cyubeVR News

Hey everyone,

again, the last weekly report was released slightly more than a week ago™ (or a bit more than slightly more...), so it's time for another one! Yay!

Let me know in the comments if you'd like to have more frequent weekly reports, I think due to the official cyubeVR roadmap on Trello it's always quite clear what I'm working on anyways, so I prefer to spend time primarily with programming and not with writing frequent weekly reports all the time :)

Those that closely follow development of cyubeVR on the official cyubeVR discord are always up to date with what I work on too, but I understand not everyone likes to be on a bunch of discords for every game you own! That's why I think writing weekly reports from time to time does make sense.

The cyubeVR discord is still nicely growing though, we're at over 400 people there now. That's great! Community interaction is most important for development of the game.

If you haven't seen it yet, a few days ago, Update 27 was released.

Also, I want to mention two great youtube videos that you should definitely watch if you haven't seen them yet! The first is this great Video from Aelgiz, showing his castle build in cyubeVR in the Snow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIX5iisJxgM

The second one is this new video from Wee Hours Games, it's always great to watch him play cyubeVR and show a lot of excitement about every new feature in the game :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXLP7zyG0I



One feature request I want to talk about a bit more in this weekly report is related to gathering of items using the bucket. Currently, you need to manually throw items into the bucket, or swipe with the bucket over the ground to collect items.

A lot of people seem to look forward to "easier" way of gathering items in the game - most importantly, the current way requires you to bend down, or sit down on the ground - you do somehow need to get at least one of your hands close to the ground. Not everyone likes doing that a lot.

The suggested improvement is often having a vaccuum bucket, which automatically sucks in items up to a certain distance.

Now, just replacing the current bucket with a vaccuum bucket would be a bit boring - a "manual" bucket makes sense to have at the start of the game, since giving the player a bit of progression and some better bucket to work towards is good!

So, one way this could be done would be that you can craft a different bucket, and replace the current bucket with that newly crafted bucket, once you have crafted it. But how would you craft a bucket that has such a vacuum effect? The game has a medieval/fantasy theme, with no electricity or other industrial themed things. That means it has to be magic! Magic is good, because it's magic!

So, the vaccum bucket will run on "magic". Now, we could make it so that you need to craft a new bucket using some new magic resource, but actually there's a better way! Why not just replace the current bucket with a bucket that allows you to use it both as a regular bucket, but also "upgrade" it by attaching something magic to it?

I know after so much text you finally want to see it, so let's take a look at a concept of the new bucket that I've recently worked on with a concept artist!



As you see, the bucket has an attachment point for a crystal on the side - the bucket can be used both with and without a crystal attached, and you can attach different crystals to the bucket for getting different effects. Who says that a bucket always has to suck items in - maybe you want a bucket that blows items away, to clean up some area of items that you don't want to collect anyways. This new design allows for that! Differently colored crystals can have different effects on the behavior of the bucket.

You see the bucket has some "magical veins" going around it, which glow (or pulse) when you have a crystal attached to the bucket - that will look awesome in the game!

Also, such crystals won't need to be limited to only the bucket - over time there can be a lot more things in the game that make use of such crystals to upgrade various behavior.

You will be able to find these crystals in caves, and the crystals will have some level of "charge", with that charge slowly being used up while the crystals are used to cause any magic effect, like the vacuum effect in the bucket.

Then there should also be some way to "recharge" crystals once they are empty, so that you are not forced to go searching for new crystals in new caves. Recharging crystals might work by having them lie outside at night in moon-light or something similar - I'm not fully sure about that yet, so if you have good ideas, please write a comment here or come into the discord!

This concept for the bucket with crystals was not something that I just decided would be good, it was something we did actually talk a lot about in the discord, and until now, this was the best solution we came up with in there :) This is why the community is so important! Getting feedback from many people on ideas is always best, and I'm super happy cyubeVR has a nice community for that!

So, that's all for this weekly report. Thanks for caring about the game! Let me know what you think about this new bucket concept!

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! There's also a community-diven subreddit about cyubeVR on reddit.

Cheers! :)

Hey everyone!

Update 27 is live, adding independent settings for the length of day and night, a setting for saturation, a way to individually reset every setting to the default value, a great new texture for light processed wood and many important fixes!

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

• Added settings for length of day and night
  
• Added setting for saturation (especially useful on WMR headsets)
  
• Added reset button next to every setting in the settings. It allows you to individually reset every setting to its default value.
  
