Nov 11, 2022

Update 53 for cyubeVR is live! New massive caves, glowing blocks and more!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 53 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds massive new caves, awesome new glowing blocks to be found in those new caves, cloaked torches for hidden lighting, footstep sounds for the player, native support for bHaptics, and many more improvements!

Let's take a look at the long list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes! Btw, are you in the official cyubeVR discord yet?

Added new cave generation!
Added "Shimmerstone" blocks in the colors Blue, Green, Gold and White
Added "Shimmertile" blocks in the colors Blue, Green, Gold and White
Added "Starstone" blocks in the colors Blue, Green and Gold
Added "Cloakstone", "Cloaknuggets", and "Cloaked Torches" in all colors
Added footstep sounds for the player
Added native support for bHaptics
Added VRAM warning in the main menu, inspired by Half Life Alyx
Improved visuals of the floating recipe papers. Transparent items no longer look invisible on them now.
Made some recipe unlocks be grouped (e.g. finding one colored torch recipe now unlocks all colored torch recipes)
When grabbing a recipe paper and releasing it, it no longer falls to the ground now. Instead, it nicely floats.
Made the save format of the WorldMetadata.important files more robust
Improved UI visuals in the main menu
Fixed block items not correctly getting destroyed after crafting something
Fixed custom blocks icons not being guaranteed to finish loading before starting to load a world
Fixed moving a floating block causing the block to move to some incorrect location
Fixed moving a block on top of dirt away from it not turning the block below not into grass, if there's enough light
The "Save AA Performance" option on "Automatic" is now also automatically enabled by default for anyone playing the game on a Quest 2, saving around 6% GPU performance
Added new screenshots to the community screenshot showcase in the main menu
Fixed underground areas sometimes looking lit when it shouldn't receive any light
Fixed underground caves being full of fog
Improved visuals of the stone texture
Fixed there being dandelions floating around underground
Updated DLSS UE4 plugin to latest version
Added new function to the VoxelAPI: ConsumeBlockItems
Added new VoxelAPI function: SetPlayerViewDirection
Fixed calling VoxelAPI function SetBlock inside of Event_BlockDestroyed or Event_AnyBlockDestroyed not working when very quickly destroying a block multiple times in a row
Fixed repeatedly calling VoxelAPI function GetBlock causing issues with damaging that block
Fixed the Type parameter in the ConsumeBlockItems VoxelAPI function not working
"No free disk space" warning now shows up at 150 MB already instead of 100 MB
Fixed white one-pixel sparkling on blocks in dark areas, which was mostly just visible with DLSS enabled.
In the bottom right corner of the main menu, the game now displays the resolution it's rendering at
Fixed it being possible to click the "Continue last world" button in the main menu more than once, and stuff then looking incorrect
Fixed the "Walking Speed" and "Smooth Turn Speed" settings sometimes not being saved and loaded correctly
The "Crazy", "High" and "Off" bloom options are now only visible if the "Expert Settings" are enabled, as they all look quite ugly, especially with the new caves.
Fixed furnace ingot mold placing not working correctly
Added RTX 4090 to the list of high end GPUs that the game uses to determine default graphics settings
Fixed axe behaving a bit weird shortly after a tree is falling over
Fixed a possible crash

New massive caves with new blocks!

cyubeVR always had caves, but in the past, caves were mostly relatively small and narrow - great for finding resources, but not necesserily impressive on their own. That now significantly changed, cyubeVR is getting much bigger and much more impressive looking caves!

This update adds completely new cave generation to the game, creating giant caves for you to explore. All caves are procedurally generated and fully unique.

Here is a video showing you one of the new caves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwMOvyjp_aM

The new caves can be very big with complex structures, and also contain 8 completely new blocks: Blue Shimmerstone, Green Shimmerstone, Golden Shimmerstone, White Shimmerstone, Blue Starstone, Green Starstone, Golden Starstone, and Cloakstone.

Shimmerstone is a very pretty block that glows and emits actual light, like a torch, illuminating the area around it. It looks very cool in caves, and it's a great reason for why you want to look for these new caves: To mine some of that new Shimmerstone and use it in your builds! The new Starstone blocks can be found primarily at the ceiling of the new caves, and look really cool too.

There are 4 different overall types of the new caves, with different rarity: Caves with Blue Shimmerstone and Blue Starstone are the most common, caves with Green Shimmerstone and Green Starstone are less common, caves with Golden Shimmerstone and Golden Starstone are even less common, and fully dark caves without any glowing stones are the rarest. Sometimes, you can also find areas where these different types of caves meet, and might contain 2 or even 3 colors at once.

In the deepest of the new caves, no matter the main color of the cave itself, you can find White Shimmerstone close to the bottom of the cave. Also only very deep down you can find the new Cloakstone, an almost invisible block that you can only see when standing right next to it.

Having big caves in the world generation is a big difference compared to before, so there were also some other changes to make this possible in the best way: Before, there sometimes were small lighting issues that caused an underground area to appear lit when it clearly didn't receive any sun light. That's fixed now. You might also remember that looking into a deep cave before, you saw a lot of fog, seemingly lighting the cave up. That's also fixed now. Visuals of regular stone blocks have also been improved a bit. And there are also no dandelions flying around under ground any more, and you can't hear bird sounds underground any more either. So all in all, it's a much improved underground experience in cyubeVR now!

These new caves look amazing in VR, and it's impossible to show on a screenshot or video how cool it feels in VR to walk through one of these new caves. As you probably know, scale in VR always is something that is impossible to represent well on a flat screen, it feels so much more impressive in VR!

The already previously existing "small" caves still exist, those were not changed. The new caves are an addition, not a replacement. They are rarer than the "small" normal caves, but some of the small and narrow caves might now lead into the new big caves.

If you already have a cyubeVR world, then to find the new caves, you need to walk to still unexplored terrain. Any newly generated terrain will contain the new caves, you don't need to create a new world.

Shimmertiles

While the new Shimmerstone blocks already look great on their own, you can also use them to craft additional new blocks, called Shimmertiles!

There are Blue Shimmertiles, Golden Shimmertiles, Green Shimmertiles and White Shimmertiles. The difference between Shimmerstone and Shimmertiles is that Shimmertiles look less organic, they're a more fully glowing block, so potentially more fitting for building. They also cast stronger light than the equivalent Shimmerstone. The White Shimmertile block is especially useful, because it's the first time you can actually have fully white light in the game! A "white" torch never existed, and while you could mix multiple torch colors to get "White", it wasn't fully white on the edges of the light.

With White Shimmertiles, there is now a block that casts fully white light in a quite large radius.

Cloakstone and Cloaked Torches

As mentioned above, one of the new blocks you can find in the great new caves is Cloakstone. Cloakstone is almost completely invisible, unless you are very close to it. So you will pretty much only find it by walking into it while exploring one of the new caves.

When you mine a Cloakstone (needs an Iron Pickaxe), you get two Cloaknuggets. Those also are almost invisible. These Cloaknuggets you can use to craft 5 new torches, or convert existing torches into these: A regular Cloaked Torch, a Blue Cloaked Torch, a Red Cloaked Torch, a Green Cloaked Torch, and a Rainbow Cloaked Torch! To get a Cloaked Torch, you can simply put a Cloaknugget into an existing torch. It will then become cloaked. You can also directly craft Cloaked Torches with new recipes.

Cloaked Torches are very cool, because they are almost invisible: Only when standing directly next to them you can see them. They act exactly the same as regular torches, apart from the fact that they are pretty much invisible. So they are super useful for if you want to light up something in your build without any torches being visible!

A Cloaked Torch can also be converted back into a regular torch by putting colored or white dye into it.

Native bHaptics support

This update adds native support for bHaptics! If you have a bHaptics vest or arm or feet haptics, they should automatically work in cyubeVR now, and help a lot with making the game even more immersive!

There are haptics for placing blocks, teleporting, shooting the bow, falling, being on low health, dying, and of course, most importantly, for mining. Now you can really feel the pickaxe in your arms and shoulders! There's also haptics for adding items to your inventory, grabbing something from a shoulder slot, chopping wood, and when using the bucket.

Footstep sounds

This update also adds footstep sounds for the player, depending on what type of ground you walk on. For some reason, the player never had footstep sounds in cyubeVR before - it's very surprising, but in the past few years, no one seemed to ever ask for footstep sounds, that's why it was never even considered that it might be a good idea to add them. It definitely improves immersion to have them, so now they exist!

VRAM Warning

This is a new feature that will help a lot of players to have better performance in the game, inspired by Half Life Alyx, which is doing the same thing: In the main menu, the game now shows you a well visible warning below the main UI if you have background software running that uses a significant amounts of VRAM (GPU Memory), and tells you that that will likely reduce performance in the game.

If there are any processes that use a lot of VRAM, the game even tells you exactly which processes that are. For example, if you have Firefox running in the background, which is one of the most problematic programs in that regard, you will now most likely see the game telling you about Firefox using significant GPU resources in the background, and suggest you to close that for best performance. A lot of VR players don't know how much having Firefox or Chrome open in the background can actually hurt performance, so this will help to prevent a lot of players from wondering why the performance in the game is a lot worse than it should be on their hardware!

New VoxelAPI functions

If you are a modder using the VoxelAPI to create mods for cyubeVR, then there are two new functions available for you now: ConsumeBlockItems and SetPlayerViewDirection. For more information about the VoxelAPI, check out the VoxelAPI GitHub repo: https://github.com/sbsce/cyubeVR-VoxelAPI-Modding

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone for supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working full-time on cyubeVR, and it's often quite hard to make a living purely off the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, Arados, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, Quill, ErrorNull, SkgBlaze, Trevor Berninger, Tom Hörberg, Ethernoctis, Sceptrex, Al Raw, Lucanes, David O, Shanya / Sabrina, KroyVR, MightyDuck, Lynx, Eti the Spirit, WillyVR, David R., Austin Flores, TallOnTwo, Tiddlez, Bhima, Plantmaster, Altair, Michael Ballard, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, WarChi1d, Alphie, Saltshine, Jackerino, gunair, Dark Slaughter, VenturePopTV, Curzek, Lucas van Leiden, M1kk3l, mazzawoollza, RelativelyQuantum, Netshaman, Dave Pearson, Bucket Codes, Lordoldmanrets, Daniel Crawford, texhnobees, Talsma, TinyMrMan (MB), AnubisXtreme, Adrian Sawn, Albertbz, joerkig, MurphChops, Connor A, Algiz, Yasha, SingingFluffyUK, Volpe, Saul2000

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of Patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or T-Shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new mods

Recently, more new mods were added to the workshop! Let's mention them here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883177343&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883177848&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883177929&searchtext=

If any of them look interesting to you, just install them with one click from the Steam Workshop. cyubeVR is highly moddable. If you're interested in creating your own mods for cyubeVR, take a look at this high level modding overview:
https://github.com/cyubeVR-Modding/.github/blob/main/profile/README.md#cyubevr-modding-overview

More awesome new custom blocks

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 30 separate beta builds! If you 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 you just write "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

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 over 3700 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, please tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also the official cyubeVR subreddit on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow cyubeVR on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!

