cyubeVR News

Hey everyone, Update 47 for cyubeVR is live!

This is the first "Survival Update" for cyubeVR, adding the health, death, respawn and fall damage mechanics, plus many more great new things, and of course also additional performance optimizations and bugfixes.

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

• Added Health System, Death, and Respawn System
  
• Added Respawn Torches
  
• Added Fall Damage
  
• Improved how the inventory works with regards to the right hand
  
• Gave the Inventory Briefcase a new design, much better looking than before
  
• Added "Crystal Mining Light" that you can put on your head to give off constant light for 10 minutes
  
• Added new setting: "Invincibility"
  
• Added new setting: "Terrain LOD Quality"
  
• Added new setting: "Save AA Performance"
  
• Added new setting: "Night Darkness"
  
• Added new setting: "Image Brightness"
  
• Added two new settings sliders in the settings (gameplay tab) that allow adjusting the bucket angle
  
• Removed "Small Scale Shadows" setting, because they don't cost any performance
  
• Improved handling of loading settings with regards to newly introduced settings
  
• Adjusted how exactly the hand has to grip the controller for the "natural grip" to be detected with index controllers
  
• Added a "Please kill me half" button in the "Stats" tab of the settings
  
• Added additional screenshot (sky castle by alan61333) to the community screenshot showcase in the main menu
  
• Made grass (foliage) generally a bit darker
  
• Increased the amount of smoothing on the inventory "laser pointer" a bit
  
• When hovering over a crystal icon in the crafting recipes overview, it now says "Magic Crystal (any color)"
  
• Added hint text when holding a valid crafted green glowing item in your hand for more than 10 seconds
  
• Added hint text appearing if you try to add an item to your inventory while it's full
  
• Changed the color of the main menu background
  
• Unified font of the text in the main menu
  
• Made sound of torches in hand a bit quieter
  
• Slightly adjusted visuals of the teleport indicator
  
• Improved wording of some tutorial pages
  
• Significant CPU-side performance optimizations, with the most noticeable improvement when very quickly mining a lot of blocks
  
• Significant GPU performance optimizations
  
• Fixed sides of some blocks sometimes looking fully black for a short while when mining with area damage tools
  
• Fixed using gravity gloves on a block item and then not catching it breaking grabbing the item until you did another successful gravity glove grab
  
• Fixed it being possible to enable tool mode or block place mode on right hand while bow is active
  
• Fixed the long-existing bug that wall-mounted torches would sometimes not want to be wall-mounted any more
  
• Fixed deletion of world in main menu sometimes not working correctly
  
• Fixed "progress bars" sometimes being visible below custom blocks in the inventory
  
• Fixed it being possible to "draw another arrow" and trigger the "Quiver" achievement while not having the bow active
  
• Fixed it not being possible to reset "Locomotion Direction" setting to default
  
• Fixed bug that molten pieces of iron/sand sometimes fell through the upper chamber of the furnace
  
• Fixed inventory not opening on left hand if left index finger was detected as fully straight with index controllers
  
• Fixed deleting tool directly from tool quick bar incorrectly deleting different item from the regular item list
  
• Fixed multiple possible crashes
  

If you've played cyubeVR previously, you know that cyubeVR is a very chill and peaceful game, ideal for everyone who enjoys immersing themselves in a beautiful infinite world in VR and being creative. But one of the biggest feature requests from many players has always been to also add "Survival Gameplay" to cyubeVR, to make it possible to play the game in a less peaceful way. So now, the time has come for survival features!

One important note first: If you prefer to play the game without any fear of death, just enable “Invincibility” in the “Gameplay” tab of the settings. Then cyubeVR is same chill and peaceful as always, and you can keep building without having to pay any attention to your health. But by default, "Invincibility" is disabled, so let's talk about what this now means!

On both of your hands, you now see a green "wristband" that indicates your health. With full health, the wristband is fully visible, with less health, it's a less complete circle. Additionally to the wristband on the hands, if you are low on health, you also see a red effect on the edges of your vision that becomes stronger the lower your health is, and you also see blood on your hands. If you are hurt, automatic health regeneration slowly heals you over time.

An important part of survival gameplay is of course "respawn". Every game with health needs some mechanic for that, and cyubeVR now also has one, making use of "Respawn Torches"!

You now start the game with one respawn torch in your inventory. If you load a world you previously played in, you will also see a respawn torch appear in your inventory the next time you load the game (if you have a full inventory, it will appear once you make some free space for it). Respawn torches look very cool, different than all other torches in the game. They're very "magical", and give off a bit of purple light.