• Added new texture for light processed wood
  
• Fixed sledgehammer not causing damage on wallstone
  
• Made sledgehammer also cause damage on all types of wood. It makes sense that a hammer can't only be used to destroy stone, but also wood!
  
• Fixed texture of blue and green flowers. The texture for them was broken, resulting in them having the same texture like regular grass.
  
• Made picture frame brighter in torch light
  
• Further reduced SSAO by 35% on "Off" and "Low" bloom
  
• Fixed rain sounds. The rain sound was broken since Update 26.
  
• Fixed cloud movement speed being significantly too fast
  
• Fixed text box in inventory always saying "Processed Wood (Light)", even while being in settings
  
• Fixed block movement breaking after mesh object placement mode has been selected (like chest)
  
• Fixed evil bug that caused game to crash when loading any world with a sledgehammer existing anywhere in the world (e.g. on a wall mount)
  
• Fixed potential crash
  

By default, day in the game is roughly 5 times longer than night. This is a good default, but you might prefer a different distribution for this, so now you can have that! You can make day and night both very long, both very short, or make one very short and the other one long or any other combination.

So these settings don't just allow you to change the relative distrubution of day/night, but also wjat is the full length of the day/night cycle.



There previously was no way to know what the default of a setting was after you changed it, now there is! This was added now because it would likely have been very hard otherwise to get back to the exact defaults for the day/night length settings.



This is a very simple setting that allows you to modify the saturation of the game - either you want to modify this due to personal preference, or you might want to make the game in LCD VR headsets look more similar to naturally more saturated headsets with OLED displays. I think I've read multiple times that WMR users like to have saturation settings, and it definitely doesn't hurt to have a setting for this!



As shown in the screenshot on the very top of this announcement, there is a new texture for light processed wood! I couldn't stand the old texture any more, it was too ugly and totally not 8K. New one looks much better and so much more high res! You'll now bump your nose against the wall before seeing any pixels of that texture. That's how textures should be!



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 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! 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!
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 more than 400 people strong 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.

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

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

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 26 is live, adding a great copper sledgehammer tool which causes a lot of area damage, a new block-move feature that allows you to move any blocks you placed even after they are placed, and a lot of significant optimizations, bugfixes, and other improvements!

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

• Added copper sledgehammer
  
• Made it possible to move blocks after they have been placed
  
• Optimized how destroying blocks is handled internally
  
• Improved when "can't modify world yet" warning is shown
  
• Fixed snow on chest, deer, and rabbits not being occluded correctly when indoors
  
• Increased delay between damaging blocks and "self-healing" for block starting
  
• Made self-healing process of blocks slower
  
• Optimized navigation code
  
• Optimized generation of instant loading files
  
• Optimized deer and rabbits, nice CPU time reduction every frame
  
• Other general performance optimizations
  
• Fixed location of attachment points of nugget items
  
• Fixed snow or rain appearing in caves sometimes
  
• Adjusted out of focus warning to more exactly mention in which ini it can be disabled
  
• Adjusted min spec warning in main menu to not detect i5 8th or 9th Gen as below min spec
  

[video]https://stonebrickstudios.com/cyubevr/SteamAnnouncements/KroySledgehammerExampleNoAudio.webm?v=1[/video]
(This is a gif made from this Twitch Clip, from a stream of Kroy testing the sledgehammer in the cyubeVR beta build)

There's now a Copper Sledgehammer in the game! It's a nice, big sledgehammer. It very quickly breaks all hard blocks like stone or ores with a lot of area damage, so every hit will damage up to 25 blocks at once, with damage getting less the further away a block is from the block you hit. Using the copper sledgehammer is a lot of fun!

The sledgehammer causes a lot of damage and is great for quickly clearing a big area - the blocks it breaks drop significantly fewer items though compared to mining them with a stone or copper pickaxe, so for efficiently mining a lot of resources it's not very useful.

Since damaging so many blocks at once is quite different to the previous tools that only ever damaged one block, the block damage system also had to be optimized quite a lot. These optimizations benefit all tools in the game and will be especially useful for all things in the future that will cause area damage on blocks.

One change you will notice with all tools is that the delay between you damaging a block and it starting to "heal" itself is twice as long now compared to before, and the "healing" process is also taking twice the time until it's done. So, damaged blocks stay damaged significantly longer than before.

