Update 48 for cyubeVR is live! Better torch lighting, and a lot of improvements!

Hey everyone, Update 48 for cyubeVR is live!

This updates adds better looking and more optimized torch lighting, a better looking night sky, a lot of new hint texts to make it easier to learn various mechanics of the game, and a lot of general improvements, optimizations and bugfixes.

Because the VR-YouTuber habie147 recently make an awesome cyubeVR video on YouTube that got over 550k views, over the past month, noticeably more people than usually have played cyubeVR! That also means, noticeably more people than usually have given good feedback and reported bugs that were previously not known. So a lot of the additions and fixes in this update are thanks to all that feedback from new players, especially related to how to make things easier to understand for new players, and making sure that the game is 100% bug-free!

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

• Improved torch lighting, making it look better and run much faster when having placed thousands of torches
  
• Significant optimizations to chunk update code
  
• Adjusted color scheme of the game to now be more warm at day, and more cold at night
  
• Added a progress indicator (%) to the loading screen
  
• Made radius of the sun and moon in the sky smaller (more realistic)
  
• The moon now has different, much more realistic movement
  
• Improved visuals of the night sky. Stars are now smaller and have a higher resolution, so overall more realistic
  
• A stone pickaxe is no longer doing any damage on iron ore and crystal blocks now. For getting iron tools, a new player now has to build at least a copper pickaxe first
  
• Changed the texture of copper ore, it's now much easier to see
  
• Added 16K screenshot option
  
• Changed the texture of up/down side of light unprocessed wood, it looks better now
  
• Adjusted furnace mechanics to no longer have any leftover iron/sand when smelting exactly 20 items
  
• Improved visuals of hand torch lighting, it now looks much "smoother", less "blocky"
  
• Putting your head into a wall now makes the screen become dark-green instead of black
  
• Deer are now sometimes looking specifically at the player when they idle
  
• Improved shadow resolution and distance on high-res screenshots
  
• Added additional screenshots to the community screenshot showcase in main menu
  
• Increased resolution of tree bark textures
  
• Adjusted the min spec warning text in the main menu a bit
  
• Improved text and visuals of the "Can't modify world here yet" warning
  
• Increased "time between dropping an item from a chest before it needs to enter the bucket to move the whole stack" from 1 second to 1.2 seconds
  
• Disabling the bow on the left hand now always makes the left hand go back to "hand" mode, instead of previous selected mode
  
• Added an ingame setting for the focus warning and adjusted text and improved visuals of it
  
• Made it so that it's possible to place blocks even while the inventory is opened, as long as you're not pointing at the inventory
  
• Made backward and forward buttons in community screenshot showcase in main menu larger and brighter
  
• Moved "INI" setting of view distance and terrain LOD quality to the left instead of the right
  
• Fixed a lot of typos in the tutorial
  
• Improved visuals of high-res screenshot
  
• High-res screenshots are now saved as lossless compressed PNG instead of uncompressed TGA
  
• The high-res screenshot handling (compression, writing to file, submitting to Steam) is now multi-threaded
  
• Fixed it being possible to accidentally take more than 2 screenshots at once
  
• Renamed screenshot setting from "Screenshot Resolution" to "Screenshots".
  
• Added "Off" option to "Screenshots" setting, and added an info text explaining how they work
  
• Made it so that torches no longer glow after removing them from a wall
  
• Improved positioning of the compass in the hand so that the thumb isn't clipping through it a lot
  
• Improved how the "Exit Game" button in the main menu exits the game
  
• Moved the crystal slot on the head slightly further back and up
  
• The hint text telling you to put what you crafted into bucket/shoulder now stays for 7 instead of 6 seconds
  
• Added hint text when dragging out a lot of items (more than 6 items in 22 seconds) from the inventory without using the item quick drop feature, explaining how to use the item quick drop feature
  
• Added hint text when hitting a block the stick can't mine with the stick, explaining that you need a better tool
  
• Added hint text when trying to destroy a chest that is not empty, explaining that it needs to be empty to be destroyed
  
• Added hint text when trying to destroy a furnace while it's burning, explaining that it can't be destroyed while it's burning
  
