Update 24 is live! Awesome new UI design, new UI rendering path for extreme clarity, Bloom "OFF" setting, high-res video capture mode and many more improvements!

Hey everyone!

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

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

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



[video]https://stonebrickstudios.com/cyubevr/SteamAnnouncements/NewUINew.webm?v=1[/video]


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

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

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



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

These bloom settings now exist:

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

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

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

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



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

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

UseVerySlow1080pMirrorForVideoCapture=0
VideoCaptureFOV=90.000000

You can find the INI file at

%localappdata%/cyubeVR/Saved/WindowsNoEditor/Game.ini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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



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



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

UseFullscreen=0
ShowFocusWarning=0

You can find the INI file at

%localappdata%/cyubeVR/Saved/WindowsNoEditor/Game.ini

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




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

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

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

Cheers!