Aug 2, 2022

Update 52 for cyubeVR is live! Great new dynamic view distance fog, and more!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 52 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds a really cool new dynamic view distance fog system that also results in the default view distance being increased from 20 to 50, significantly improved world generation speed on slow CPUs, rendering fixes for Pimax headsets, plus many other significant improvements and bugfixes.

Let's take a look at the long list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes!

Added a really cool dynamic/intelligent view distance fog
Increased the default view distance from 20 to 50. Thanks to the new view distance fog system, this is now possible!
Significantly improved the initial world generation speed on slower CPUs
The dark mode in the main menu is now the default!
Fixed rendering issues with running the game on a Pimax headset on "Normal" or "Large" FOV
Improved tree spawning, it was too noticeable before
Fixed it being possible to type in a world name including characters that aren't allowed by windows for folder names, causing a crash
Fixed the "time until first weather change after generating a new world" not working correctly
Increased the time until the first weather change after creating a new world from 16 minutes to 25 minutes
Updated list of high-end GPUs where the game automatically chooses higher default graphics settings
Fixed crafting recipe detection sometimes being a bit too generous (e.g. 4x1 copper being detected as a wall mount)
Fixed typo in welcome text
Made the crystal symbol on the smoothbrain statue a bit easier to see
Fixed it being possible to sometimes have duplicate flint stones on a furnace
Fixed a possible bug in the tree loading/saving code
Fixed custom blocks that are uploaded to the workshop not automatically getting the "All custom blocks", "Glowing" or "Animated" label if they should
Improved the text on the "can't modify world here yet" warning message
Improved rotation of hint texts
Fixed the music mute button in the main menu being almost invisible when the dark mode is enabled
Improved the colors of the buttons in the "Start new world" tab in the main menu in dark mode
Fixed a possible crash
Fixed a possible VoxelAPI crash while loading a world
Fixed a crash that could very rarely happen while just walking around
Some CPU optimizations
Added new VoxelAPI functions: SpawnHintTextAdvanced and DestroyHintText
Added new VoxelAPI function: GetWorldSeed
Added new VoxelAPI function: GetThisModGlobalSaveFolderPath
Fixed the bool CreatedNewWorld being incorrectly inverted in the VoxelAPI
Fixed the VoxelAPI function GetGameVersionNumber returning incorrect value when the version number did not include a minor version
Improved crash message when VoxelAPI mod tries to do something with a block at a Z coordinate outside of 0-799

New dynamic view distance fog system!

As you probably know, cyubeVR has a really cool near-infinite view distance system - you can see for miles, while still having great performance. But to be able to see an area of your world, you actually need to have explored that area first. When you start a new world, you start with having no parts of the world explored of course - so your view distance slowly grows bigger over time as you explore more of the world.

Previously, if you set your view distance to some high settings to make full use of the near-infinite view distance system (which you should!), without actually having explored much of the world yet, then you would see clearly visible chunk edges that were not really pretty. Leaving the view distance on a low setting like 20 would mean you don't see any chunk edges, because there's a view distance fog exactly at 20 chunks away from you, but it would also mean you don't benefit from a nice high view distance. Setting the view distance high meant you benefit from the nice view distance, but with clearly visible chunk edges, because the view distance fog would then be e.g. at 200 chunks away, far behind the actually generated chunks. So in practice, there wouldn't be any fog to nicely hide the chunk edges. The only way to have it look perfect before was to set the view distance high *and* also explore the whole area within the view distance, so that no chunk edges were visible any more. But exploring a whole view distance of 200 takes quite a long time, so in the meantime, it would not look best.

And that wasn't ideal of course!

Now, with Update 52, cyubeVR gets a way better dynamic view distance fog system that dynamically puts the view distance fog exactly at the place where you have explored the world so far - so no matter if you put the view distance at 20 or at 200, the transition at the end of the so-far explored world always looks great.

Here are two screenshots to make it clearer.

This is how it looked like with Update 51, if you set the view distance to 200, while only having explored a small part of that 200 view distance:

And this is the exact same view with Update 52, still having the view distance set to 200:

You see, it looks much nicer now! And that's just a static comparison - the new view distance fog system also looks much nicer regarding how new chunks are "uncovered" as you walk around and explore terrain - you usually never see chunk edges any more, and it all looks much more natural and realistic. A big improvement to the overall graphics of the game!

And thanks to this new dynamic view distance fog, the default view distance in cyubeVR was now increased from 20 to 50 - previously, 50 would look worse than 20 while only having actually explored 20, which is the case for every new player who just starts the game. So that was the only reason why the default view distance was at 20 - thanks to how optimized everything in cyubeVR is, there actually is no relevant performance difference at all between 20 and 50, so contrary to what a lot of people might expect, performance actually was not the reason why the default is just 20! But now, 50 looks just as good as 20 while having explored only 20, and 50 will automatically start looking much cooler than 20 once a new player has explored some more areas. So it's way nicer now :)

Much faster initial world generation speed on slow CPUs!

cyubeVR has some very pretty procedural terrain generation, everyone is always impressed what the generation in cyubeVR can come up with - but it comes at a cost, being that it's quite heavy to calculate. On modern CPUs that's not a problem, you never notice it being slow, it's all instant - But on older CPUs, CPUs from like 8 years ago or so, you can notice it being quite slow. The cyubeVR min spec reflects that you need a reasonably good CPU to run cyubeVR nicely ("AMD Ryzen or Intel CPU, from 2014 or later with at least 6 threads").

With this update, the initial world generation speed using slow CPUs has been much improved. This only affects the initial world generation speed, and only slow CPUs. On modern CPUs, it was already almost instant, so not much could be improved there. To see how much Update 52 improves the speed on old CPUs, I have emulated a very slow CPU, far below the min spec of the game, and the result was that with Update 51 it took 12 minutes to generate a new world, and with Update 52 it only takes 50 seconds. So that's a big improvement! Of course, I would still not recommend that you try to play cyubeVR on a CPU below the minimum spec. cyubeVR is much more enjoyable if you play it on the hardware it's supposed to be played on, always check the min spec of a game on the Steam page before buying a game!

The dark mode in the main menu is now the default!

For quite a while, cyubeVR had both a light mode and a dark mode in the main menu. The default has always been the light mode. Recently, I did a poll in the cyubeVR discord, asking people the question "Do you prefer the light mode or the dark mode of the cyubeVR main menu? Which looks better?". The result of that poll was 9 votes in favor of the light mode, and 148 votes in favor of the dark mode. That's a very clear result! So, with that poll result, I didn't have to think much - the dark mode has now been made the default option in the main menu of cyubeVR!

Another great cyubeVR video from Habie!

Let's also mention here that habie147 made another great cyubeVR video, showing the nice smoothbrain statue that has been added with Update 51. Thanks very much to him for showing cyubeVR again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-1jl1FrAOI

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone for supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working full-time on cyubeVR, and it's often quite hard to make a living purely off the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, Arados, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, SkgBlaze, Tom Hörberg, Quill, Al Raw, Sceptrex, Shanya / Sabrina, Lucanes, David O, KroyVR, Trevor Berninger, Ethernoctis, WillyVR, MightyDuck, Austin Flores, Lynx, Tiddlez, David R., Eti the Spirit, WarChi1d, Alphie, Jackerino, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Dark Slaughter, gunair, Bhima, Plantmaster, Altair, Michael Ballard, Curzek, Lucas van Leiden, mazzawoollza, RelativelyQuantum, Saltshine, Netshaman, VenturePopTV, Dave Pearson, Bucket Codes, Lordoldmanrets, Daniel Crawford, texhnobees, TinyMrMan (MB), Adrian Sawn, joerkig, M1kk3l, MurphChops, Connor A, Talsma, Algiz, AnubisXtreme, Yasha, SingingFluffyUK, Albertbz, Volpe

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of Patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new mods

Recently, more new mods were added to the workshop! Let's mention all of them here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2830300720&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2831449248&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2831468841&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2836860451&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2841733188&searchtext=

cyubeVR is highly moddable. If you're interested in creating your own mods for cyubeVR, take a look at this high level modding overview:
https://github.com/cyubeVR-Modding/.github/blob/main/profile/README.md#cyubevr-modding-overview

More awesome new custom blocks

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 13 separate beta builds! If you 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 you just write "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

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 over 3500 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, please tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also the official cyubeVR subreddit on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!

Jun 23, 2022

Update 51 for cyubeVR is live! Super powerful modding support and more!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 51 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds super powerful new modding capabilities like a native modding API and native support for UE4 mods, including Steam Workshop support, categories for custom blocks, an update to the latest Unreal Engine 4 version, a really cool craftable smoothbrain statue in honor of habie147, much improved performance with LIV, and many other significant improvements, like being able to grab rabbits and geckos with gravity gloves!

Let's take a look at the long list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes!

