cyubeVR News

Hey everyone, Update 30 for cyubeVR is live!

Most importantly, the Unreal Engine version cyubeVR is based on was updated from 4.19 to 4.22. The engine update took a bit longer than expected to be done, but it results in significant performance improvements on its own, and in addition to that, I also spent quite a lot of time optimizing various different things in the game further. You could say, this update is about "making the game ready for 144hz on Valve Index" :)

Here is a very quick overview of the things changed in Update 30, with some more details below:

• Update Engine to UE4 4.22
  
• Significant optimizations related to deer and rabbits
  
• Fixed issue that caused a lot of unnecessary triangles to render for chunks in the distance
  
• Optimized how torches, chests, picture frames, deer and rabbits are rendered, resulting in significantly fewer draw calls, and as a result better performance
  
• Very significant optimization related to shadow rendering of chunks in the distance, making it roughly 10 times faster
  
• Added new INI option HideControllersForVideoCapture for hiding controllers in high res video capture mode
  
• Experimental support for rendering the game using Vulkan
  
• Added button to main menu that triggers some music to be played on your controllers using the vibration motors
  
• Changed font in main menu to be more readable
  
• Music toggle in main menu is now persistent, so its state will be same the next time you open the game
  
• Updated min spec warning in main menu
  
• Fixed what happens when you try to put a structure of items attached together into a chest
  
• Fix for making sure picture frames are receiving light correctly
  
• Applied a fix that should make the game look more correct on Pimax or Valve Index
  
• Fixed bottom stone at bottom of the world not always generating correctly
  
• Fixed flying particle in air and birds not being visible in high res video capture
  
• Fixed multiple possible crashes
  
  

cyubeVR is now using Unreal Engine 4.22.2. Previously, the game was running on Unreal Engine 4.19. 4.19 was released on March 14, 2018, and 4.22 was released on April 2, 2019, so it's more than a year worth of engine changes to UE4.

The engine update improves performance significantly - with 4.22, the rendering code of UE4 was moved to a more intelligent Frostbite-like approach, making better use of available CPU and GPU resources.



Apart from the performance improvements coming from the engine update, I also took the opportunity to take a very in-depth look at all the relevant code in cyubeVR that could be optimized further - and got some nice gains out of that.

Shadows for chunks are now, after a certain distance, always rendered based on LOD chunks instead of full res chunks. There isn't any visible difference, but this hugely improves performance of shadow rendering, especially when using higher view distances, or higher view distances for LOD0 chunks, as high geometric complexity for visible chunks now no longer directly correlates with high geometric complexity for shadow rendering, the cost for shadow rendering is independent now from LOD settings for visible chunks.

Previously, shadow rendering got exponentially slower the higher the view distance was, with this optimization, when using higher general view distances and/or higher view distances for LOD0 chunks, shadow rendering can be more than 10 times faster than before.

If you have more than 16GB RAM, definitely take a look at increasing the view distance of the game in the INI, as having a higher view distance looks super awesome!

Some of these optimizations require the game to recreate the "Instant Loading files" for your world, so the first load of your world after updating to Update 30 will be slower than usual. Don't worry, world loading speed will be back to normal after the first time of using Update 30.



You can now run cyubeVR using Vulkan, instead of DirectX 11. Vulkan support is still a bit "experimental" compared to DirectX, so there might be bugs that are not known yet. In general, it runs very nicely with Vulkan though. To run the game using Vulkan, navigate to the directory that contains the cyubeVR.exe, and create a shortcut to that .exe where you add " -vulkan" at the end. Then run the game using that shortcut.

This Vulkan support is the first big step towards official Linux support for cyubeVR, as the game will always run with Vulkan on Linux.



When using the high res video capture mode, you can now choose to have your controller models be invisible in the high res video output. This ini setting has been added to the game:

HideControllersForVideoCapture=0

As for all such settings, you can find this ini file in Appdata/Local/cyubeVR/Saved/WindowsNoEditor/Game.ini.



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 16 separate beta builds! Especially in the case of an engine update, a lot of in-depth testing by beta testers is absolutely invaluable. 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 450 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 :)

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!