If you place a respawn torch in the world, that position will be where you respawn when you die. Without having a respawn torch placed, you will respawn where you originally started the game, which might be far away from where you currently are - so once you found a place where you want to stay, make sure to place a respawn torch there!

You can also craft and place additional respawn torches, using a new recipe you can find now, but placing additional respawn torches deactivates the respawn torches you previously placed. Only one respawn torch can be active at any time. You can activate inactive respawn torches by putting a crystal into them, but that consumes the crystal, so you don't want to switch your respawn point too often. You can also collect a respawn torch again and place it somewhere else, but only if it's either the only respawn torch in the world, or currently not active. If you have multiple respawn torches in the world, and you want to collect the currently active respawn torch, you need to first activate one of the other inactive respawn torches again.

So, what happens when you die? First, you see a very nice looking death animation. All items from your inventory stay where you died, and a blue floating orb appears where you died, with your inventory "floating above it". A very tall death beacon will be visible at your death position, which you can see from very far away, even far outside of your view distance. This death beacon marks your death position, to allow you to easily find your way back to where you died, because nothing would be more frustrating than dying and not finding your way back to get your inventory back. The death beacon will slowly fade away over time, until it disappears after 60 minutes. So don't wait too long if you want to get your inventory back! If you die multiple times in 60 minutes, then multiple death beacons can be visible, and you can identify the most recent one by which one looks the most "powerful" and least "faded away". The items from your inventory stay forever where you died, only the death beacons have a limited lifetime.

Once you walked back to your death position, you can either collect your full inventory by sucking up the blue orb with your bucket, or selectively collecting individual items from your old inventory by dragging and dropping them into your main inventory. If you collect all the items from your old inventory, the blue orb disappears, and the death beacon also disappears.



There's now fall damage! You can take damage, or die, from fall damage. The damage is linearly proportional to the height.

The exact amount of fall damage you take depends on the type of block you fall on. Falling on hard ground like stone is significantly more damaging than falling on soft ground like grass or dirt. The exact values used are these: Falling on hard ground like stone starts causing damage at 4 blocks height, and max damage (death) is reached at 26 blocks height. Falling on soft ground like grass or dirt or sand starts causing damage at 8 blocks height, and max damage is reached at 60 blocks height. Falling on any other blocks starts causing damage at 6 blocks height, and max damage is reached at 40 blocks height.



Previously, opening the inventory would always move the right hand into "laser pointer" mode. This was sometimes a bit confusing for people to understand at first, especially if someone had the inventory opened, looking at the tutorial explaining how to do something with the right hand, but it wouldn't work while looking at the inventory.

Now, the right hand stays in the mode it was in before, even while the inventory is opened, and it's also possible now to select a different mode on the right hand, like the tool mode or block placement mode, while the inventory is opened. The only thing that remains not possible is placing blocks while the inventory is opened, to not accidentally place blocks when using the trigger in the UI.



There's a lot of useful new settings with this update, to allow everyone to customize the game to their liking as much as possible. Here's a list of the new settings and what they do:

"Terrain LOD Quality": Allowing you to adjust how detailed the terrain is further away from you. To save performance, the detail gets reduces after a certain distance. This setting now allows you to increase the visual fidelity of this, at some extra performance cost. There's three options: "Normal", "Ultra", and "INI". Previously, it was possible to adjust this setting in the INI file, using the "ViewDistanceLOD" settings, and there was no way to dynamically adjust it while the game is running. Now, if you set "Terrain LOD Quality" to "INI", your value from the INI will be used, "Normal" is the same default as always (4, 8, 12), and "Ultra" is a higher quality setting for people with good hardware (8, 12, 16).

"Invincibility": Allowing you to choose if you want to have the whole health/death/respawn system enabled, or just play fully peacefully with infinite health.

"Night Darkness": Allowing you to make night more realistically dark if you want to. By default, night is quite bright in cyubeVR. There are two settings now, "Realistic" and "Brighter". The default is still "Brighter", but if you want to, you can now make it "Realistic", which is more immersive, but also more difficult regarding gameplay, as you see less, so it's a lot easier to e.g. accidentally fall into a cave while walking around.

"Image Brightness": Allowing you to affect the overall brightness of the game. You can choose between "Normal", which is the default, and "Darker". This affects very bright blocks the most (e.g. a white block hit by sun light).