Awesome new modding feature: Added native UE4 blueprint modding support
Awesome new modding feature: Added a native modding API, the VoxelAPI
Awesome new modding feature: Added Steam Workshop support for both new types of mods
Awesome new modding feature: Added categories for custom blocks
Awesome new modding feature: Added ability for mods to show their own tutorials in the list of tutorials in the game
Added an awesome smoothbrain statue that can be crafted, in honor of habie147 (see below for more details!)
Updated Engine to the latest UE4 version (4.27)
Gravity gloves now work on rabbits and geckos. It's an amazing feature.
Updated the LIV plugin to the newest version, hugely improving performance of LIV
Improved gravity gloves, they now always prefer objects in line of sight over those out of sight
Some improvements to the "Manage Mods" menu
The crafting type indicator on the bucket now also works with custom blocks
Added some light haptic feedback that indicates when you can drop an item behind the shoulder
Updated DLSS plugin to latest version
Switched to using Clang instead of MSVC as the C++ compiler for the whole game
Updated SQLite library to latest version
Added a new graphics setting: "Placed Torch Brightness"
Tools now no longer pass through animals
Added three new possible options to the Properties.json for custom blocks
Added ability to make a custom block that can't be crafted
Added new SimilarTo value 4 for custom blocks
Adjusted the "Terrain LOD Quality" setting, the old "Ultra" is the new "Normal", and the old "Normal" is the new "Low".
Improved sharpness of block textures
Small GPU performance optimization
Added the ability to make the game crash by pressing Shift+Ctrl+Win+Alt+C
Made the sound effect when dropping an item into a chest audible from a bit further away
Added version number to the top left of the briefcase
Slightly improved the lighting on the dandelion seeds in the air
Improved wording on the "Crafting" tutorial page
Slightly increased outline size on font on the main 4 briefcase buttons
Fixed movement of animals not always working correctly
Fixed crash when dying before walking around enough in the world
Fixed the funny april fools feature in cyubeVR not working
Fixed main menu buttons not always being guaranteed to all be visible
Fixed a bug that could in theory have caused a crash
Fixed a small bug with custom block texture import code that usually wasn't noticeable
Fixed "You need better tool to mine this" message coming up when trying to destroy bottom stone
Fixed a possible crash when leaving the world within less than a second of mining a block
Fixed a possible crash when placing thousands of blocks at once (basically only happening when using the Voxel API)
Fixed game often crashing when closing it ungracefully
Fixed bug with weather saving/loading
Fixed chunks-not-updating bug that could be triggered by VoxelAPI mods
Fixed dragging out items or tools from radial menu slots or shoulder slots sometimes turning custom blocks in regular inventory slots into invalid blocks
Fixed it being possible to duplicate an item by dragging it out of a radial menu slot or shoulder slot
Fixed dirt blocks placed with crystal assisted block placement sometimes turning into grass blocks where they should logically be dirt and not grass
Fixed "Distance Tree Shadows" setting not always correctly being force-disabled when view distance is over 50
Fixed glass blocks sometimes staying visible after being destroyed
Fixed visible delay with spawning trees when generating terrain
Fixed it being possible to "get stuck" with smooth locomotion and having to teleport to be able to move again
Fixed multiple crashes
Some CPU optimizations

Super powerful new modding features!

It's probably fair to say, this is the most game-changing update ever for cyubeVR so far. cyubeVR now supports so much modding that it's possible to turn the game into basically anything, and a lot of modders have created awesome mods already!

As you probably know, before this Update, cyubeVR supported custom blocks, with custom recipes, that could easily be shared through the Steam Workshop. But that was quite limited "modding" - it did not allow for anything more complex than blocks to be made. And that's hugely changing now with Update 51!

Starting with this Update, cyubeVR now officially supports all the modding. There is a new native modding API, the VoxelAPI, for easily interacting with the voxel world through a simple easy-to-use API. Additionally, there is now full native support for Unreal Engine Blueprint mods that can add basically anything to the game. That's two completely new, separate ways of modding the game, depending on the type of mod you want to make, and your skills. And of course, there's also Steam Workshop support for these new types of mods, so you can easily install any mod with one single click!

Before we look in more detail at the new types of modding that are supported now, let's start with showing you a list of all the mods that have already been created by modders using the beta build of the game, and are ready to be used by everyone with Update 51 now. It's a really impressive list already!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2821687728&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819601766&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819438970&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824385911&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819463120&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2822248085&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824239680&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824194168&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819439314&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824385811&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819439253&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819439159&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819429999&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819439071&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824385987&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824386075&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2824386157&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819425276&searchtext=

Wow! Update 51 hasn't even been out yet, and so many awesome mods have been created already by modders using the beta build of the game! It's really amazing to see how well the reception of the new modding features has been.

Many of these mods are super powerful, and completely game-changing for players who are interested in those features.

To mention just three examples of how game-changing these mods are:

It was not possible before in cyubeVR to quickly remove or copy/paste a whole mountain for some giant build you want to do - but now, thanks to the super powerful world editing tools of cyubePainter, being able to do that is just one click on the Steam Workshop away
For a long time, one of the most requested features in cyubeVR has been adding enemies - that's still planned as a native feature of course, but now in the meantime, thanks to the Enemy Mod, having enemies to fight is also just one click on the Steam Workshop away
The world in cyubeVR is infinitely big, but if you wanted to have multiple builds 20 km apart from each other, it would take you like an hour of walking ingame to move between them, so few people built anything really far away - now with cyubeGate, you can simply put such a teleport gate between the two locations, and almost instantly move between them. What a difference!

And that's just three of the mods from the list above. Every one of those mods is definitely worth trying out.

The YouTuber ChibiArcher has been reviewing many of those mods on his channel already in the past few weeks, so if you want to watch how some of those mods work without trying them out yourself, this "cyubeVR Mod Reviews" YouTube playlist from ChibiArcher is really cool.

Installing mods is super easy - the cyubeVR Steam Workshop now has a list of tags on the right, where you can easily choose between only seeing custom blocks, or only seeing mods that aren't just custom blocks.
And of course, if you prefer to not use the Steam Workshop and instead want to manually download a mod from some random place in the internet, that works too, by simply downloading it from any source you want and it extracting it manually into the

[GameInstallDirectory]/cyubeVR/Mods/ModFolders/

folder.

But how does the modding actually work?

Now that we talked about all the cool mods that have been made already, let's get a bit more technical and talk about what kind of modding features exactly have actually been added to the game now with Update 51?

If you want to make your own mods, it's important to understand that there are now three totally separate types of "mods" you can make for cyubeVR, each requiring different skills, and best suited for different types of mods:

Custom Blocks

Custom blocks are the simplest type of modding you can do in cyubeVR, and they existed before Update 51 already - creating blocks with custom textures and custom recipes, that can be used the same like any other block in the game. Update 51 added some additional features for custom blocks to give modders more control, but overall, this works the same as before.

Making a custom block is very easy, it requires no programming at all. If you know how to use any image editing software, you can create a custom block! If you are primarily an artist and not a programmer, this is exactly for you!

The guide for how to create custom blocks can be found here.

VoxelAPI Modding

Starting with Update 51, cyubeVR now has a native modding API, called the VoxelAPI. It is an easy-to-use API for interacting with the voxel world in cyubeVR. Placing blocks, removing blocks, teleporting the player to some location, damaging/healing the player, any similar things. With the VoxelAPI, you can easily create any mod that is "block based". Want to generate custom ores in the ground? VoxelAPI! Want to procedurally generate a whole castle when the player places one block? VoxelAPI! Want to create a minigame with blocks that spawn around the player? VoxelAPI!

To create a VoxelAPI mod, knowing how to create custom blocks is very useful, most VoxelAPI mods will also contain one or multiple custom blocks. To create VoxelAPI mods, you should know at least some programming - which programming language you know isn't too important and importantly, you do not need to know how any game engine works. As long as you know the basic concepts of programming, you will be able to create a VoxelAPI mod, it's all designed to be very easy to understand.

Here you can find the repository for the VoxelAPI, with a lot of details about how everything works in the Readme.

The majority of the mods mentioned above in the list are VoxelAPI mods: cyubePainter, Cloud Walker, cyubeGate, or the Creative Menu are examples for VoxelAPI mods.

One of the super cool things about the VoxelAPI is that the API is specifically setup so that any existing VoxelAPI mod will stay compatible with the game forever, even if the mod is abandoned by the author and never gets updated for newer game versions. Also, due to how the API is setup, a VoxelAPI mod can't decrease the performance of the game, even if it accidentally calculates 10 trillion digits of PI every second in its code. The VoxelAPI is a fully stable and backwards-compatible API - API calls will never be removed or change, to ensure every mod always keeps working without any changes from the mod-authors required. It is a native API, so it's the job of the game itself to ensure that every VoxelAPI mod always keeps working.

Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Modding

Starting with Update 51, cyubeVR now also natively supports Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint (UE4 BP) Modding. This is the most powerful type of modding supported in cyubeVR. With UE4 BP Modding, you can create basically anything that you can make in UE4 and make it work inside of cyubeVR! Want to spawn your own enemies into the game? UE4 BP Mod! Want to make the deer play a nuclear explosion instead of the normal fireworks when they explode? UE4 BP Mod! Want to add driveable tanks into cyubeVR? UE4 BP Mod!

UE4 BP Modding is extremely powerful, but requires you to need to know at least the basics of how to use Unreal Engine 4, the game engine that cyubeVR is made with. UE4 BP Modding can also be combined with VoxelAPI modding - for example, you can make a VoxelAPI Mod spawn a particle effect or a sound effect from a UE4 BP Mod.

Here you can find a YouTube playlist that explains how to get started with UE4 BP Modding in cyubeVR. Those videos have been created by Buckminsterfullerene, who has actually been the driving force behind adding this type of modding to cyubeVR. I did not even know such native UE4 modding support would be possible before Buckminsterfullerene pointed it out and explained what functionality exactly needs to be added to the game for modders to be able to nicely use this. UE4 BP modding is super powerful, but that also makes it quite complex, and the native support of the game to load mods alone does not do much if the things required for making such mods in a convenient way are not also setup, like a template project for easily interacting with existing game code and generated headers for figuring out how to call any functions from the game. All these required things for making UE4 BP Mods have been setup by Buckminsterfullerene for cyubeVR UE4 BP modding in this cyubeVR Modding Repo on GitHub, so thanks very much to him for that!

Of the currently existing mods, these three are Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Mods: Enemy Mod, Big Animals, Timelapse Cameras

In contrast to VoxelAPI mods, UE4 BP Mods will usually have to be updated by their authors whenever the engine version the game uses is updated - so when cyubeVR will be updated to Unreal Engine 5 in the future, UE4 BP Mods will need to be updated by their authors to specifically support UE5, otherwise they will stop working. VoxelAPI mods on the other hand don't care about the engine the game uses - they just automatically keep working forever.

