Update 26 is live! Copper sledgehammer tool, moving of existing blocks, significant optimizations and more!

Hey everyone!

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

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

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

[video]https://stonebrickstudios.com/cyubevr/SteamAnnouncements/KroySledgehammerExampleNoAudio.webm?v=1[/video]
(This is a gif made from this Twitch Clip, from a stream of Kroy testing the sledgehammer in the cyubeVR beta build)

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

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

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

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

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



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

You can now move existing blocks!

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

- Other small optimizations



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

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

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

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

Cheers!