cyubeVR News

Hey everyone!

Update 21 is live, finally updating the engine version from a 1.5-year-old Unreal Engine to a more recent one, resulting in significantly better performance, better visuals and also fixing the few remaining (very rare) crashes. Additionally, there are a few nice new features in the game!

This update took way longer than usual (multiple weeks) since it was a lot of work! cyubeVR is running on a custom, modified Unreal Engine 4 to allow for some nice custom features like voxel lighting and custom performance optimizations, so all the changes had to be made compatible with the new version.

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

- Very significant performance improvements
- New dynamic resolution algorithm with temporal upscaling, resulting in a way sharper image
- Falling! There's now a separate (optional) mode that allows you to fall down ledges
- Its now possible to adjust the block place distance, allowing you to place a block below the block you're standing on
- Added setting for light shaft quality, with significantly better-looking default
- Fixed bug that caused bucket being active sometimes while invisible
- Rewrote the saving/loading of animals, it works way better now
- Teleport beam will automatically be disabled now on 8K screenshots
- Fixed any crashing during the crafting of big items, like chairs



Unreal Engine 4 is constantly getting improved by many programmers, so new features are added, and the performance of existing features are sometimes greatly improved. Such changes don't affect games using it "automatically", as a developer you have to update your game to use the new version. I had previously already ported back some recent improvements from UE4 into the game, but that was only a small part of the improvements that were done of course.

So this update introduces 1.5 years worth of improvements made to UE4, significantly improving performance. One specific feature where performance was improved a lot is the "Distance Shadows". While those were very expensive before, they are now twice as fast which makes them usable on a GTX 1070 and above. So if you kept those disabled before and you have a good GPU, enable them! They vastly improve the visual quality of trees in the distance.



The biggest new feature that you'll notice is the completely new dynamic resolution and temporal upscaling.

The game now expects that you run the SteamVR supersampling at default settings - before, I advised anyone to make sure the SteamVR supersampling is manually set to 100%. Now, you should just keep that at default. It's significantly more user-friendly like this.

The new dynamic resolution is doing upsampling in a temporal way, so it looks at multiple recent frames and tries to preserve sharp edges as good as possible. All post-processing is only done on the upscaled image, so post-processing always keeps the same quality, independent from the resolution the scene was rendered with.

It's also significantly better at dealing with performance issues caused by the CPU. Previously, it was possible that the game would reduce it's resolution, making everything blurry, just due to the CPU being too busy. Now, its really mostly just dependent on the graphics card, so if you have a good GPU, you should always see a nice, sharp image.



Before, there were two different settings regarding head based smooth loco: Off and On. Now, there's a third setting: "With Falling".

If you enable that, you will be able to fall down anywhere in the game if you're leaning too far over a ledge or if you're walking over a ledge using smooth locomotion.

There is no damage yet, so you can fall as much as you want without getting any negative impact. That will be added later! For now, enjoy falling down some bridges you built :)



You can now adjust the "block place distance" by sliding your thumb on the left touchpad while you have the block place mode selected on the right controller. The max place distance is high enough to allow you to "build down", meaning to place a block below the block you're currently standing on - previously, it was impossible in the game to build something like a staircase starting at a mountain and going down. Now, that's possible!



The engine update has been tested in a special engineupdate branch for quite a while already - the initial version of this was released 1.5 weeks ago. Since then, our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord have tested the update a lot through 25 individual beta versions, reported all issues they found and I made sure that everything was fixed before this gets released in the stable branch, which is now! 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! 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. 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.
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!

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

Cheers!

Hey everyone,

The last weekly report was released more than a "week" ago, so it's time for another one!

The last update was Update 20 which just fixed some bugs introduced with Update 19 which increased general performance in the game a lot and made block items in the world persist.

What have I been working on since then? If you're in the official cyubeVR Discord and follow development closely, you've seen there were 3 beta version since the last update.



The most major new feature in there, which took quite a while to implement, is Falling! If you've played the game a bit, you know that there are two different options for smooth loco, one "room based" and one "head based". Now theres a third option, "head based with falling". Regular "head based" doesn't allow you to fall down anywhere, but when you enable falling, you can actually fall down if you walk over a ledge. It's not just walking over a ledge - if you move your head too far over a ledge, you'll also fall down!

It wasn't easy to make that feel nice and perfect, but its very nice now I think, and falling was a very much requested feature! If you want to help test that, join our community on Discord!

Falling is also the first step towards Survival. There was no way to die before, but with the ability to fall down, theres now a reason to implement health, death, respawn and all those related things that you actually need for Survival gameplay.



If you follow development of the game for a while already, you know that for quite a while I planned to update the engine version of the game, and now I'm finally doing that!

cyubeVR is using Unreal Engine 4, and that engine is constantly updated with bugfixes, new features and performance improvements. They have hundreds of developers working on making that engine better. The last time I updated that engine version was January 2017, so long before the game was released. That means most improvements that were done to UE4 between then and now are not affecting the game at the moment. I have manually ported some changes back from newer engine versions, but only a few selected changes that were very relevant.

What makes an engine update a lot of work is that cyubeVR is not just using the "stock" UE4, its actually running on a significantly modified version of UE4 due to many improvements I did to the UE4 source code, mostly for improving performance or improving other aspects of the engine to better fit a game like cyubeVR. In general, no existing engine is actually build for open world games with an infinite world size where everything has to be fully dynamic, so using such a general purpose engine for a special game like this does require quite a lot of work to get it running with good performance!

Every time I update the engine version, I have to make sure that all my custom changes to the UE4 source code still work in the never version. Since the source changes a lot, I do have to basically redo many of the changes. The longer I wait between engine updates, the more work that is.

So that's what I started working on this week!