If you have any questions about any of the modding stuff, feel free to ask in the #modding or #voxel-api channel in the official cyubeVR Discord. It's normal that it might take a while to understand everything about the modding features, and I'm very happy to help anyone who wants to make mods for cyubeVR as much as I can!

A smoothbrain statue in honor of habie147

I am sure many of you still remember this YouTube video from habie147 about cyubeVR.

Habie made an awesome video about cyubeVR there, and by now that video has over 1 million views on YouTube. Just to put that into perspective: Before Habie's video, the cyubeVR video with the most views on YouTube was the (old) official trailer of the game, uploaded 4.5 years ago. That trailer managed to get 34,000 views in 4.5 years. Habie's video got over 1 million views in less than 8 months!

Even without looking at any numbers, Habie's video was the first time ever since cyubeVR was released 4.5 years ago, that any bigger YouTuber actually made a video about cyubeVR that explains in a nicely edited video what cyubeVR is about, with enough depth to understand what exactly makes cyubeVR special. While Habie didn't show many of the late-game features (the furnace mechanics, or the crystal mechanics, or the near-infinite view distance), what matters is, he explained most of the important aspects of what cyubeVR is about in better words, and in a more interesting way, than I could ever do myself.

Such a video simply did not exist before. That's likely because usually, YouTubers prefer to check out new fresh releases of games, which unfortunately excludes games that were released earlier, even if they are still in very active development and constantly getting new features, like cyubeVR.

So the important point is: Habie's video is awesome. I am very grateful to Habie for making that video. His video will forever be the first cyubeVR video to have hit 1 million views on YouTube, and I have heard from multiple active cyubeVR players who have played hundreds of hours of the game by now, that they originally found the game through Habie's video. So there is no doubt that his video brought many new players to the game, who are now active in the awesome cyubeVR community, thanks to Habie making that video.

So I thought it would be very nice and totally rightful to honor that in some way with a nice feature directly in the game - and that's exactly what Update 51 is doing now!

Update 51 adds an amazing craftable smoothbrain statue, in honor of habie147 and his whole community:

The statue is super detailed, as you are used to from everything in cyubeVR: It is sculpted from stone, with awesome 8K textures, and incredible detail of 200,000 triangles for the statue alone (there are of course LODs so that if you are further away, not all those 200k triangles need to be rendered). To build the statue, you will need to find the recipe for it, and then craft it, out of 54 stone items. It's a fun, cheap recipe to build. Everyone has 54 stone!

On the top of the statue, next to the very very smooth brain, there is a slightly hidden, but well readable text engraving that reads "In honor of habie147, creator of the first cyubeVR video to surpass 1 million views". At the bottom of the statue, on each of the 4 sides, there is an additional engraving of the words "Stop it | Get | Some | Help".

And that's not all yet - on the smoothbrain on top of the statue, you can see a (slightly hidden) crystal symbol. If you put a magic crystal into the brain, it starts to glow and play a very pretty animation, looking like what Habie calls an "atomic mirror brain":

It looks awesome! We really put a lot of effort into making this statue as perfect as possible :) As long as the crystal in inside of the smoothbrain, it will keep looking like that "atomic mirror brain". If you want to, you can also remove the crystal again, and then the smoothbrain turns into regular looking stone again.

Like all other decorative objects in the game, the statue can of course be freely resized while placing, so you can place smoothbrain statues of any size in your world - from tiny to huge! And you can also still move a statue around after it is placed, by simply grabbing it with two hands.

I really hope Habie will like this great smoothbrain statue. This was not coordinated with him in any way, it is a surprise for everyone! Not even beta testers of cyubeVR have seen the statue so far - it's one of the only times that a feature was added to cyubeVR without having been in a beta build before. So build it and let me know what you think about it!

New custom block features

As mentioned above, the custom block feature also got significant improvements! Most importantly, custom blocks can now be displayed as part of categories in the crafting recipes UI.

There are so many custom blocks on the Steam Workshop by now (over 300!) that the crafting recipe overview UI has become quite inconvenient to scroll through for anyone who has all of them installed. Categories fix this! The creator of a custom block can now specify a category name. Any blocks sharing that category name will automatically be displayed grouped in the UI. The category can be folded in and out by clicking at it. Way less scrolling needed, and way easier to find the blocks you look for in the UI!

The category has to be specified by the creator of the custom block, so if you have made any blocks that would benefit from being grouped in a category, simply update your blocks by adding the additional field

"CategoryName": "Put Name Here"

in the Properties.json of your blocks.

But that's not the only new property you can add to your custom blocks!

You can now make indestructible custom blocks
You can now make custom blocks that do not have a crafting recipe and don't show up in the list of crafting recipes
You can now make custom blocks that cannot be placed with crystal assisted block placement
You can now make custom blocks that can't be moved after they have been placed
You can now make custom blocks that drop a different type when destroyed, for example allowing for your own wood -> processed wood mechanic with your custom block.

These new properties are all explained in the guide about how to make custom blocks for cyubeVR. So if any of those sounds like something you want to use for your custom blocks, check out the guide here to learn more details! These new properties are most useful when making custom blocks specifically for use in a VoxelAPI mod.

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone for supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working full-time on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, Tom Hörberg, Arados, SkgBlaze, Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, Sceptrex, Quill, WillyVR, David O, KroyVR, Lucanes, Austin Flores, Tiddlez, MightyDuck, David R., Lynx, WarChi1d, Alphie, Eti the Spirit, Jackerino, Dark Slaughter, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Trevor Berninger, Ethernoctis, Lucas van Leiden, gunair, mazzawoollza, Netshaman, Curzek, Saltshine, Bhima, Plantmaster, Altair, Bucket Codes, Lordoldmanrets, Dave Pearson, VenturePopTV, Daniel Crawford, texhnobees, TinyMrMan (MB), Adrian Sawn, joerkig, Connor A, Algiz, MurphChops, Talsma, Yasha, SingingFluffyUK

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of Patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new custom blocks

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 70 separate beta builds! 70 beta builds, that's a lot of beta builds! If you 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 you just write "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

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 over 3500 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, please tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also the official cyubeVR subreddit on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!

Mar 6, 2022

Update 50 for cyubeVR is live! Significant optimizations and more!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 50 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds very significant optimizations like reducing the RAM usage of the game by a whole 4 GB, a new awesome movement option, new helpful hints making the game easier to learn for new players, visual improvements, and many other significant improvements and bugfixes! And if you enjoy to use all your software in dark mode, you'll consider the newly added dark mode for the cyubeVR main menu the most important new feature ;)

Let's take a look at the long list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes!

Significant optimization regarding RAM usage of the game: cyubeVR now uses 4 GB less RAM!
Added a new awesome "Hybrid" option to the "Movement Orientation" setting
Significantly optimized CPU performance when walking around in a world with a lot of torches or chests or picture frames placed
Significant CPU frame time optimizations when having a high view distance (>150) and having generated the terrain for much of it
Significantly optimized world generation speed
Added a dark mode to the main menu
Updated the visuals of the loading screen, it's now much prettier
Fixed performance issue after taking 4K / 8K / 16K screenshots
Made it possible to chop wood logs quicker and more accurately
Reduced the amount of crystal blocks that get generated by 50%
Crystals are now only 1/3 as magically bouncy as before when being mined
Fixed desktop mirror of the game sometimes flickering in the main menu
Fixed it being possible to create a world with an empty name which then caused a lot of issues
Added a new setting "Expert Settings" that is set to "Hidden" by default
Added a "Delete all Free Crystals" button at the bottom of the stats (needs Expert Settings enabled)
Fixed it being possible to walk through placed fences
Renamed Metal Pod to Metal Pot
Made empty slot texture in chests prettier
Fixed the "place torch in torch" bug
Halved the amount of circulating birds in the sky
Made the bow hint text appear sooner, and stay for longer
Added two hint texts explaining that you can put a crystal into the build tool
Added hint text explaining to recharge crystals in sunlight and moonlight when crystal in bucket is empty
Added hint text explaining that a torch can be placed on the ground, wall or ceiling
Added a hint text that explains you can resize objects like chairs, tables etc
Added a hint text that explains you can move blocks
Added a "How to craft something" button in the crafting recipe overview, only visible before the player has successfully crafted anything for the first time
Fixed item quick drop hint text appearing when dragging out many crystals from inventory (it should not appear for crystals)
Renamed "Smooth Loco Speed" setting to "Walking Speed"
Renamed "Locomotion Direction" setting to "Movement Orientation"
Changed the default option for the "Movement Orientation" setting to "Head"
Changed the order of the settings in the "Gameplay" tab to have the most important settings be at the top
Changed default option for turning from Snap 22.5° to Snap 45°
Fixed a possible crash when having a lot of chests
Fixed it being possible to light up items in chest on fire
Fixed birds high up in the sky flickering, especially with DLSS enabled
Fixed chest slots being visible when holding items that are attached together in a hand
Fixed that sometimes when wanting to take a whole stack from chest to inventory only one item is taken
Moved the area for grabbing an arrow a bit further forward, making it easier to hit
Improved snow accumulation on trees, it is now more synchronized with the snow accumulation on the ground, and there's also a bit less snow on the trees, making them less fully white
Made snow accumulation on trees and the landscape in the distance more in sync with snow accumulation on trees and landscape up close
Improved wording on some of the tutorial pages
Fixed the bucket sound being audible for a short while when starting the game
Fixed it being possible to grab a flintstone and attach it to another block with crafting
Fixed the physics of the monitor lizard when shot with an arrow (it was trying to become an astronaut too much)
Adjusted order of the tutorial pages
Fixed the haptic feedback from the shovel always happening in the right hand, even if it's used with the left hand
Fixed duplication bug with the radial menu when using the advanced control scheme on index controllers
Fixed shoulder slot not getting greyed out correctly when placing last of a block from there that's also in a radial menu slot
Fixed tree re-spawning when walking away too far from a tree while it's chopped and falling
Fixed trees often being back after rejoining the world after cutting them down
Added haptic feedback for wiggling the axe out of the tree
Fixed crash after cutting down a lot of trees
When starting a new world, the torches you start with are now automatically in a radial menu slot
Fixed block staying in radial menu slot after manually deleting it from the inventory
When adding a placable item to the inventory, it now automatically gets added to an empty radial menu slot (if one exists)
Made the news in the main menu look better (less bright)
The news in the main menu is now automatically scrolled down a bit further to show more relevant text
Fixed "sometimes after walking for a long time and then modifying the chunk you're standing on, the chunk becomes invisible" bug
Fixed "sometimes after walking for a long time, you get an unwanted teleport" bug
Fixed "sometimes after walking for a long time, you see a green flash" bug
Fixed an invisible axe sometimes being stuck in hand after chopping down a tree
Updated compiler to latest version
Chunk rebuild CPU performance optimizations
Fixed crash when grabbing items while they fall into the bucket
When using stick on tree, the wood pieces now spawn a bit further away when the tree is large
Fixed crash when quickly picking grass
Fixed tree disappearing for a few seconds when walking away from it while looking at it
Made the overlap area of the delete bar in the inventory taller, so it's easier to hit now
Other CPU performance optimizations
Other small bugfixes

A lot of optimizations

This update adds a lot of significant optimizations, reducing the RAM usage of the game by at least 4 GB (even more if you use custom INI settings), making world generation noticeably faster, improving framerate a lot when using very high view-distances, and making the game run much smoother when walking around in worlds that contain a lot of torches, picture frames or chests, making sure there are no framedrops from loading or unloading such objects.