"Save AA Performance": This has three options: "Automatic", "Force On", and "Force Off". What this setting does if its enabled is disabling antialiasing (AA) on the edges of the view, so a bit like fixed foveated rendering. This saves some significant GPU performance, and should be unnoticeable in VR, due to the most outside area of the view being outside of sweet spot anyways. It is slightly noticeable on the edges of the desktop mirror window though, so if you record videos or stream the game, you should disable it. Having it enabled saves around 5% GPU performance. This is still a bit experimental, so for now, if you set it to "Default", it's only enabled on Valve Index, and disabled on all other headsets. "Force On" enables it no matter which headset you use, and "Force Off" is doing the opposite.

"Bucket Angle (Roll)" and "Bucket Angle (Pitch)": Allowing you to freely adjust the rotation of the bucket between -180° and +180° on two axis.



You can now put a "mining light" crystal on your head that gives off constant light! This is meant primarily for making the "Blocks mined in 10 minutes" world record in the game more interesting. Did you know recently a new record for this was set? "KroyVR" managed to mine 40822 blocks in cyubeVR in 10 minutes!

If you put a crystal on your head, it will now give off light (matching the color of the crystal) for 10 minutes and 30 seconds. So, exactly the time it probably takes to grab the tools you need, and then do 10 minutes of mining. And then you can mine without having to be in darkness for 10 minutes! After the time is over, the light stops and the crystal disappears, it's not re-usable in this case. But you'll probably accidentally find at least 50 new crystals if you spend 10 minutes mining with dual wielding iron sledgehammers.



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 some "hint texts" that appear if the game thinks the player might not know something and needs some hint. Currently, just in these 3 places:

- If you try to collect an active respawn torch while having multiple respawn torches placed in the world, a hint text will appear telling you to first re-activate one of the other inactive respawn torches

- If you try to add something to your inventory while your inventory is full, a hint text will appear that tells you that your inventory is full

- If you hold a green glowing crafted structure in your hand, or have it lie on the ground, and wait for over 10 seconds without collecting it, a hint text will appear (once), telling you that to finish crafting it, you need to put it into the bucket or drop it behind your shoulder.

With future updates, more of these hint texts will probably be added - if you know anything that you think wasn't clear when you played the game for the first time where you think the game should show some hint text to help, please let me know!



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, David O, SkgBlaze, WillyVR, KroyVR, Jackerino, texhnobees, WarChi1d, Netshaman, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Adrian Sawn, David R., gunair, Algiz, Dark Slaughter, SingingFluffyUK, Sceptrex

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=2464370400&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2470094670&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2487189515&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510627809&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2511870284&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2525527486&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553763821&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553763998&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553764147&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553764580&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553764677&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2555961525&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560806427&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560806550&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560893774&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 24 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 a few words. Writing a positive 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 over 1600 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!

Hey everyone, Update 46 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds new achievements, a new additional way of adding things to your inventory, new haptic feedback on crafting, new useful settings, LIV support, plus many more smaller additions, bugfixes and improvements.

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

• Added 7 new achievements to the game
  
• Added "Community Screenshot Showcase" in main menu
  
• Added new, additional way of adding things to the inventory, by dropping them behind your shoulder (Alyx-Style)
  
• Added feature to install some custom blocks directly from the main menu
  
• The teleport indicator now has a new, better design
  
• Added a new graphics setting: "Sharpness"
  
• Added haptic feedback for crafting
  
• Added LIV support back into the game
  
• Improved anti-aliasing on grass and flowers
  
• Updated UE4 to latest version (minor update)
  
• Made monitor lizard play "look up" animation more often while idle
  
• Added a new setting: "Location fade on teleport"
  
• Various CPU-side optimizations, primarily for when quickly mining a lot of blocks with area damage tools
  
• Fixed min spec warning in main menu being rendered behind regular main menu UI
  
• Fixed main menu sometimes flickering for some people on desktop mirror of the game
  
• Fixed iron shovel sometimes leaving behind "dirt" blocks that should really be "grass" blocks
  
• Fixed non-placable items like coal ending up in the block place quick bar when adding them to the inventory
  
• Fixed progress-based achievements not working correctly (Miner, Builder, Crafter)
  
• Added hardcoded 10% thumbstick deadzone for left thumbstick to make sure the game always works correctly even with controllers with thumbstick drift
  
• Fixed it being possible to get stuck "above" the world when using the bucket-fly trick
  
