Update 39 for cyubeVR is live! Technical improvements, optimizations and fixes!

Hey everyone, Update 39 for cyubeVR is live!

This update primarily improves a lot of internal technical aspects of the game. A new way of storing data, and big internal rendering changes. Plus a lot of good bugfixes and other small improvements and optimizations!

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

• Switch to SQLite database for storing world data
  
• Big internal rendering restructuring
  
• Adjusted smooth locomotion to react more quickly on quick changes of direction
  
• Improved visuals of torch lighting (it's even smoother now)
  
• Made it possible to drag tools out of the inventory directly from the tool quickbar
  
• When holding multiple attached block items in both hands, the overlap spheres around the blocks are now no longer visible, to make it clear that you can't attach subsections of recipes together
  
• Made grass darker, especially at night. It blends in a lot better with the rest of the world now.
  
• Fixed crash that often happened on exiting the game through SteamVR or the Oculus software
  
• Fixed multiple recipe papers sometimes spawning "inside of each other", and fixed possible crash when collecting recipe
  
• Fixed some bugs with torch lighting
  
• Fixed bug that caused tool in left hand to sometimes get stuck to the hand if grabbing a tool simultaneously while opening the inventory
  
• Fixed torch flying into space when activating gravity glove on it
  
• Fixed torch not showing gravity glove indicator when pointing at it with gravity glove
  
• Some more optimizations
  
• Fixed typo in tutorial
  

cyubeVR now uses a SQLite database for saving world data!

This is a big change in how the saving/loading of data in cyubeVR works. Previously, every chunk was stored as 2 individual files on your disk. If you had 10000 chunks generated in your world, your world folder would contain 20000 files.

Now, cyubeVR uses 1 SQLite database for storing all the world data. There only is a single chunkdata.sqlite file now that contains all the data from your whole world.

Why the change?

The main reason is that the previous way of dealing with world data was not power safe, meaning if you had a power failure while playing cyubeVR, it could happen that your world would be corrupted and the next time you'd try to load the world, the game would just crash. This new system now is power safe, so no matter how many power failures you have while playing cyubeVR, your world should never be corrupted in any way.

Another advantage of this new system is that sending your world files to another person, or making a backup, becomes a lot faster. Windows is not good with dealing with tens of thousands of files. Copying 20000 individual files from one location to another is a slow operation in windows, while copying 1 big file of the same total size is fast.

In theory, reading and writing the data this new way should also be slightly faster than the old way, but reading/writing of data always was so fast that a speed improvement is kinda irrelevant.

How does the transition from old system to new system work?

There is no big "conversion" of files happening. If you load your world with this new version, it will regularly load the world from the old save files. Once you modify any chunk (e.g by placing or mining a block), the game writes the new data to the SQLite Database. The next time you load the world, the game will load the chunk from the SQLite Database instead of from the old save files then. The game will never automatically delete the old save files - so the game will never ever modify any of the old save files in any way. They're completely "read-only" for the game now.

The first load into your world with this version will be slower than usual though, because the game does delete the old instant loading files. The instant loading files are now also stored in a SQLite Database, named chunkmeshes.sqlite.



Pretty much everything internally about how meshes are submitted from the CPU to the GPU has changed. So this is a big change! This should improve performance quite a bit, especially reducing stutters when quickly walking around in the world with a high view distance. This change already improves performance quite a bit now, but many more positive impacts from this change will come with the next engine update, as new UE4 versions can make use of this new setup a lot better than the current UE4 version cyubeVR is still on.

This change also is the first big step towards RTX/DXR raytracing support in cyubeVR, as this new setup is needed to allow raytracing with high performance.



A new, updated version of the official cyubeVR trailer was released a few weeks ago, so if you haven't seen it yet, here's the new trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us6NMd0U-n0

Ideally, share it with anyone who doesn't know about cyubeVR yet!



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

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2149958230&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2152883779&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2152910551&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2153551588&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2154168913&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2162389212&searchtext=

Make sure to regularly browse through the Steam Workshop and subscribe to anything you find useful for building in cyubeVR!

If you're also interested now in creating custom mod blocks for cyubeVR, here you can find a tutorial about how to create custom mod blocks for cyubeVR - as long as you are familiar with using any image editing software, it's a really 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 7 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 1000 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!

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

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

Cheers!