Smooth framerates are super important for getting a perfect immersive experience in a VR game like cyubeVR, so this update helps a lot with that. cyubeVR is one of the most pretty VR games, and that is great, but only if it also goes hand in hand with being one of the most optimized VR games, so a lot of time is spent with optimizing all the code in cyubeVR as much as possible! In case you didn't know yet, cyubeVR is written in highly-optimized C++ and using a modified version of Unreal Engine 4 with various custom optimizations added to the UE4 code.

Before this update, there also was an issue with using the games special high-resolution screenshot feature leading to constantly reduced framerate after taking such a screenshot - this is fixed now, so if you ever encountered it, remember that you can now take nice 8K screenshots all the time without having to worry about performance!

New "Hybrid" movement orientation

You are likely familiar with there usually being two different movement orientatation options in VR games - Either the movement is head-oriented (thumbstick forward moves you in the direction you look at), or the movement is controller-oriented (thumbstick forward moves you into the direction your thumb points to). cyubeVR also had these two options for a long time, but in some cases, neither of them are ideal. Controller-oriented movement for example suffers from the downside of holding your controller upside-down making you move backwards when pushing the thumbstick forward, which usually does not feel right.

Most VR game players consider something like hip-oriented movement ideal, but that is only possible if some kind of hip tracker is used (e.g. Decamove). Normally a game can only know about the location and orientation of your head and hands, and not of the rest of your body.

With this Update, cyubeVR now gets a third movement orientation option, called "Hybrid". This option is basically using a fancy algorithm to estimate your chest orientation, and then use that for movement. It has the same advantages as controller-oriented movement (easily being able to walk in a direction different from where you are looking) while not sharing problems like turning the hand upside down making you move backwards when you actually want to move forwards.

Based on feedback from all the beta testers who tried it, this new "Hybrid" option seems to now be the favorite movement orientation among people who tried it. So you should definitely try it out, you'll like it! :)

Additional Hint Texts and crafting tutorial

As part of every update, I try also to do something that makes "learning" the game easier - it's easy to just focus on the requests of the "hardcore" players who play cyubeVR for hundreds of hours and know everything in the game perfectly, but it's also important to ensure that new players have a good time when they play the game for the first time! For that, the game now has some additional "hint texts" that appear if the game thinks the player might not know something and would benefit from some hint, this time focusing especially on letting a player know about all the cool crystal-related features of the game.

For new players of the game, there now also is a "How to craft something" button next to any crafting recipe. Clicking this button plays a video that shows how crafting in cyubeVR works. That way, it should be 100% clear to everyone how to craft something, even to people who ignore any tutorial in the game. The "How to craft something" button is only visible until you have successfully crafted anything for the first time. After that, the buttons disappears.

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone for supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working full-time on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, Al Raw, SkgBlaze, Shanya / Sabrina, Tom Hörberg, Arados, WillyVR, KroyVR, David O, Tiddlez, Austin Flores, Sceptrex, Lucanes, WarChi1d, Jackerino, David R., Dark Slaughter, MightyDuck, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, mazzawoollza, Lynx, Netshaman, gunair, Alphie, Eti the Spirit, Bucket Codes, Lordoldmanrets, Daniel Crawford, texhnobees, TinyMrMan (MB), Curzek, Saltshine, Adrian Sawn, joerkig, Connor A, Algiz, Dave Pearson, VenturePopTV, Yasha, MurphChops, SingingFluffyUK, Talsma

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of Patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new custom blocks

Recently, more new custom blocks were added to the workshop! Let's mention some of them here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2719749413&searchtext=

Glowing blocks in a lot of colors (only linking some of them, there are more):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2766533494&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2766535800&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2766536100&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2766536648&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2766536935&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2766537455&searchtext=

You can install every one of them with a single button click, and immediately use them for building in the game. Make sure to regularly browse through the Steam Workshop and subscribe to anything you find useful for building in cyubeVR!

If you're interested now in creating your own custom blocks for cyubeVR, here you can find a tutorial about how to create custom blocks for cyubeVR - as long as you are familiar with using any image editing software, it's a really fun and easy process! https://steamcommunity.com/app/619500/discussions/3/1640917625019543783/

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 24 separate beta builds! That's a lot of beta builds! If you 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 you just write "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

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 over 3400 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, please tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also the official cyubeVR subreddit on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!

Dec 19, 2021

Update 49 for cyubeVR is live! Adding a great new control scheme, and much more!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 49 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds an awesome completely new control scheme using a "Half-Life: Alyx"-inspired Radial Menu with fully ambidextrous tool/block selection and additional Shoulder Slots! It also adds DLSS Support, improved bow controls and mechanics, a significant upgrade to "Astronaut Deer", some funny commands for streamers, and many other significant improvements, bugfixes, and optimizations!

Let's take a look at the long list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes!

The game now has a great new control scheme using a Radial Menu on both hands and Shoulder Slots! (Much more info below)
New bow controls, and various improvements to the bow mechanics
Added DLSS support
Big upgrade to "Astronaut Deer"! Launching deer now have flames coming out of their rear end, and they explode!
Added a "hover to pause" button to rotating crafting recipes
Added a visual indicator for where to attach a tool to a wall mount, visible when holding a tool near a wall mount
Added two new options to the "Night Darkness" setting: There's now the options "Dark", "Realistic", "Brighter", "Brightest"
Added some funny commands for streamers
Updated all the controller button mapping overviews for the new control scheme
Updated all the tutorial pages for the new control scheme
Added a message showing up explaining that SteamVR needs to run to play cyubeVR if you attempt to play cyubeVR without SteamVR installed
Significantly improved the visuals of hint texts
Updated all the torch icons to look better
Improved how custom block icons are displayed in the briefcase UI
Adjusted the wallstone recipe, it now gives 24 wallstone instead of 16
Adjusted the glass block recipe, it now gives 32 glass blocks instead of 50
Improved loading screen: The loading screen % now has one decimal digit and there is less of a freeze at 20%
Improved where the wood block items spawn when hitting a tree with the stick, it is now much more predictable, and they won't sometimes fly away
Added a hint text explaining how to use the bow
Added a hint text explaining how to make processed wood
Added a hint text explaining that you can put a crystal into the bucket
Improved the regular stone block texture
Improved the dark processed wood texture
To move the block placement distance slider on a hand, the finger now needs to hover for a minimum of 0.2 seconds over it before it moves in any direction
Made the overlap area between the index fingertip and the block placement distance slider smaller
Unprocessed wood blocks placed with crystal assisted block placement now always drop blocks when destroyed
Sledgehammers on crystal blocks now never drop any crystals
Added two new screenshots to the community screenshot showcase in the main menu
Improved behavior of preview block, when finishing placing a lot of blocks the preview block now immediately is at the new location
Adjusted the "less than 100 MB free space" warning text to make it clear that there is a difference between actual free space and free space that is usable for the game
Added "Chunk you're currently standing on" stat to the "Stats" tab of the settings
Moved the coordinates to the top of the "Stats" tab
Made gravity glove aim more forgiving for items up close
Made aiming at the crafted structure of multiple items easier with gravity glove, and improved the grab position when grabbing them that way
Moved the "drop behind shoulder" area forward a bit, to make it easier to hit even if someone drops it "on" the shoulder instead of "behind" the shoulder
Made it so that successfully crafted structures lose their physics when adding them to the bucket, to not make the physics make them fly away sometimes
Scrolling in the briefcase UI is now also possible with the right thumbstick on Index controllers, and not just with the right touchpad
Cleaned up all old SteamVR input actions
Made sure that the UI in the main menu is fully rendered in front of the white lines, not behind, on the desktop mirror too
Reduced brightness difference in torchlight between damaged and undamaged blocks
Made the "Brighter" Night Darkness setting a bit darker than before ("Brightest" is now identical to what "Brighter" was before)
Leaning over an elevated chest will no longer "move you up"
It's now no longer possible to use gravity gloves on wall-mounted tools (to prevent accidentally removing tools from a wall mount)
Improved smoothing of briefcase (anti-shaky-hands)
When having the Astronaut Deer setting at "Off (Boring)", the physics of the deer are now even more boring than before
Arrows shot from the bow now have a certain minimum speed, so even when not drawing the bow much they won't just "shoot at your feet"
Updated compiler to the latest version
Enabled more aggressive compiler optimizations
Added a sanity-check that makes the game crash when it detects a chunk would incorrectly get regenerated
Fixed game music sometimes restarting for some people before the track was done playing
Fixed a duplication issue with chests and item quick drop feature
Fixed flickering when damaged blocks finished healing
Fixed a possible issue with the bindings setup
Fixed there being a blue glowing dot in the left hand in the main menu
Fixed ground mesh objects staying placable at last valid location while placing when first pointing at the ground and then pointing into the air
Fixed the first block preview visually moving a bit when placing blocks with crystal assisted block placement while walking at the same time
Fixed it being possible to move the block distance slider while it's invisible
Fixed the shot arrow projectile looking smaller than the arrow in your hand
Fixed stick sometimes being greyed out after dying
Fixed the iron sledgehammer being set to drop more items from blocks than the copper sledgehammer
Fixed inbuilt thumbstick deadzone not being applied everywhere where thumbstick values are read
Fixed the "can't mine this" hint text sometimes incorrectly coming up when hitting stone with the stick
Fixed the hand not always visually keeping its grip closed when holding a tool
Fixed the item quick drop hint text incorrectly mentioning "touchpad" on Oculus controllers
Fixed swapping a tool with a tool in the stick slot incorrectly deleting the tool
Fixed the sliders on the hands being visible in the main menu
Fixed opposite hand staying in placing mode when placing the last one of a mesh object type
Fixed there sometimes being a few floating pieces of melting iron/sand in the furnace
Fixed wall mounted colored torches having incorrect color on their wall holder mesh
Fixed there being a black "Death Star" above the player when using a very high view distance
Fixed spawning of Christmas presents, it now works again the way it was intended to work
Fixed Christmas presents sometimes containing "Buggy Stone"
Fixed one very rare, long-existing rare crash
Fixed crash when successfully gravity-glove grabbing an item while it's getting sucked into the bucket
Fixed crash when holding a burning block item in the hand until it's fully burned out
Fixed that deer were still sometimes headbanging
Fixed the game sometimes not playing audio when it's not in focus
Various small optimizations