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

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :) Upcoming for the next update is support for finger tracking of Knuckles / Valve Index Controllers!

Cheers!

Happy Easter everyone!

This easter, there's a special event in cyubeVR: Bunnies have hidden easter eggs all over your world, so you can go looking for easter eggs in VR! Here's a video explaining the feature and where you can find the easter eggs :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P004XLso4q8

This feature had been hidden in Update 29, so you don't need to download any new update for this.

Cheers!

Hey everyone, Update 29 for cyubeVR is live!

This is an update primarily focused on fixing multiple bugs that have been found and reported in the last few days. The game should always be almost bug-free, so when bugs are found, they are immediately fixed before anything else is worked on. This update also makes it significantly faster to find all the recipes in the game, and adds an awesome new camera smoothing feature to the High-Res Video Capture Mode.

Just 4 days ago, Update 28 was released. If you haven't seen that one yet, you can read through the announcement post here:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/619500/announcements/detail/1783897610480980929

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in Update 29, with some more details below:

• Added awesome camera smoothing feature to the high res video capture mode, allowing for very smooth video captures
  
• When collecting a recipe, duplicates will now change the type to a different recipe instead of despawning
  
• Fixed torch sounds sometimes not working
  
• Fixed birds being invisible sometimes due to spawning at incorrect location
  
• Fixed music sometimes not playing
  
• Slightly increased minimum height for high-up flying birds
  
• Fixed weird artifacts that could sometimes happen at various locations on light processed wood texture
  
• Fixed potential double item spawn when destroyed with 2 tools at the exact same time
  
• Fixed saving/loading of day/night length sliders
  
• Fixed bug that sometimes made it impossible to move chairs or chests
  
• Fixed green glow around attached blocks that are valid crafting recipe sometimes disappearing or flickering
  
• Fixed blocks not playing "scale down" animation sometimes when adding to bucket
  
  

There's now an awesome smoothing mode for high res video capture! Two new ini settings have been added to the game:

UseSmoothingForVideoCapture=1
SmoothingSpeed=0.500000

When this new smoothing mode is enabled, the camera on the monitor will not just be where your head is, instead it will smoothly fade towards your head location. This gives it a gimbal-like appearance which is awesome for capturing some nice scenes in the game. The SmoothingSpeed variable allows you to specify how quickly the virtual camera will move.

Here's an example video of a beta tester who used the new smoothing to capture this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM89C980vqI



Previously, if you collected a recipe of some type, all duplicates of that recipe would despawn, which resulted in the chance to find a new recipe greatly decreasing when you almost found all existing recipes already. Now, duplicates will no longer despawn, and instead they are updated to represent a different recipe.

This change makes the time it takes to find a new recipe roughly stay constant, which makes it feel significantly easier to find the last few recipes.



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 4 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.

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!

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 28 for cyubeVR is live!

As usual, here is a very quick overview of the things changed in this update, with more details below. Actually, the "quick overview" has never been as long as this time, there's a lot of changes!

• Added Rainbow Flowers, Rainbow Dye and Rainbow Torches
  
• Added alternative control method with snap-turning, smooth-turning, and touchpad/thumbstick locomotion
  
• Added settings for snap-turning
  
• Added system for changing colors of existing torches
  
• Added way better looking new model for the stick tool
  
• Added preparation for currently still secret feature
  
• Added white dye that can be collected from white flowers
  
• Added text in UI that tells you which world format the chunk you are standing on was generated with
  
• Added in-game setting for screenshot resolution to switch between 4K and 8K
  
• Modified flagstone recipe to now result in 28 flagstone blocks, instead of 16 blocks previously
  
• Added controls for time of day when using the high-res video capture mode
  
• Added new torch models and modified torch placement to make it possible to place torches on the floor/ceiling
  
• Increased radius of dynamic hand-held torchlight by 90%
  
• Added setting for enabling/disabling black fade on teleport, and changed default to disabled
  
