Update 57 for cyubeVR is live! Localization, Seated Mode, and more!

Hey everyone, Update 57 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds localization support making cyubeVR now officially playable in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Klingon language! Also, cyubeVR now officially supports seated gameplay through a "Seated Mode", and there are significant CPU performance, GPU performance and RAM usage optimizations, improvements to the graphics, and as always, many more improvements 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?

• Added localization support to all text in the game!
  
• Added German language support
  
• Added Spanish language support
  
• Added French language support
  
• Added Italian language support
  
• Added Portuguese language support
  
• Added Ukrainian language support
  
• Added Klingon language support
  
• Added a "Seated Mode" that adjusts the height of the player by an adjustable offset and adds a crouch toggle button
  
• Many significant CPU performance and RAM usage optimizations
  
• Added new fancy shadows around the corners of blocks
  
• On "Basic" and "Medium" Ground Foliage Quality, trees have new distant LODs now that look much better
  
• Added a custom keyboard to the main menu for entering the world name and seed (instead of the SteamVR Keyboard)
  
• Renamed the "Ground Foliage Quality" setting to "Foliage Quality" since it affects both grass and trees now
  
• Added a "High" option to the "Terrain LOD Quality" setting. It's closer to "Ultra" than to "Normal" regarding the quality
  
• Improved graphics of "Light Shaft Quality" on "Low" and "Mid" settings
  
• Increased the default smooth turn speed, and also increased the maximum speed you can set smooth turning to
  
• Reduced brightness of sun shadows
  
• Reduced the nighttime cricket volume by 50%
  
• Fixed the floating recipe paper sound not quite being as "positional/3D" as it should be
  
• Reduced the default music volume (from 50% to 35% on the slider in the settings)
  
• Slightly increased the footstep sounds volume
  
• All block textures in the game are now loaded at runtime, in theory allowing for texture packs to easily be created
  
• Improved the perceived texture resolution of the furnace, bucket, stone pickaxe, and light tree
  
• Significantly optimized the performance of crafting large recipes like the furnace
  
• Made transition between outside sounds on/off much smoother when entering/leaving an enclosed space
  
• Optimized the performance of the button mapping view
  
• Optimized the briefcase UI performance
  
• Optimized CPU performance when having many objects placed in the level that can be dragged around with both hands
  
• Major performance optimizations to quickly mining a lot of blocks, primarily when using area damage tools (sledgehammers and iron shovel)
  
• Significant RAM usage reduction related to custom blocks, resulting in multiple GBs less RAM usage now if you have a lot of custom blocks installed
  
• Optimized the size of the WorldMetadata.important files in the save data, they're less than half the size now for large worlds
  
• Optimizations to chunk saving and unloading
  
• Optimized RAM usage while quickly walking around in the world
  
• Optimized the chunk LOD calculation, resulting in less vertices per LOD chunk
  
• Added a mesh optimization pass that reorders the vertices/triangles of chunks for more efficient rendering on the GPU
  
• Removed "Manual" tab in main menu since there is no reason any more to read the Manual in the main menu
  
• Slightly improved the animation on the logo when starting the game
  
• Improved the wording and positioning of the "You can't modify the world here yet" warning message
  
• Increased the size of the copper and iron shovel, and adjusted the grab rotation
  
• Added three new stats in the "Stats" tab of the settings: "Loaded Chunks", "Memory Used" and "Peak Memory Used"
  
• The manual tab in the briefcase defaults to the "First Steps" page now instead of the "Welcome" page
  
• Improved the loading screen % number, it jumps around less now while going up
  
• Uncategorized custom blocks are now automatically put in one or multiple "Misc" categories
  
• Custom block categories now display a number on them that show how many blocks are inside of that category
  
• Increased accuracy of the VRAM memory calculation for custom blocks in the crafting recipes UI (it was missing 341 kB per block before)
  
• Every custom block category in the crafting recipe list is now limited to at most 50 entries
  
• Added "Briefcase Open" and "Briefcase Close" event dispatchers in the BriefcaseBP (Unreal Engine Modding related)
  
• Fixed deleting or moving a tool out of a radial menu slot while it's active in the hand not removing it out of the hand
  
• Fixed deleting a tool in the inventory while another of the same type is in a radial menu slot making the tool in the radial menu slot become greyed out
  
• Fixed possible performance issue when collecting recipe paper
  
• Fixed "Low" bloom setting looking flickery on shimmerstones
  
• Fixed one grass side texture that looked slightly too dark
  
• Fixed a typo in the "Craft and place a chair" objective text
  
• Fixed "Pause" button for the recipe preview being visible even for custom block recipes
  
• Fixed some chunks staying loaded when they should unload
  
• Fixed deer moving in weird ways when it walks against a rabbit
  
• Fixed the flint stones in front of the furnace being affected by bucket suction
  
• Fixed the "Dual Wield Something" achievements and objectives not unlocking correctly
  
• Fixed the tool in the left hand not visually teleporting immediately with the player when teleporting
  
• Fixed there sometimes being one or two visible floating trees very far above the world
  
• Fixed a possible crash
  
  

cyubeVR can now finally not just be played in English language! This has been a popular request over the years from many people who are not super fluent in English language. But before the introduction of objectives, it was generally easy enough to understand everything in the game even without understanding much English - after all, you will likely understand what a dirt block is purely from its visuals even if you have no idea what "Dirt" means.

