PNG and BMP images on them, and even adjust the frame thickness! There are multiple included paintings that should please even the most stingy home decorators.
There are a variety of included paintings that should please even the stingiest of home decorators.

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in this update, with more details below:

- Added picture frames and fixed all bugs with picture frames that didn't exist when picture frames didn't exist
- All mesh objects that use the wall placement mode (currently that's wall mount and picture frames) are now always visible 20cm away from your controller when the place mode is active


This is a great feature that makes so much sense! Interiors are looking a million times nicer with this. These picture frames are so dynamic and customizable, you can design interiors way more to your personal liking now.



The picture frames use the system for 100% free placement, so you can freely move them around on the wall after they are placed, and you can also freely resize them without any limits (besides your arms or creativity)! You can have small 1 inch frames, big 40 inch frames, or anything in between! They also don't "snap" to the voxel grid in any way, you can place multiple smaller picture frames on one block side, or a big picture frame across many blocks - it's all completely dynamic and adjustable!

There are 10 great looking default paintings that you can select between, and any images you put into your Windows
directory will automatically be in the game to select for the picture frames! It makes the most sense to paste JPG or PNG images into that folder, but BMP also works fine.

There is also no 2D UI at all. The picture frames are fully set up "in 3D", the way you expect it to be in a game built from the ground up for VR :) When you click on a picture frame you get a preview of all available images in a post-card format on your left hand, so you can then drag and drop those onto a picture frame to apply them.

You can even add new pictures to the folder while the game is running, to select a different picture you simply have to click a picture frame again and then the list of images which you see on your left hand is updated automatically :)

You can use any images you want - the frame will also automatically adjust to the aspect ratio of the image you select, so the image will never appear stretched in any way!

To resize a picture frame, you can grab the bottom left and upper right corner of the picture frame at the same time and then move the controllers toward or away from each other, it's very intuitive. That also allows you to move the picture frame at the same time while resizing it.

If you grab the bottom part of a frame with 2 controllers, you'll only move the frame without resizing it, which is quite useful since you can't accidentally change the size then.

Additionally to the custom images in the form of the "post-cards", you also have 2 sliders on your left hand that allow you to adjust the frame thickness of the frame and also the free space between frame and picture canvas. These options make them super adjustable and allow for very different looking frames. As you're used to with objects in cyubeVR, the picture frames of course also have really high detail models and textures.

The frames can be crafted with wood, gold, and copper - so 3 different frames exist at the moment, with 3 different recipes that you have to find :)


This picture frame update has been tested in the beta branch of the game for quite a while already - the initial version was released more than 2 weeks ago! Since then, our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord have tested the update a lot, reported all issues they found and I made sure that everything was fixed before this gets released in the stable branch, which is now! If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) If you don't like something about the game, tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord.
If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 22 is live, mostly just fixing a few bugs that were reported after Update 21. Since that engine update was a major change, it also caused some new bugs that were not all found before Update 21 was released. This update should fix them :)

These are the changes in this update:

- Fixed torches disassembling when picking them up from wall
- Fixed backside of torch holder being incorrectly rendered
- Fixed blue dot floating in front of right controller sometimes
- Fixed chests not working correctly after they have been moved
- Fixed ragdoll physics on deer and rabbits, they should work correctly again
- Added setting for "Astronaut Deer", you can now choose if you want the crazy deer physics that are enabled by default, or if you prefer realistic physics. With "Astronaut Deer" enabled, they now fly even higher than before ;)
- Fixed items being used from inventory when trying to place blocks or torches close to the edge of the current world generation where they can't be placed yet
- Fixed collision of blocks being removed when trying to destroy a block close to the edge of the world where you can't destroy it yet
- Added warning when you're close to the edge of the world explaining that you can't modify the world there yet, that the world is infinite in size and that it takes a while to generate more
- Improved .dmp file generation after a crash

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;)
If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!