New control scheme with Radial Menu and Shoulder Slots!

This update adds a completely new control scheme to cyubeVR, using a "Half-Life: Alyx"-inspired Radial Menu as the main way of selecting tools and blocks, with two additional "Shoulder Slots" for even more convenience!

This new control scheme makes the controls way easier to learn for new players, and it also just feels better.

All the tool and block selection controls are now fully ambidextrous and symmetric, meaning you are no longer limited to only being able to select tools or blocks on the right hand quickly - it's now all available on both the left and right hand, making the game way more convenient to play especially for left-handed people, but also for everyone else due to way quicker tool selection on the left hand, and the additional benefit of now being able to place blocks with the left and right hand simultaneously! Dual-wielded block placement! It means twice the possible building speed if you can coordinate your two hands well enough! Placing blocks, placing torches, placing decorative items, using crystal assisted block placement, it all works the same with the left and right hand now.

A lot of effort was put into making the radial menu feel super polished regarding its visuals, animations, sound effects, and haptics. Every beta tester so far loved it, so most likely, you will too!

An important change accompanying the move to a Radial Menu is that instead of previously having separate 4 "Tool Slots" and 4 "Block Slots" to use, there are now simply a total of 8 "Radial Menu Slots" which you can freely use for both blocks and tools, plus additionally 2 "Shoulder Slots" which can also freely be used for anything.

The Shoulder Slots allow you to equip tools or blocks by simply grabbing behind your shoulder with either hand. So you can put your most-used tools/blocks there for super quick and convenient access.

IMPORTANT: If you did any manual changes to the SteamVR Input Bindings of cyubeVR in the SteamVR Bindings UI, you will have to reset your bindings back to the default. The new control scheme uses many completely new input actions.

Improved bow controls and mechanics

For the new ambidextrous tool/block selection using the radial menu, one more button was needed on the left controller - so this was a great opportunity to much improve the handling of the bow in cyubeVR. Instead of being bound to a special button that was doing nothing else than enabling/disabling the bow, the bow is now a tool like any other in cyubeVR. So the bow is now getting selected through the Radial Menu, the same as any other tool.

The second radial menu slot is now the "Bow Slot", just like the first radial menu slot is the "Stick Slot". You can override the bow with another tool if you want to, and you can always get it back if you remove the other tool/block from that slot again, same as the stick. So you can never lose the bow. But you can loose the bow! ;)

Another big improvement of this is, the bow can now be selected on both hands, using the radial menu. So the bow is no longer only available on the left hand, it's fully ambidextrous now! Having left-handed bow controls has been a request for a long time from left-handed players, as especially with a bow, it's hard not to use it with your correct hand. So now, everyone should be fully happy in this regard!

The way how you draw another arrow and shoot was also adjusted to be easier and more convenient: When you hold a bow in either hand, moving your other hand behind your head and then pressing and holding trigger now grabs a new arrow. Releasing the trigger at any point drops the arrow. Moving the hand to the bow while keeping the trigger pressed, nocking the arrow, drawing back the bow, and then releasing the trigger is how to shoot the bow now.

A lot of small details of the bow mechanics have also been adjusted: The hand now grips the bow at a more realistic position (higher up), the arrow now rests on a more realistic position (higher up) and the arrow now more realistically points "a bit towards the inside".

It's also now possible to have the bow active in one hand, and a tool or block placement active in the other hand. Only once you draw an arrow, your arrow hand drops what it was holding before and grabs the arrow.

DLSS Support

Not much needs to be said about this - you probably all know what DLSS is by now, and cyubeVR now supports it! So if you use an Nvidia RTX GPU, you can now enable DLSS in the options for either better visuals or improved GPU performance. Depending on your VR Headset, SteamVR render resolution, and your GPU, the exact impact it has will vary.

Astronaut Deer Upgrade

Astronaut Deer got a big upgrade! Launching deer now have flames coming out of their rear end, and there's an explosion when they are at their apogee. Hopefully, this will now make it 100% clear to everyone that cyubeVR's "Astronaut Deer" are an intended feature, and not a bug, and will even further increase the laughter people experience when first shooting a deer in cyubeVR ;)

And of course, you can still disable this with the "Astronaut Deer Off" option in the game if you prefer realistic deer over astronaut deer.

Funny commands for streamers

There was an interesting suggestion from streamers a while ago, what if viewers of a cyubeVR stream could trigger some fun events to happen for the streamer in the game? It was easy to implement some commands as an experiment, so these commands now exist:

- Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q now teleports a deer to the current player location

- Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W now makes all chests within 10 meters around the player open and close their lids

- Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E now makes a (placed) dirt block appear randomly in an area in front of the player

- Pressing Ctrl+Alt-Shift-T now randomly knocks one wall-mounted torch close to the player off the wall

They have been in the beta build for a while now and tested by various streamers, and yes, indeed, it's very funny to make blocks or deer appear in front of streamers while they play cyubeVR ;) If you want to make use of these commands for your stream, you will have to set up some software that converts chat commands to local key presses, there are various free tools available to do that which you probably know if you're a streamer, this one, for example, seems to work well with cyubeVR for this purpose: https://streamer.bot/.

Additional Hint Texts

Added screenshots to community screenshot showcase

In the main menu of the game, cool screenshots of builds from the cyubeVR community get showcased. This update adds two new screenshots:

A Winter Scene | Built by: Sceptrex

Mountain Home | Built by: Talsma

If you also have also built something cool that's worthy to be showcased there, simply post it in the #screenshots channel in the cyubeVR Discord, and it will be considered for the showcase in the main menu.

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone for supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working full-time on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, Al Raw, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, Shanya / Sabrina, SkgBlaze, WillyVR, KroyVR, David O, Tiddlez, Austin Flores, WarChi1d, Jackerino, Sceptrex, David R., Lucanes, mazzawoollza, Tom Hörberg, Arados, Dark Slaughter, Netshaman, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Lordoldmanrets, gunair, texhnobees, MightyDuck, Adrian Sawn, Daniel Crawford, Algiz, Lynx, Bucket Codes, joerkig, Connor A, TinyMrMan (MB), Curzek, Saltshine, Yasha, SingingFluffyUK, MurphChops, Dave Pearson, Talsma, VenturePopTV

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of Patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new custom blocks

You can find Christmas presents in the game!

Until December 31st, you can find Christmas presents in the game! Santa flew over your world and lost some presents on the way, containing various useful items, including gold and rainbow dye! You can also find Christmas presents in some of your chests.

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 46 separate beta builds! That's a lot of beta builds! If you 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 you just write "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

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 over 3000 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, please tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also a cyubeVR subreddit available on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!

Sep 18, 2021

Update 48 for cyubeVR is live! Better torch lighting, and a lot of improvements!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 48 for cyubeVR is live!

This updates adds better looking and more optimized torch lighting, a better looking night sky, a lot of new hint texts to make it easier to learn various mechanics of the game, and a lot of general improvements, optimizations and bugfixes.

Because the VR-YouTuber habie147 recently make an awesome cyubeVR video on YouTube that got over 550k views, over the past month, noticeably more people than usually have played cyubeVR! That also means, noticeably more people than usually have given good feedback and reported bugs that were previously not known. So a lot of the additions and fixes in this update are thanks to all that feedback from new players, especially related to how to make things easier to understand for new players, and making sure that the game is 100% bug-free!

Let's take a look at the long list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes!

