Update 55 for cyubeVR is live! New graphics for grass and flowers, and more!

Hey everyone, Update 55 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds completely new, realistic graphics for the grass and flowers with a whole new system for efficiently rendering them, significant reductions in save file size reducing the required disk space to 1/4 of what it was before, plus many many more improvements, optimizations and bugfixes!

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

• Completely new realistic graphics for the grass and flowers and completely new system for rendering them
  
• Significantly optimized the save file format of the game, it's now only 1/4 the size as before
  
• Added an optional, much stronger compression algorithm for the WorldData_InstaLoad files, reducing them to 1/4 of their regular size
  
• When you launch the game, there's now a voice saying "Welcome to cyubeVR!". Finally everyone will know how to pronounce cyubeVR ;)
  
• Improved the LOD distances and LOD visuals for trees. LOD transitions of the trees are now significantly less noticeable.
  
• The floating recipe papers in the world now rotate, making them easier to see from different angles
  
• Grabbing recipe papers now looks better. The hands now have a specific pose for grabbing them.
  
• Added a day counter to the "Stats" tab of the settings, showing you how many in-game days have passed in this world since you started playing in it
  
• Updated the Unreal Engine version from 4.27 to 4.27+
  
• Updated the LIV plugin to the latest version
  
• Added a "Gravity Gloves" objective. It's an early objective, before crafting the stone axe
  
• When opening the briefcase for the first time, the default selected tab is now the "Objectives" tab
  
• Free torches are now also affected by the suction of the vacuum bucket
  
• Fixed that crystals, dye, or any other block items could sometimes fall through the world when dropping them with too much speed
  
• Optimized CPU performance of picture frame custom image loading
  
• Optimized CPU performance of chest spawning and despawning
  
• Updated the "Greetings" text in the main menu to no longer recommend to "read through the tutorial", and instead recommend checking out the objectives
  
• The DLSS setting now has the options "Disabled", "Performance" and "Quality"
  
• The "Ultra" option on the "Shadow Quality" setting has been renamed from "Ultra" to "RTX 3090"
  
• Renamed the old "Tutorial" everywhere to "Manual", since the objectives are now supposed to be the interactive tutorial into the game
  
• Fixed Shimmerstone and Starstone not showing any "need better tool" message when trying to mine it with a Stone Pickaxe
  
• Added a hint text when putting a crystal on the head as a mining light, explaining the feature
  
• Fixed the "Cloak a torch" objective only unlocking when cloaking a regular torch and not a colored torch
  
• Fixed that trying to cloak a cloaktorch turned it into bottom stone
  
• Deer now dissolve a few seconds after their touchdown
  
• Added a mention in the respawn torch objective text that respawn torches can also be crafted later
  
• Added a hint text when adding more than 25 items into the upper chamber of the furnace, explaining that any amount over 20 is wasted
  
• Made it so that crafting a copper pickaxe also unlocks the objective for crafting a stone pickaxe now
  
• Crafting two copper pickaxes now also unlocks the objective for crafting two stone pickaxes
  
• Slightly reduced the default music volume
  
• Destroying a cactus now makes the cactus drop green dye
  
• When you overwrite the stick slot or the bow slot for the first time in the inventory, there now appears a hint text explaining that the bow and stick are always available
  
• Improved the moon circle cutout to be less noticeable
  
• Fixed Razer Cortex warning "Continue" button not working
  
• Added code for automatically calculating if it's currently easter. Previously, the easter date was hardcoded
  
• Adjusted the date at which easter eggs spawn: Instead of only between Easter Sunday and Easter Tuesday, it's now between Maundy Thursday and Easter Tuesday
  
• Added new "Dynamic Resolution" setting, allowing to completely disable the dynamic resolution. Only visible if the "Expert Settings" are enabled
  
• Changed the text of the first objective to make it more clear that especially at the beginning the objectives are supposed to serve as an interactive tutorial
  
• A handheld torch now also illuminates grass and flowers correctly
  
• Updated the text on the "Welcome" manual page and replaced the three "First Steps in the Game" manual pages with a single page that just mentions doing the objectives
  
• Being on an unloaded chunk now no longer counts as being "inside of a block" with the fade to green and teleport back to the last free location happening
  
• Fixed the April 1st feature of the game even happening when the deer were dead already, and made it a bit quieter
  
• Added a hint text that comes up when hitting the flint stones against each other with too little speed, explaining to use more speed
  
• Made it possible to grab the flint stones from the furnace with gravity gloves. No more bending down, yay!
  