• Fixed grabbing gecko incorrectly unlocking "Grabbed Rabbit" achievement
  
• Fixed hover-text on crafting recipe ingredient incorrectly saying "Wood (any, same type)" for custom blocks
  
• Adjusted the initial greetings text in the main menu
  
• Fixed bug with area damage causing blocks to sometimes incorrectly disappear after they've healed
  
• Added some smoothing to the teleport location pointer
  

There have been some cool features in the game which never got an achievement associated with them yet. Because you surely want to be able to show off a cool achievement after you unlocked some of the cool things in the game, now some of these features got their own achievements! Here's a list of the 7 new achievements:

A Huge Furnace! - Placed a furnace
Smelter - Smelted Iron Ore to Iron in the Furnace
Gecko Grabber - Grabbed a Gecko
Very Heavy Tool - Crafted an Iron Sledgehammer
Transparent - Placed a Glass Block
Building With Magic - Placed multiple blocks at once using crystal assisted block placement
Gravity Glove - Grabbed something using gravity gloves

If you have any fun ideas for what kind of achievements you'd like to see be added to the game in the future, be sure to post them in the Discord of the Forums!



In the main menu of the game, to the right of the main UI, there's a new "Community Screenshot Showcase" slideshow now, showing everyone the coolest builds created by people playing the game! So, a slideshow of the most amazing builds ever posted to the #screenshots in the official cyubeVR discord. It automatically switches images every 6 seconds, but it also has a "back" and "forward" button allowing you to manually switch between the images if you want to spend a bit more time looking at one specific image. For every screenshot, it mentions below what's shown on the screenshot (e.g. "House") and who has built it ("Built by: Name").

The slideshow always moves chronologically through those screenshots, but it starts at a random index every time the game is launched, so all screenshots are same likely to be seen.

These are the screenshots currently featured in that Community Screenshot Showcase:


Windmill | Built by: ChibiArcher


Dwarf Pub | Built by: gunair


Dwarf Library | Built by: gunair


Dwarf Library | Built by: gunair


Dwarf Pub | Built by: gunair


Interior | Built by: alan.raw


Interior | Built by: alan.raw


Interior | Built by: alan.raw


Huge Castle | Built by: Aelgiz


Huge Castle | Built by: Aelgiz


Floating Palace | Built by: Buchman


Unfinished Bridge | Built by: KroyVR


Shroom | Built by: KroyVR


Scrabble | Built by: Tino


Modern House | Built by: Maika


House | Built by: GARRthePIRATE


Aqueduct | Built by: Floater


Christmas Tree | Built by: ChibiArcher


Pixel Art | Built by: ChibiArcher


Crafting Nook | Built by: Floater


House | Built by: Wilroc


Glass Tower | Built by: Raven Seldon

If you have also built something similarly cool that you'd like everyone to see in that "Community Screenshot Showcase", it can definitely be added there, just post it into the #screenshots channel in the official cyubeVR discord :)



It's now possible to add items, tools, torches, or anything else to the inventory by dropping them behind your shoulder. This mean you can now use "Gravity Glove + Drop behind shoulder" to add something to your inventory in 100% Half-Life Alyx style! This is a second, optional way of adding things to the inventory, and you can of course still also just use the bucket, which stays the main way of adding things to your inventory.

The bucket is definitely faster for picking up a lot of items at once, but for adding that one individual torch or tool you grabbed using gravity gloves to your inventory, this "behind-shoulder-add" makes a lot of sense, and it is what some people naturally expect they're able to do when they play around with gravity gloves.



Previously, there was no haptic feedback when crafting. So you visually had to make sure that both block items you want to attach to each other are having the green outline to make sure that if you release one item, it get's attached to the other item. I've often seen that even people who have played hundreds of hours of cyubeVR still sometimes accidentally release an item in a slightly incorrect position, causing it to drop to the ground instead of being attached to the other item correctly. Now, with haptic feedback, you feel the controller vibrate only if you hold the new block item you want to attach in the exact correct spot for it to be attached to the other block items correctly. This means you can now, in theory, craft a simple recipe even if you're completely blind and deaf! That hopefully feels like a nice improvement to everyone!



Steam Workshop support for custom blocks is one of the greatest features of cyubeVR, as it means there's a huge and constantly growing amount of blocks, made by the community, available to install with one single click from the workshop! These blocks are super easy to use, same easy as all of the default blocks of the game. But some people might not be super familiar with the Steam Workshop and find it a bit hard to learn how exactly that works.