I'm actually making good progress with that. It's hard to guess how long that will take, probably at least 1 more week. So that means Update 21 will take a bit longer to be released than what you're used to.

You'll most likely see some significant performance improvements then though, and also significant improvements in visual clarity since there were some nice features added to UE4 recently (most notably, Temporal Upscaling). Also, it should finally add support for mixed reality gameplay recordings!

Also, it's a very big step towards switching from DirectX 11 to Vulkan and adding Linux support, so that's very nice!

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game! 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!
Also make sure to make me aware of any feedback you have in the official forums or the official discord server where we have over 240 members already!

Also, don't forget to follow and subscribe to the official Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter and YouTube so that you don't miss anything interesting about the game.

Cheers!





Below, I'll paste the patch notes for the 3 beta versions that were released since the last update:

Originally posted by Discord

Beta 21.0 is live!

- Added great small feature: You can now adjust the "block place distance" by sliding your thumb on the left touchpad while you have the block place mode selected on the right controller. The max place distance is high enough to allow you to build down! :)

So, this should make a lot of people happy I think!

Originally posted by Discord

Beta 21.1 is live!

- Falling! Before, there were two different settings regarding head based smooth loco: Off and On. Now, there's a third setting: "With Falling".

If you enable that, you will be able to fall down anywhere in the game if you're leaning too far over a ledge or if you're walking over a ledge using smooth loco.

There is no damage yet, so you can fall as much as you want without getting any negative impact. That will be added later! This is mostly meant so that you can test it a lot and tell me how it feels. If you'd constantly die during testing, you couldn't test it very nicely :)

Originally posted by Discord

Beta 21.2 is live!

- Fixed main menu. Player was spawned at wrong height in main menu, so you couldn't actually use the menu at all.

Hey everyone!

Update 20 is live, just quickly fixing some issues that were reported with Update 19 that was released 2 days ago.

I'm always aiming for having 0 known bugs in the game, so when there is a known bug, especially crashes, those will be fixed as soon as possible. Here's the full list of changes for this update:

- Fixed crash that could happen when collecting flowers
- Fixed 2 different crashes that could happen when walking around in the world
- Fixed bug that picked up flowers would sometimes be way too big
- When reaching behind your head to get a new arrow, you now get haptic feedback when you've drawn a new arrow

That's all for now! If you still see any other bugs, let me know :)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 19 is live, adding significant optimizations that should improve framerate very noticeably, making block items in the world saved and loaded, and much more!

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the new things added in this Update, with more details below:

- Block items are saved and loaded now!
- Added a max amount of 500 active block items
- Significantly optimized performance of adding/removing block items
- For drawing a new arrow, you need to move your hand behind your head now
- The .ini file for changing settings like view distance changed and got some new settings
- Significantly optimized performance of deer and rabbits
- Significantly improved performance of torches
- Fixed bug that torch fire would sometimes disappear for a moment
- Other small optimizations



Block items are saved and loaded now! So when you leave the world and come back, all items will still exist. This also means, if the game ever crashes while there are items on the ground or while you are crafting something, you'll no longer lose any items.

Having the items saved and loaded means you could also just throw items into a chest now and not actually put them into the slots since they will still be saved/loaded correctly no matter where they are. Even if you build a tower of items, leave the game and come back, it will still be exactly where you left it!

The block items are also pooled with a max amount of 500 now. This means, when the 501st is spawned, the oldest disappears. The game constantly "reuses" the old items now, so this improves performance and the fact that its limited to 500 means that if you are mining a lot of blocks and don't care about actually collecting them, you will no longer end up with so many active items on the ground that the framerate gets hurt.



The optimizations in the last Update were primarily about optimizing the speed of the world generation, so you ended up with way quicker world gen, but it didn't affect framerate much.

This update is very much about performance improvements that do affect the framerate! Deer and rabbits were significantly optimized so that their constant runtime cost is way less now. Every animal added in the future will also benefit from this of course.

Also, the performance of torches was optimized by a lot. The LOD system for torch particles was completely rewritten to be more effective. If you have a world with many torches, this is the most significant optimization of this update.

This was tested in a world with ~400 torches that someone sent me to investigate why the performance is bad, and after these optimizations were added, everything was perfect. You should be able to place thousands of torches with no problem now :)

There also was an issue before that if you walked closer to a torch, at some point the fire would disappear for ~0.5 seconds and then reappear. This is fixed now.



Previously, if you shot an arrow, you immediately had a new arrow in your right hand again. That's no longer the case now. After you shoot an arrow, your right hand will be empty. To draw another arrow, you need to move your right hand behind your head and draw another arrow there. You don't need to press any buttons, this happens automatically. It makes the bow and arrow feel more realistic, and that's good!



The game .ini options are now inside of

%localappdata%/cyubeVR/Saved/Config/WindowsNoEditor/Game.ini

Previously, the Engine.ini was used. Now, it's the Game.ini.

The content of that file looks like this now:

[cyubeVR.Settings]
Start=1
MaxUpdateThreads=5
RAM_EATING_MODE=1
ViewDistance=20
OverrideDefault=0
ViewDistanceLOD1=4
ViewDistanceLOD2=8
ViewDistanceLOD4=12
ViewDistanceLOD8=32

The OverrideDefault option was newly added with this Update. While that option is 0, the .ini variables are not used by the game. Only if you set it to 1, the game will apply the options from the .ini. So the OverrideDefault option allows you to quickly test if your .ini settings do increase/decrease visual fidelity or performance.



All the things mentioned above have been in the beta branch of the game for a while already and were tested by our great beta testers there! Thanks to those, you hopefully get fully stable updates in the stable branch of the game. If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the official cyubeVR discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! 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. 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.
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!

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

Cheers!