Update 25 is live! Dynamic Weather with Snow and Rain, Birthday Hats, grabbing bunnies and much more!

Hey everyone!

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

There's Rain now!

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

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

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

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

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





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





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

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



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



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



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



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



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

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

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

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

Cheers!