• Added a "Hint Texts" setting that makes it possible to disable hint texts. VoxelAPI hint texts and the "No free space in inventory" hint are excluded. Only visible if the "Expert Settings" are enabled
  
• Desert grass is now also affected by hand-held torch light
  
• Slightly improved the texture quality of the desert grass
  
• Fixed multiple crashes that could happen when using mods like cyubeGate to teleport very far
  
• Fixed a possible crash
  
• Multiple small CPU performance optimizations
  
  

There is a new setting in the game now: "Ground Foliage Quality". It offers the options "Basic", "High" and "RTX 4090". If you choose the "Basic" option, the grass and flowers use the old graphics, and do not require any more performance than before - but if you use at least the "High" option, you get the much better looking new grass and flowers, featuring fully realistic looking high-poly photogrammetry meshes with every individual blade of grass being actual real geometry, and an overall higher density of grass in the world!

The better graphics do need slightly more performance, but it's actually only a relatively minor difference, anyone with at least a RTX 2060 or so should enable the much nicer foliage!

Here are some more screenshots of the new grass and flowers:



The new grass and flowers is not just a visual change, it also involves a lot of new code, to make grass and flowers in this quality possible the game needed a whole different foliage rendering system. Before this, grass and flowers were considered "Blocks", while now they are considered "Trees". So they use a totally different rendering system now, which has many advantages (and the disadvantage that it's a lot more complex, so it was a lot of work to implement).

One of the advantages of the new system is that grass and flowers should now work out of the box with Nanite once cyubeVR will be updated Unreal Engine 5 in a future update (yes, that's definitely planned!). With the old system, Nanite support would not have been possible, as Nanite does not support any procedural geometry, so "Blocks" cannot be Nanite. But "Trees" can be!



This Update significantly optimizes the regular save file format (The "WorldData" folder). It's now only 1/4 the size as before! This has no downsides, it's simply always more efficient now due to optimizations in the way the data is stored. It's still using the same compression algorithm as always, so it's not in any way slower.

Additionally, there's now an optional, much stronger compression algorithm for the "WorldData_InstaLoad" files, which is where the game stores the data for the near-infinite view distance system, reducing them to 1/4 of their regular size at the cost of world generation taking twice as long. This is useful if you are low on disk space, want to have a very large cyubeVR world, and have a good CPU where world generation speed isn't an issue. Or when you have a world like the "Round Robin Community World" that cyubeVR players in the cyubeVR Discord are playing in (basically asynchronous turn-based multiplayer) where no new world generation is being done anyways and where size matters because it's something people regularly need to download. This new optional stronger compression algorithm is a a per-world option that is disabled by default and can be enabled in a Config.ini file in the world folder.





It's this time of the year again! Every year at this time, there's a special seasonal event going on in your cyubeVR world: The easter bunnies visited your cyubeVR world and hid easter eggs everywhere outside in your world that you can search for now! Some of the easter bunnies even hid easter eggs in some of your chests. And some of the easter bunnies them kept their easter eggs for themselves and will only give them to you once you grab and lift them up in the game!

The easter eggs have been further improved this year, they can can now be collected very nicely with gravity gloves, collecting them is easier, and they contain a bigger variety of items, including the new Starstone, Shimmertiles and Cloaknuggets that were added with the recent Update 53! So make sure to go on a hunt for easter eggs in your cyubeVR world. This special event is active between Maundy Thurday and Easter Tuesday!

Oh, and you might also find some rare colored easter bunnies riding on the back of deer ;)





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


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.





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

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2949188791&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2926121820&searchtext=

If it looks interesting to you, just install it 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



New custom blocks were added to the workshop too! Let's mention some of them here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908059608&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908029747&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908029681&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908029123&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908028541&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908028154&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908027674&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908027581&searchtext=

Great new blocks! 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, or easily create your own 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 it's simply "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 3800 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 :)

Happy Easter! Cheers!