The sledgehammer crafting recipe is now the biggest recipe in the game, requiring 35 items. Go search for it now! :)



[video]https://stonebrickstudios.com/cyubevr/SteamAnnouncements/BlockMove.webm?v=1[/video]

You can now move existing blocks!

With the block place mode selected, when the front of the place tool is inside of a block and you hold the trigger button, you can move that block now.

Previously, if you were building something and you accidentally placed a block at an incorrect location, you had to switch to the "tool" mode, select the correct tool, destroy the block, collect it, select the place mode again and place the block at the correct location. This whole process is no longer needed now, you never need to switch away from the block place mode! You can keep the place mode active and just move the block to the correct location, and then keep building.

Moving blocks only works with blocks that were placed by the player, that prevents that you could take an ore block and "move" it across the whole world - you can move every block that you manually placed.

I'm quite excited about this, it really feels great to move blocks around. Try it out yourself!



Previously, only when you fully destroyed a block the visual representation you see was updated, so depending on how fast and busy your CPU was, it could happen that a block stayed visible for something like 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 seconds after you already destroyed it. That didn't feel as good as it could.

Now it's changed so that once you damage a block, the chunk is updated already internally, while you still see a temporary representation of the damaged block. Once you finished destroying the block, which is likely at least half a second later, only that temporary representation of the block disappears, and the actual chunk has already had the block removed, which means the block will disappear instantly (the exact frame you destroyed it). Even if you're running the game on a way too slow CPU like an i3, or having Prime95 run in the background, destroying blocks should feel completely instant now! It was actually quite some work to get that working nicely.

One side effect of this is that once you damage a block, it will look slightly different (slightly brighter) compared to when it's undamaged. Before, the damaged block only had the damage texture applied, now the whole block also has a slightly brighter color.



This is an update that (again) improves performance in general. From time to time, it's good to spend a bit of time on performance! Some things were sped up very significantly:

- Optimized one function in the UE4 source code responsible for AI navigation, causing hitches from time to time. The code in there was not ideal, so it was possible to make it 13 times quicker

- Made Chunk LOD generation twice as fast by optimizing memory access pattern (meaning, more cache friendly code)

- Hugely optimized generation of instant loading chunk mesh files, it's 4400% faster now while resulting in same file sizes

- Significantly optimized deer and rabbits, this results in some nice CPU time reduction every frame

- Other small optimizations



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 and made sure possible bugs are were fixed before this update gets released in the stable branch! 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! 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!
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 more than 390 people strong 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.

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

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

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update 25 is live, adding most importantly dynamic weather, including snow and rain! Also, it's cyubeVRs 1st birthday today, so you can expect to see some nice birthday hats. There's a lot of other things added or improved in this update, so keep reading!

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

- Added dynamic weather system
- Added new weather: Rain
- Added new weather: Snow
- Added weather settings
- Added best feature ever: You can grab bunnies now. Then they're fidgeting. You can carry them around!
- Added birthday hats to deer and rabbits, only on 26th and 27th January
- Added graphics setting for Antialiasing Strength
- Improved functionality of resolution slider in the graphics settings
- Improved feeling of tool physics
- Adjusted 8K screenshots to take second screenshot at "Low" bloom instead of "Medium"
- Made getting wood from tree with stick more predictable, exactly every 6th hit will now spawn a wood item
- Improved various rendering related things that made cyubeVR not work on Pimax
- Added a small, second needle to the compass that shows you your elevation
- Fixed issue that caused recipes to not show up correctly for some people using Windows 7 or Windows 8
- General performance optimizations



There's now a system for dynamic weather changes in the game. The weather will smoothly change between normal, snow and rain. If you dislike some weather, you can actually disable it in the settings menu of the game - there are settings for both rain and snow, you can set either of them to "Always", "Natural", or "Never". So you can easily say you want it to constantly snow while it's winter, or never rain.



[video]https://stonebrickstudios.com/cyubevr/SteamAnnouncements/SnowLoop.webm?v=1[/video]

Yay! It's winter! There's snow now!

Snow is white stuff slowly falling from the sky. No one knows where it comes from. But it's white! And it looks great!

The longer it snows, the more white the landscape will become, and it's not just the landscape! The animals will be white, the trees will be white, everything will be white! Of course, snow is only outside, in your house or in caves there will be no snow.

You should keep bloom at low, otherwise you'll probably die from blindness, as snow is pretty white.

The world feels completely different with snow, it feels like winter. Great winter atmosphere! Best winter atmosphere! It's winter! I'm very excited about snow!