Improved torch lighting, making it look better and run much faster when having placed thousands of torches
Significant optimizations to chunk update code
Adjusted color scheme of the game to now be more warm at day, and more cold at night
Added a progress indicator (%) to the loading screen
Made radius of the sun and moon in the sky smaller (more realistic)
The moon now has different, much more realistic movement
Improved visuals of the night sky. Stars are now smaller and have a higher resolution, so overall more realistic
A stone pickaxe is no longer doing any damage on iron ore and crystal blocks now. For getting iron tools, a new player now has to build at least a copper pickaxe first
Changed the texture of copper ore, it's now much easier to see
Added 16K screenshot option
Changed the texture of up/down side of light unprocessed wood, it looks better now
Adjusted furnace mechanics to no longer have any leftover iron/sand when smelting exactly 20 items
Improved visuals of hand torch lighting, it now looks much "smoother", less "blocky"
Putting your head into a wall now makes the screen become dark-green instead of black
Deer are now sometimes looking specifically at the player when they idle
Improved shadow resolution and distance on high-res screenshots
Added additional screenshots to the community screenshot showcase in main menu
Increased resolution of tree bark textures
Adjusted the min spec warning text in the main menu a bit
Improved text and visuals of the "Can't modify world here yet" warning
Increased "time between dropping an item from a chest before it needs to enter the bucket to move the whole stack" from 1 second to 1.2 seconds
Disabling the bow on the left hand now always makes the left hand go back to "hand" mode, instead of previous selected mode
Added an ingame setting for the focus warning and adjusted text and improved visuals of it
Made it so that it's possible to place blocks even while the inventory is opened, as long as you're not pointing at the inventory
Made backward and forward buttons in community screenshot showcase in main menu larger and brighter
Moved "INI" setting of view distance and terrain LOD quality to the left instead of the right
Fixed a lot of typos in the tutorial
Improved visuals of high-res screenshot
High-res screenshots are now saved as lossless compressed PNG instead of uncompressed TGA
The high-res screenshot handling (compression, writing to file, submitting to Steam) is now multi-threaded
Fixed it being possible to accidentally take more than 2 screenshots at once
Renamed screenshot setting from "Screenshot Resolution" to "Screenshots".
Added "Off" option to "Screenshots" setting, and added an info text explaining how they work
Made it so that torches no longer glow after removing them from a wall
Improved positioning of the compass in the hand so that the thumb isn't clipping through it a lot
Improved how the "Exit Game" button in the main menu exits the game
Moved the crystal slot on the head slightly further back and up
The hint text telling you to put what you crafted into bucket/shoulder now stays for 7 instead of 6 seconds
Added hint text when dragging out a lot of items (more than 6 items in 22 seconds) from the inventory without using the item quick drop feature, explaining how to use the item quick drop feature
Added hint text when hitting a block the stick can't mine with the stick, explaining that you need a better tool
Added hint text when trying to destroy a chest that is not empty, explaining that it needs to be empty to be destroyed
Added hint text when trying to destroy a furnace while it's burning, explaining that it can't be destroyed while it's burning
Added hint text when chopping a tree with an axe: If you need more than 10 hits, a hint text tells you that 3 hits parallel to the ground in the same spot is what's needed
Added hint text when grabbing more than 7 items in 30 seconds from a chest and dropping them into the world, explaining how to move a whole stack from a chest into the inventory
Fixed "teleport boots" having collision and pushing around blocks on the ground
Fixed the bucket not being lit by torches when it's dark
Fixed torch you hold in your hand not being lit by it's own light
Fixed gravity glove on right hand not working when the inventory is opened on left hand
Fixed it sometimes not being possible to grab grass/flowers with the right hand
Fixed result of crafting not always being updated correctly with custom blocks
Fixed red inventory laser pointer not being visible when in picture frame picture selection mode
Fixed default pictures for the picture frames not working
Fixed item held by right hand not dropping when enabling tool/place mode on right hand
Fixed "Builder" achievements on Steam not counting and unlocking correctly
Fixed it being possible to damage or move the block below a respawn torch
Fixed crash when being at world height limit of 800
Fixed red health effect being visible on high res screenshots
Fixed health regeneration not working when invincibility is enabled
Fixed loading screen often getting stuck when leaving a world and entering it again
Fixed it sometimes being possible to place a block item inside of another block item when crafting
Fixed it being possible to place blocks in the center of the furnace
Fixed it being possible to place torches inside of objects like chests/furnaces etc
Fixed "Crafting recipe list thinking you hover over incorrect item" bug
Fixed headbanging deer
Fixed grabbing dried grass unlocking "Dye" achievement
Fixed the upper/lower part of the desktop mirror flickering when loading screen is visible
Fixed wall-mounted torches not being lit themselves by their own light
Fixed it being possible to drag out the tool from the slot you currently have active in your right hand, and thus temporarily duplicating the tool
Fixed crash sometimes happening when destroying a furnace
Fixed loading screen sometimes going away already before the trees around the player have been spawned
Fixed gravity glove "glow indicator" not looking correct on "free" torches that have been removed from a wall
Fixed moon being "behind the stars"
Fixed "Dual Wield Copper Sledgehammers" achievement not unlocking correctly when physically grabbing copper sledgehammers in both hands
Fixed iron turning to glass when leaving the game exactly while the iron was flowing out of the furnace
Fixed possible duplication issue with iron/sand in furnace
Fixed some other potential bugs in the code that might never have been noticeable anyways
Fixed a possible crash

Better looking and better optimized torch lighting

This update brings way more optimized, and also better looking torch lighting!

This change was sparked by one player (roehrensockel) spending hundreds of hours building a very impressive giant tower in cyubeVR (he posted some nice screenshots in the cyubeVR Discord!), so huge that updating the main chunk of that tower became noticeably slower for him. A chunk in cyubeVR is very tall vertically (800 blocks), so the case of building something relatively thin and very tall is what taxes it the most. So something needed to be optimized there!

The main slowness was the torch lighting code, so the best solution there was just rewriting that in a way more performant way. This also was a great opportunity to fix some long-existing bugs with the torch lighting, like that sometimes there were some unnatural lighting borders between chunks, or that rainbow torches sometimes had not-very-smooth light transitions.

The new torch lighting code works quite differently than before, it's not just way faster, but it also looks noticeably different. Especially regular torches look more "realistic" now, less "just yellow everywhere". You will immediately see the visual difference if you have a lot of torches placed!

Here's some screenshots:

It's not trivial to update all the chunks from the old lighting system to the new lighting system, so there can sometimes be some incorrect torch lighting transitions between chunks as part of this move to the new lighting code - if you see something like that, just damage or place a block near incorrect lighting and that will automatically fix it.

There's also some other significant optimizations to chunk update code in this update, so it's generally faster, with the most noticeable improvements in the case of building a giant vertical tower that goes all the way up to the building height limit of 800 blocks.

16K screenshots and general screenshot improvements

cyubeVR is a game primarily about building, and a lot of people love to take great looking screenshots of what they've built! So for a long time, cyubeVR had an 8K screenshot feature that you can trigger by holding both teleport buttons for 2 seconds. That was now improved, and now it supports 16K screenshots too! The setting for this has been renamed from "Screenshot Resolution" to "Screenshots" and allows you to pick between "Off", "4K", "8K" and "16K" now.

16 Ks! That's KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK! Steam only supports a maximum of roughly 7K, so if you take an 8K or 16K screenshot, it get's downsampled by the game to 7K for the submission to Steam. In your Steam library, you see the "small" 7K JPG version of the screenshot, while the full resolution lossless version of the screenshot can always be found in %localappdata%/cyubeVR/Saved/Screenshots.

Here is an example of how such a 16K screenshot looks like, this is a 16K screenshot taken by KroyVR, of a great bridge he's building in cyubeVR:

Click here to open screenshot

Here's how a 16K screenshot looks like after being downscaled to 7K and compressed by Steam, this is a village built by ChibiArcher in cyubeVR:

One important thing to note is that these 16K screenshots can only be taken quickly with a very good GPU, because such a huge image needs a lot of VRAM to be generated. On GPUs with 8 GB or less VRAM, it's much better to keep the setting at 8K. But if you have a RTX 3090, you finally have one game now that can benefit from the 24 GB VRAM it has!

Other improvements to the high-res screenshot feature are that they are now saved as lossless compressed PNG instead of uncompressed TGA, so they take less space than before. The screenshot handling (compression, writing to file, submitting to Steam) is also now multi-threaded! So no matter if you take 4K, 8K or 16K screenshots, you will see a big improvement in how long it takes to take a screenshot with this update.

Improved night sky and colors

The time of day in cyubeVR is constantly changing, so night is an important part of the game. With this new update, the colors during night are generally much colder now than before. That makes night feel more realistic! The stars have also been updated and are higher-res now and also looking more "realistic" (more stars, smaller stars). The movement of the moon was a bit crazy before, now it has been changed to a speed according to the real moon on Earth, and the moon size has also be adjusted to make it look more like Earths moon.

Here are some screenshots of night now in cyubeVR, taken at the "Realistic" night darkness setting:

Additional Hint Texts

Changed mining progression mechanics

Previously, it was possible to directly mine iron ore with a stone pickaxe, and thus completely skip over the second (copper) tier of tools. That now changed! A stone pickaxe is no longer doing any damage on iron ore and crystal blocks now. For getting iron tools, a new player now has to build at least a copper pickaxe first. When trying to mine iron ore or crystals with a stone pickaxe, a hint text now pops up that explains that a copper pickaxe is needed to mine those blocks.

Since it now became more important to find copper, the copper texture has also been changed to be a lot easier to see.

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working fulltime on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off of the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, WillyVR, SkgBlaze, David O, KroyVR, Jackerino, mazzawoollza, WarChi1d, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, David R., Netshaman, texhnobees, Dark Slaughter, Sceptrex, Adrian Sawn, gunair, Algiz, Lucanes, Lordoldmanrets, SingingFluffyUK, Daniel Crawford, joerkig, Connor A

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new custom blocks

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 21 separate beta builds! If you 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 "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game, because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

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 over 2600 people 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 :)

There's also a cyubeVR subreddit available on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!

Jul 30, 2021

Update 47 for cyubeVR is live! The First Survival Update!

cyubeVR - Stonebrick Studios

Hey everyone, Update 47 for cyubeVR is live!

This is the first "Survival Update" for cyubeVR, adding the health, death, respawn and fall damage mechanics, plus many more great new things, and of course also additional performance optimizations and bugfixes.

Let's take a look at the list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for the biggest changes!