• Added hint text when chopping a tree with an axe: If you need more than 10 hits, a hint text tells you that 3 hits parallel to the ground in the same spot is what's needed
  
• Added hint text when grabbing more than 7 items in 30 seconds from a chest and dropping them into the world, explaining how to move a whole stack from a chest into the inventory
  
• Fixed "teleport boots" having collision and pushing around blocks on the ground
  
• Fixed the bucket not being lit by torches when it's dark
  
• Fixed torch you hold in your hand not being lit by it's own light
  
• Fixed gravity glove on right hand not working when the inventory is opened on left hand
  
• Fixed it sometimes not being possible to grab grass/flowers with the right hand
  
• Fixed result of crafting not always being updated correctly with custom blocks
  
• Fixed red inventory laser pointer not being visible when in picture frame picture selection mode
  
• Fixed default pictures for the picture frames not working
  
• Fixed item held by right hand not dropping when enabling tool/place mode on right hand
  
• Fixed "Builder" achievements on Steam not counting and unlocking correctly
  
• Fixed it being possible to damage or move the block below a respawn torch
  
• Fixed crash when being at world height limit of 800
  
• Fixed red health effect being visible on high res screenshots
  
• Fixed health regeneration not working when invincibility is enabled
  
• Fixed loading screen often getting stuck when leaving a world and entering it again
  
• Fixed it sometimes being possible to place a block item inside of another block item when crafting
  
• Fixed it being possible to place blocks in the center of the furnace
  
• Fixed it being possible to place torches inside of objects like chests/furnaces etc
  
• Fixed "Crafting recipe list thinking you hover over incorrect item" bug
  
• Fixed headbanging deer
  
• Fixed grabbing dried grass unlocking "Dye" achievement
  
• Fixed the upper/lower part of the desktop mirror flickering when loading screen is visible
  
• Fixed wall-mounted torches not being lit themselves by their own light
  
• Fixed it being possible to drag out the tool from the slot you currently have active in your right hand, and thus temporarily duplicating the tool
  
• Fixed crash sometimes happening when destroying a furnace
  
• Fixed loading screen sometimes going away already before the trees around the player have been spawned
  
• Fixed gravity glove "glow indicator" not looking correct on "free" torches that have been removed from a wall
  
• Fixed moon being "behind the stars"
  
• Fixed "Dual Wield Copper Sledgehammers" achievement not unlocking correctly when physically grabbing copper sledgehammers in both hands
  
• Fixed iron turning to glass when leaving the game exactly while the iron was flowing out of the furnace
  
• Fixed possible duplication issue with iron/sand in furnace
  
• Fixed some other potential bugs in the code that might never have been noticeable anyways
  
• Fixed a possible crash
  

This update brings way more optimized, and also better looking torch lighting!

This change was sparked by one player (roehrensockel) spending hundreds of hours building a very impressive giant tower in cyubeVR (he posted some nice screenshots in the cyubeVR Discord!), so huge that updating the main chunk of that tower became noticeably slower for him. A chunk in cyubeVR is very tall vertically (800 blocks), so the case of building something relatively thin and very tall is what taxes it the most. So something needed to be optimized there!

The main slowness was the torch lighting code, so the best solution there was just rewriting that in a way more performant way. This also was a great opportunity to fix some long-existing bugs with the torch lighting, like that sometimes there were some unnatural lighting borders between chunks, or that rainbow torches sometimes had not-very-smooth light transitions.

The new torch lighting code works quite differently than before, it's not just way faster, but it also looks noticeably different. Especially regular torches look more "realistic" now, less "just yellow everywhere". You will immediately see the visual difference if you have a lot of torches placed!

Here's some screenshots:





It's not trivial to update all the chunks from the old lighting system to the new lighting system, so there can sometimes be some incorrect torch lighting transitions between chunks as part of this move to the new lighting code - if you see something like that, just damage or place a block near incorrect lighting and that will automatically fix it.