[video]https://stonebrickstudios.com/cyubevr/SteamAnnouncements/RainLoop.webm?v=1[/video]

There's Rain now!

Rain is wet water falling from the sky. Rain causes splashes on the ground, and the ground becomes wet. Really wet. Rain sounds like rain. If you have a roof over your head, rain will stay outside!

The rain sound is nicely 3D - if you're in a building with one opening to outside, you will hear the rain sound coming from exactly that opening. That feels very realistic.

Since rain falls from the sky, the sky will look different when it rains. The sky will be very cloudy, and the clouds don't let as much light through as without clouds. That means it will get darker, even during the day. Also, clouds absorb certain wavelengths of light more than others - which means the light that reaches the ground has a colder color temperature. That's also the case for snow!

And rain comes with wind! Wind is moving air, and moving air collides with trees - wind movement of trees is significantly stronger when it rains!

While it's raining, you can actually end up in the rain clouds of you are somewhere high up on a mountain - the higher your elevation is, the foggier it becomes. You'll have the clearest view in valleys.





Today, it's cyubeVRs 1st birthday! Depending on timezone, the game came out either on 26th or 27th of January 2018. We need to celebrate this in the game! This is why all deer and rabbits will wear birthday hats on the 26th and 27th of every year now. They are happy about the game's birthday :)





This is really the best feature ever. Well, no, snow is better. But this is so much fun!

You can now grab bunnies with the hand and lift them up. Then they're fidgeting. You get haptic feedback from the bunnies! You can carry them around. Maybe they don't like it? Or maybe they like it. No one knows! You can also grab a dead bunny. Those are not fidgeting. They are dead. Because you killed them. And those have realistic ragdoll physics! So you can throw them around and have fun with them :) Or you keep them alive and enjoy the fidgeting. Alive bunnies are better than dead bunnies!



There's a graphics setting for Antialiasing Strength now. It's a slider that allows you to choose between strong AA, which results in a more "stable" image that has less flickering, but looks more blurry, and on the opposite end an image with little AA that has flickering around edges, but also significantly sharper.



There have been some low-level rendering changes to make cyubeVR work better on the Pimax 8K/5K+ headsets. It's still not fully working, but at Small FOV, the game should be perfectly playable now, which is a big improvement already. Still working on making it work better on Normal and large FOV, unfortunately having to wait for one bug in UE4 to be fixed for that.



Previously, when you hit a tree with the "stick" tool, a piece of wood spawned with a probability of 1/12. Now, I changed it so that exactly every 6th strong enough hit will spawn a piece of wood. Based on peoples reactions in videos, it seems the system with the probability was quite confusing to some people, since having it based on chance, it was a possibility that you could hit a tree 50 times and still not get anything, which would feel like the game is not working correctly. That's why it was adjusted now to feel completely predictable instead.



There's a second small needle in the lid of the compass now which shows the elevation you are at. It moves between 0 and 800 (that's the max block height in the game). Now you can know how high you are!



This update has slowly grown in the beta branch of the game for a long time already, in a total of 13 beta builds. As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who test new features and make sure possible new bugs are always fixed before an update gets released in the stable branch! 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, join it before its full ;) We're more than 370 people strong 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.
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, don't forgot there's an official roadmap with voting features now!

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

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Today I have something special for you - a public roadmap for cyubeVR, on trello, with voting features!



Roadmap on Trello

I have created that roadmap to make it more clear what the upcoming features in cyubeVR will be - previously, people that followed discussion on the official cyubeVR discord closely usually knew quite exactly what I'm working on and what the next things were, but for anyone who wasn't checking the discord every few days, the cyubeVR development process probably didn't feel as transparent as it could be. That should be different now with that public roadmap being available! :)

You see the roadmap is structured in a way that it's clear what priority ever feature listed on there is - things are tagged as "Highest Priority", "High Priority", "Medium-High Priority", "Medium Priority", and "Low Priority". You also see which features and fixes were done in the last few updates, and you see what new things there are in the current beta branch that's available for our great beta-testers in the discord!

If you have something that you think is missing on the roadmap, please join the discord and mention it there, or create a post in the Steam Discussions about cyubeVR! Of course the roadmap is always evolving and not static - things will change on there, and more new things will be added over time.

I hope you love the new roadmap, don't forget to vote on the features that interest you most so that I can easily see what's import important for the community :)

That's all for today! Thanks for caring about the game, and if you like it, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review 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 :)

Cheers!