Added Health System, Death, and Respawn System
Added Respawn Torches
Added Fall Damage
Improved how the inventory works with regards to the right hand
Gave the Inventory Briefcase a new design, much better looking than before
Added "Crystal Mining Light" that you can put on your head to give off constant light for 10 minutes
Added new setting: "Invincibility"
Added new setting: "Terrain LOD Quality"
Added new setting: "Save AA Performance"
Added new setting: "Night Darkness"
Added new setting: "Image Brightness"
Added two new settings sliders in the settings (gameplay tab) that allow adjusting the bucket angle
Removed "Small Scale Shadows" setting, because they don't cost any performance
Improved handling of loading settings with regards to newly introduced settings
Adjusted how exactly the hand has to grip the controller for the "natural grip" to be detected with index controllers
Added a "Please kill me half" button in the "Stats" tab of the settings
Added additional screenshot (sky castle by alan61333) to the community screenshot showcase in the main menu
Made grass (foliage) generally a bit darker
Increased the amount of smoothing on the inventory "laser pointer" a bit
When hovering over a crystal icon in the crafting recipes overview, it now says "Magic Crystal (any color)"
Added hint text when holding a valid crafted green glowing item in your hand for more than 10 seconds
Added hint text appearing if you try to add an item to your inventory while it's full
Changed the color of the main menu background
Unified font of the text in the main menu
Made sound of torches in hand a bit quieter
Slightly adjusted visuals of the teleport indicator
Improved wording of some tutorial pages
Significant CPU-side performance optimizations, with the most noticeable improvement when very quickly mining a lot of blocks
Significant GPU performance optimizations
Fixed sides of some blocks sometimes looking fully black for a short while when mining with area damage tools
Fixed using gravity gloves on a block item and then not catching it breaking grabbing the item until you did another successful gravity glove grab
Fixed it being possible to enable tool mode or block place mode on right hand while bow is active
Fixed the long-existing bug that wall-mounted torches would sometimes not want to be wall-mounted any more
Fixed deletion of world in main menu sometimes not working correctly
Fixed "progress bars" sometimes being visible below custom blocks in the inventory
Fixed it being possible to "draw another arrow" and trigger the "Quiver" achievement while not having the bow active
Fixed it not being possible to reset "Locomotion Direction" setting to default
Fixed bug that molten pieces of iron/sand sometimes fell through the upper chamber of the furnace
Fixed inventory not opening on left hand if left index finger was detected as fully straight with index controllers
Fixed deleting tool directly from tool quick bar incorrectly deleting different item from the regular item list
Fixed multiple possible crashes

Health, Death, Respawn

If you've played cyubeVR previously, you know that cyubeVR is a very chill and peaceful game, ideal for everyone who enjoys immersing themselves in a beautiful infinite world in VR and being creative. But one of the biggest feature requests from many players has always been to also add "Survival Gameplay" to cyubeVR, to make it possible to play the game in a less peaceful way. So now, the time has come for survival features!

One important note first: If you prefer to play the game without any fear of death, just enable “Invincibility” in the “Gameplay” tab of the settings. Then cyubeVR is same chill and peaceful as always, and you can keep building without having to pay any attention to your health. But by default, "Invincibility" is disabled, so let's talk about what this now means!

On both of your hands, you now see a green "wristband" that indicates your health. With full health, the wristband is fully visible, with less health, it's a less complete circle. Additionally to the wristband on the hands, if you are low on health, you also see a red effect on the edges of your vision that becomes stronger the lower your health is, and you also see blood on your hands. If you are hurt, automatic health regeneration slowly heals you over time.

An important part of survival gameplay is of course "respawn". Every game with health needs some mechanic for that, and cyubeVR now also has one, making use of "Respawn Torches"!

You now start the game with one respawn torch in your inventory. If you load a world you previously played in, you will also see a respawn torch appear in your inventory the next time you load the game (if you have a full inventory, it will appear once you make some free space for it). Respawn torches look very cool, different than all other torches in the game. They're very "magical", and give off a bit of purple light.

If you place a respawn torch in the world, that position will be where you respawn when you die. Without having a respawn torch placed, you will respawn where you originally started the game, which might be far away from where you currently are - so once you found a place where you want to stay, make sure to place a respawn torch there!

You can also craft and place additional respawn torches, using a new recipe you can find now, but placing additional respawn torches deactivates the respawn torches you previously placed. Only one respawn torch can be active at any time. You can activate inactive respawn torches by putting a crystal into them, but that consumes the crystal, so you don't want to switch your respawn point too often. You can also collect a respawn torch again and place it somewhere else, but only if it's either the only respawn torch in the world, or currently not active. If you have multiple respawn torches in the world, and you want to collect the currently active respawn torch, you need to first activate one of the other inactive respawn torches again.

So, what happens when you die? First, you see a very nice looking death animation. All items from your inventory stay where you died, and a blue floating orb appears where you died, with your inventory "floating above it". A very tall death beacon will be visible at your death position, which you can see from very far away, even far outside of your view distance. This death beacon marks your death position, to allow you to easily find your way back to where you died, because nothing would be more frustrating than dying and not finding your way back to get your inventory back. The death beacon will slowly fade away over time, until it disappears after 60 minutes. So don't wait too long if you want to get your inventory back! If you die multiple times in 60 minutes, then multiple death beacons can be visible, and you can identify the most recent one by which one looks the most "powerful" and least "faded away". The items from your inventory stay forever where you died, only the death beacons have a limited lifetime.

Once you walked back to your death position, you can either collect your full inventory by sucking up the blue orb with your bucket, or selectively collecting individual items from your old inventory by dragging and dropping them into your main inventory. If you collect all the items from your old inventory, the blue orb disappears, and the death beacon also disappears.

Fall Damage

There's now fall damage! You can take damage, or die, from fall damage. The damage is linearly proportional to the height.

The exact amount of fall damage you take depends on the type of block you fall on. Falling on hard ground like stone is significantly more damaging than falling on soft ground like grass or dirt. The exact values used are these: Falling on hard ground like stone starts causing damage at 4 blocks height, and max damage (death) is reached at 26 blocks height. Falling on soft ground like grass or dirt or sand starts causing damage at 8 blocks height, and max damage is reached at 60 blocks height. Falling on any other blocks starts causing damage at 6 blocks height, and max damage is reached at 40 blocks height.

Improvements to how the inventory works with regards to the right hand

Previously, opening the inventory would always move the right hand into "laser pointer" mode. This was sometimes a bit confusing for people to understand at first, especially if someone had the inventory opened, looking at the tutorial explaining how to do something with the right hand, but it wouldn't work while looking at the inventory.

Now, the right hand stays in the mode it was in before, even while the inventory is opened, and it's also possible now to select a different mode on the right hand, like the tool mode or block placement mode, while the inventory is opened. The only thing that remains not possible is placing blocks while the inventory is opened, to not accidentally place blocks when using the trigger in the UI.

New settings

There's a lot of useful new settings with this update, to allow everyone to customize the game to their liking as much as possible. Here's a list of the new settings and what they do:

"Terrain LOD Quality": Allowing you to adjust how detailed the terrain is further away from you. To save performance, the detail gets reduces after a certain distance. This setting now allows you to increase the visual fidelity of this, at some extra performance cost. There's three options: "Normal", "Ultra", and "INI". Previously, it was possible to adjust this setting in the INI file, using the "ViewDistanceLOD" settings, and there was no way to dynamically adjust it while the game is running. Now, if you set "Terrain LOD Quality" to "INI", your value from the INI will be used, "Normal" is the same default as always (4, 8, 12), and "Ultra" is a higher quality setting for people with good hardware (8, 12, 16).

"Invincibility": Allowing you to choose if you want to have the whole health/death/respawn system enabled, or just play fully peacefully with infinite health.

"Night Darkness": Allowing you to make night more realistically dark if you want to. By default, night is quite bright in cyubeVR. There are two settings now, "Realistic" and "Brighter". The default is still "Brighter", but if you want to, you can now make it "Realistic", which is more immersive, but also more difficult regarding gameplay, as you see less, so it's a lot easier to e.g. accidentally fall into a cave while walking around.

"Image Brightness": Allowing you to affect the overall brightness of the game. You can choose between "Normal", which is the default, and "Darker". This affects very bright blocks the most (e.g. a white block hit by sun light).

"Save AA Performance": This has three options: "Automatic", "Force On", and "Force Off". What this setting does if its enabled is disabling antialiasing (AA) on the edges of the view, so a bit like fixed foveated rendering. This saves some significant GPU performance, and should be unnoticeable in VR, due to the most outside area of the view being outside of sweet spot anyways. It is slightly noticeable on the edges of the desktop mirror window though, so if you record videos or stream the game, you should disable it. Having it enabled saves around 5% GPU performance. This is still a bit experimental, so for now, if you set it to "Default", it's only enabled on Valve Index, and disabled on all other headsets. "Force On" enables it no matter which headset you use, and "Force Off" is doing the opposite.

"Bucket Angle (Roll)" and "Bucket Angle (Pitch)": Allowing you to freely adjust the rotation of the bucket between -180° and +180° on two axis.

Crystal mining light

You can now put a "mining light" crystal on your head that gives off constant light! This is meant primarily for making the "Blocks mined in 10 minutes" world record in the game more interesting. Did you know recently a new record for this was set? "KroyVR" managed to mine 40822 blocks in cyubeVR in 10 minutes!

If you put a crystal on your head, it will now give off light (matching the color of the crystal) for 10 minutes and 30 seconds. So, exactly the time it probably takes to grab the tools you need, and then do 10 minutes of mining. And then you can mine without having to be in darkness for 10 minutes! After the time is over, the light stops and the crystal disappears, it's not re-usable in this case. But you'll probably accidentally find at least 50 new crystals if you spend 10 minutes mining with dual wielding iron sledgehammers.

Hint Texts

As part of every update, I try to also do something that makes "learning" the game easier - it's easy to just focus on the the requests of the "hardcore" players who play cyubeVR for hundreds of hours and know everything in the game perfectly, but it's also important to make sure that new players have a good time when they play the game for the first time! For that, the game now has some "hint texts" that appear if the game thinks the player might not know something and needs some hint. Currently, just in these 3 places:

- If you try to collect an active respawn torch while having multiple respawn torches placed in the world, a hint text will appear telling you to first re-activate one of the other inactive respawn torches

- If you try to add something to your inventory while your inventory is full, a hint text will appear that tells you that your inventory is full

- If you hold a green glowing crafted structure in your hand, or have it lie on the ground, and wait for over 10 seconds without collecting it, a hint text will appear (once), telling you that to finish crafting it, you need to put it into the bucket or drop it behind your shoulder.

With future updates, more of these hint texts will probably be added - if you know anything that you think wasn't clear when you played the game for the first time where you think the game should show some hint text to help, please let me know!

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working fulltime on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off of the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

ChibiArcher, Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, David O, SkgBlaze, WillyVR, KroyVR, Jackerino, texhnobees, WarChi1d, Netshaman, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Adrian Sawn, David R., gunair, Algiz, Dark Slaughter, SingingFluffyUK, Sceptrex

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.

More awesome new custom blocks

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 24 separate beta builds! If you 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 positive 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 over 1600 people 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 :)

There's also a cyubeVR subreddit available on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

And lastly, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

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

Cheers!