But with Update 54 introducing the objectives as an important feature into the game, that meant the introduction of a lot of text that really should be understood for properly playing through the game. So with that, localization has become way more important than before, and that's why Update 57 now makes it possible to play cyubeVR not just in English, but also in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Klingon language! If your Windows installation is set to one of the supported languages, the game will automatically start in that language now. And if you want to manually set the language you play the game in, there is a new language selection in the bottom left corner of the main menu where you can pick any of the supported languages.

It was quite a lot of work to set up the whole game for localization support - it's not just a matter of translating some text, but actually a lot of work is simply making sure that all text is setup in a way that it can actually be translated. For example, the controller button mapping view in the lower half of the briefcase was an image before, an image containing text - images with text are a big pain for localization since they would require duplicating the image many times in every language, which would unnessesserily increase the size of the game (textures are what makes up most of the game size). So the button mapping view, and many other similarly implemented things in the game, had to be completely re-implemented with this Update as "real" text to be ready for efficient localization.

Since cyubeVR is "Made in Germany", a German localization was of course easy to add and German should be "just as perfect as English" already. For the other languages, it will probably take a bit of tweaking still to get all text in them fully perfect, and if you are a native speaker of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian or Klingon, then please feel free to post in the Steam Forums or in the cyubeVR Discord about any issue you see with the translations (anything where you think it sounds not quite right in the specific context or could be translated better), and then it can quickly be fixed in the next update to make sure all translations are really perfect in every language :) And two important languages that are still missing are Chinese and Japanese - those are planned to be added with future updates.

I'll be most curious about the feedback from native Klingon speakers of course ;) All the languages the game supports are mentioned on the Steam Store Page now, except for Klingon, which is not mentioned there because the Steam UI does not actually support showing a game supporting Klingon language. I contacted Valve and asked if they could please add Klingon as a selectable language for games to show support for on the Steam Page, but unfortunately they said there are no plans for that. But still, the game supports Klingon! Qapla'!



Until now, cyubeVR always mentioned on the Steam Page that it only supports "Roomscale" or "Standing" Gameplay, but not "Seated". In theory cyubeVR always worked quite well seated, but the one thing that was really always missing for being able to ideally play the game seated was a way to offset your ingame height by an adjustable amount to make it feel like you're standing in the game, even while you're sitting in the real world, so that it doesn't constantly feel like you're way too short in the game.

So Update 57 now adds exactly that!

You can now enable the "Seated Mode" in the "Gameplay" tab of the settings, and if that's enabled, there is a "Seated Mode Offset" slider you can freely adjust to set your virtual height in the game. Also, since reaching the ingame floor will no longer be possible while you have an offset applied, enabling the "Seated Mode" also enables a crouch toggle (right thumbstick south) that let's you toggle between "full height" (including the offset) and "real height" where you can reach the floor.

cyubeVR is certainly still the most immersive when playing it standing with full roomscale movement, but for people who have to or prefer to play seated, it's nice that the option exists now :)



This update adds a lot of optimizations, both for CPU and GPU performance, and for RAM usage! Doing intense sledgehammering of tens of thousands of stones will feel way smoother now for example, and the game uses multiple GBs less RAM if you have a lot of custom blocks installed. And you might remember that if you've crafted a large recipe like the furnace before, there might have been a bit of a negative effect on the framerate from attaching so many blocks together - that's also fixed now and no matter how large the recipe you're crafting, there should be 0 noticeable effect on the framerate!

These optimizations are basically everything that was required for making the game run perfectly on PS5 / PSVR2 without a single framedrop, and this newest version of cyubeVR (Update 57) is scheduled to be released on PSVR2 later this month! And the nice thing about optimizations is really that everyone benefits from optimizations, even if you have the most high-end PC with a 4090 and a 7950X3D.





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


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, one new custom block was added to the cyubeVR Steam Workshop!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3068085926&searchtext=

You can install it with a single button click. 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!

And it's also super easy to create your own custom blocks! Did you know there is a super easy to use GUI tool now for creating cyubeVR custom blocks? Everything you need to know about how to create custom blocks you can find here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/619500/discussions/3/1640917625019543783/

And if you want to create more sophisticated mods for the game, that's possible too! Check out this page that explains all the different types of modding possible with cyubeVR: https://github.com/cyubeVR-Modding



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 44 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 X/Twitter or follow cyubeVR on Bluesky (a new Twitter alternative).

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!