• Changed look of preview torches to be more opaque and easier to see
  
• Adjusted arrow trace particles to only stop when the arrow hits something
  
• Adjusted recipe order in crafting recipe overview
  
• Fixed bugs related to controls on oculus touch controllers and WMR controllers
  
• Fixed deer blood being rendered on top of controller models
  
• Fixed aurora speed (was too fast)
  
• Fixed inventory bug that could happen when dragging items into the chest
  
• Fixed bug that could happen when destroying wood scaffolding with an arrow next to a chunk border
  
• Fixed crash that could happen while moving blocks
  
• Fixed potential crash in UI rendering code
  
• Fixed crash that could happen when removing a block on a chunk border next to a torch
  
  

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

There are now rainbow flowers that give you rainbow dye which you can use to craft rainbow torches! The torches do constantly and smoothly switch between all available colors.

Rainbow flowers are quite rare - rarer than green or blue flowers! Rainbow flowers are now the rarest type of flower in the game. You won't often see them, and if you do, you probably want to pick them up!

The rainbow torches really show how good and versatile the code for the custom voxel lighting in the game is - not only can it do colored torches, which is already something that you don't find in many other voxel games, but even animated rainbow torches work! This is exciting! :)





There's an alternative control method now that allows for snap-turning, smooth-turning and touchpad/thumbstick locomotion!

In the settings, there's a new setting called "Alternative Move/Turn". This new setting is disabled by default. If you enable it, the left menu button now acts as a switch for switching the left touchpad/thumbstick between the button-functions it has, to acting as a thumbstick/touchpad for turning and movement.

When the left touchpad/thumbstick is in that turn/movement mode, swiping left/right on it will cause snap or smooth turning. Pressing and holding it will cause smooth locomotion.

There's also a new setting added that allows you to switch between 22.5° snap turning, 45° snap turning and smooth turning.





It's now possible to place torches on the floor and also the ceiling!

Previously, you could only place torches on the wall - not anymore. It's the same torch item that you place, but torches placed on the ground or ceiling look a bit different than torches placed on the wall. Torches placed on the ground and ceiling look great and are a great way to give your interior a more interesting look.



Ever since Update 9, cyubeVR had an awesome 8K screenshot feature that you can trigger by holding both teleport buttons for 2 seconds. You can now choose if screenshots are done in 4K or in 8K resolution! The default is still 8K, same like before, just that now you can decrease it to 4K if you want. When set to 4K, screenshots are obviously at a lower res, but they are also taken pretty much instantly and don't freeze the game for multiple seconds, so it's a bit more convenient. Also, the file size for 4K screenshots is less.





The stick tool now looks way better!

I once read the old stick looked too much like a pool noodle, and that probably had some truth. It was indeed not the best looking stick, so it had to change! The new stick tool is an awesome 8K photogrammetry model with crazy detail and significantly more interesting looking than the old one. Enjoy!



Previously, the white flowers were the only flowers you couldn't collect any dye from - that was a bit hard to understand, so now you can collect white dye too! Crafting a torch with white dye is a valid crafting recipe, but it just results in a regular torch, same as if you would not add the white dye.



You can now change colors of existing, placed torches by touching the torch with a dye!

So, for example, you can now place a regular torch, grab a rainbow dye, touch the torch with that dye and the regular torch will turn into a rainbow torch. When doing that, the dye disappears. Touching a torch with a white dye turns it into a regular torch.



When you open the settings and scroll down, after the last setting the game will now tell you which world format the chunk you are standing on was generated with. This is helpful to see if a chunk you are standing on has some new stuff (like ore, or flowers) that was only added in some recent version of the game. For example, rainbow flowers you will only find on chunks that are world format 24 or above.



In Update 24, a great high-res video capture mode was added to the game:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/619500/announcements/detail/1714079766550841115

When the high res video capture mode is enabled, you can now move time of day backward/forward by pressing the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard. This allows you to easily set up the exact shot you want, without having to wait for the sun to move to where you want to have it.




As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 12 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!

The screenshots above are taken in a world of Koi, one of the beta testers, you can follow him playing the game here on his youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM8k4IzB5E0

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.

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!

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,

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! :)