There's also some other significant optimizations to chunk update code in this update, so it's generally faster, with the most noticeable improvements in the case of building a giant vertical tower that goes all the way up to the building height limit of 800 blocks.



cyubeVR is a game primarily about building, and a lot of people love to take great looking screenshots of what they've built! So for a long time, cyubeVR had an 8K screenshot feature that you can trigger by holding both teleport buttons for 2 seconds. That was now improved, and now it supports 16K screenshots too! The setting for this has been renamed from "Screenshot Resolution" to "Screenshots" and allows you to pick between "Off", "4K", "8K" and "16K" now.

16 Ks! That's KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK! Steam only supports a maximum of roughly 7K, so if you take an 8K or 16K screenshot, it get's downsampled by the game to 7K for the submission to Steam. In your Steam library, you see the "small" 7K JPG version of the screenshot, while the full resolution lossless version of the screenshot can always be found in %localappdata%/cyubeVR/Saved/Screenshots.

Here is an example of how such a 16K screenshot looks like, this is a 16K screenshot taken by KroyVR, of a great bridge he's building in cyubeVR:

Click here to open screenshot

Here's how a 16K screenshot looks like after being downscaled to 7K and compressed by Steam, this is a village built by ChibiArcher in cyubeVR:



One important thing to note is that these 16K screenshots can only be taken quickly with a very good GPU, because such a huge image needs a lot of VRAM to be generated. On GPUs with 8 GB or less VRAM, it's much better to keep the setting at 8K. But if you have a RTX 3090, you finally have one game now that can benefit from the 24 GB VRAM it has!

Other improvements to the high-res screenshot feature are that they are now saved as lossless compressed PNG instead of uncompressed TGA, so they take less space than before. The screenshot handling (compression, writing to file, submitting to Steam) is also now multi-threaded! So no matter if you take 4K, 8K or 16K screenshots, you will see a big improvement in how long it takes to take a screenshot with this update.



The time of day in cyubeVR is constantly changing, so night is an important part of the game. With this new update, the colors during night are generally much colder now than before. That makes night feel more realistic! The stars have also been updated and are higher-res now and also looking more "realistic" (more stars, smaller stars). The movement of the moon was a bit crazy before, now it has been changed to a speed according to the real moon on Earth, and the moon size has also be adjusted to make it look more like Earths moon.

Here are some screenshots of night now in cyubeVR, taken at the "Realistic" night darkness setting:













As part of every update, I try to also do something that makes "learning" the game easier - it's easy to just focus on the the requests of the "hardcore" players who play cyubeVR for hundreds of hours and know everything in the game perfectly, but it's also important to make sure that new players have a good time when they play the game for the first time! For that, the game now has a lot of additional "hint texts" that appear if the game thinks the player might not know something and would benefit from some hint.



Previously, it was possible to directly mine iron ore with a stone pickaxe, and thus completely skip over the second (copper) tier of tools. That now changed! A stone pickaxe is no longer doing any damage on iron ore and crystal blocks now. For getting iron tools, a new player now has to build at least a copper pickaxe first. When trying to mine iron ore or crystals with a stone pickaxe, a hint text now pops up that explains that a copper pickaxe is needed to mine those blocks.

Since it now became more important to find copper, the copper texture has also been changed to be a lot easier to see.



A big thanks to everyone supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working fulltime on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off of 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, Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, WillyVR, SkgBlaze, David O, KroyVR, Jackerino, mazzawoollza, WarChi1d, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, David R., Netshaman, texhnobees, Dark Slaughter, Sceptrex, Adrian Sawn, gunair, Algiz, Lucanes, Lordoldmanrets, SingingFluffyUK, Daniel Crawford, joerkig, Connor A

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

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2578227480&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2563174466&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573323433&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573323829&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573324035&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573324176&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573324392&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573324549&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2573324777&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2577484532&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2578478134&searchtext=

And the whole alphabet and all numbers on limestone blocks, I'll just link one number and one letter, but they all exist!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2588755595&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2588756993&searchtext=

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!

If you're interested now in creating your own custom blocks for cyubeVR, here you can find a tutorial about how to create custom blocks for cyubeVR - as long as you are familiar with using any image editing software, it's a really fun and 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 21 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 "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 2600 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!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account 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 :)

Cheers!