So to make it easier for those to get some really cool community-made blocks installed, there now is a new convenience feature: If someone starts the game for the first time without having any workshop blocks installed, the game shows a prompt in the main menu offering to install a developer-selection of some of the most useful blocks from the workshop, with one click. The player can choose yes, or no. If you already have any workshop blocks installed, you will never see this prompt, as it's just meant to help people who are not very familiar with the Steam Workshop to easily get access to some of the coolest community-made blocks in there. If you already have custom blocks installed, the game assumes you are familiar enough with the workshop to be able to pick yourself which blocks you find useful or not.



LIV support is now back in the game, using the new UE4 LIV plugin the LIV devs released just a few days ago! So you can now take great Mixed-Reality videos or streams in cyubeVR again!

cyubeVR has usually been supporting LIV for a long time, but after the engine update to the newest Unreal Engine version 4.26 (done with cyubeVR Update 44), LIV was not working any more, because LIV was not supporting that quite new UE4 version yet. Now they released a new version that supports UE4 4.26, and also features includes other improvements, so now LIV in cyubeVR should work better than ever before!





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):

Al Raw, ChibiArcher, Shanya / Sabrina, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, David O, SkgBlaze, KroyVR, Jackerino, texhnobees, WillyVR, Adrian Sawn, Netshaman, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Algiz, WarChi1d, gunair, David R., SingingFluffyUK, Dark Slaughter

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=2470094670&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2459261008&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2458217469&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2400165366&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464370122&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464370286&searchtext=

Make sure to regularly browse through the Steam Workshop and subscribe to anything you find useful for building in cyubeVR!

If you're also interested now in creating custom mod 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 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 11 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 a few words. Writing a positive 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 over 1500 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!

Hey everyone, Update 45 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds two amazing new animals to the game, a gecko and a monitor lizard, and also adds two new iron tools, an iron pickaxe and and iron axe! Plus many more smaller additions and improvements.

Let's take a look at the list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for some of the changes, with some more nice screenshots!

• Added a new animal in the desert: Geckos
  
• Added a new animal in the desert: Monitor Lizards
  
• Added a new tool: Iron Pickaxe
  
• Added a new tool: Iron Axe
  
• Added a completely new, better algorithm for the wind animation on trees
  
• Added a new "Bester" quality option for the "Tree Distance Quality"
  
• Increased damage of pickaxes and stick on stone
  
• Added a slider in the settings for adjusting the smooth locomotion speed. Maximum is 50% more than before.
  
• Added ingame setting "Tool Hit Item Smoke"
  
• Reduced chance of rain (it was raining too often)
  
• Added ability for animals to save/load their color variation
  
• Added INI setting HapticFeedback=1, affecting haptic feedback on the controllers
  
• Increased the range before the lowest quality LOD of some trees is visible
  
• Adjusted how the antialiasing treats the flying dandelion particles, and how they're rendered
  
• One significant GPU performance optimization
  
• Improved parameters for the dynamic resolution algorithm
  
• Significantly improved CPU rendering performance in worlds with a lot of active block items and/or open chests
  
• Even more CPU optimizations to the chunk visibility system
  
• Told the game the dates for easter 2021 and 2022
  
• The first screenshot of the 8K screenshot now uses "Best" bloom instead of way stronger bloom
  
• Fixed spawn rotation of animals not being correctly randomized
  
• Fixed animals not walking around any more if you walked around a bit after joining the world
  
• Fixed animals sometimes not saving/loading correctly
  
• Fixed copper axe recipe video looking too bright
  
• Fixed block quickbar fully being filled with torches when starting a new world
  
• Fixed block items potentially being able to start burning when they should not
  
• Fixed performance drop when placing a lot of blocks at once with crystal assisted block placement
  
• Updated engine to latest UE4 version (minor changes)
  
• Updated compiler (MSVC) to latest version
  
• Various other optimizations
  

This update adds two new animals to the game, both roaming around in the desert! Suddenly you're not alone any more in the desert!

Both the Gecko and the Monitor Lizard were made by a community member: Xweert123. Thanks very much to him for that! Both animals were his idea, and he modeled, textured and animated them. Check out his Instagram, Youtube Channel, Sketchfab, Steam and Patreon!

Integrating community-made additions into the game is always possible if they are fitting into the game and are of high enough quality to satisfy the high visual standard of everything in cyubeVR. These two new animals are definitely fitting, and also of very high quality! They look really cool, thanks to both a high detail base mesh, and additional tessellation to make every small detail stand out, like the scales on the lizard and gecko. And, of course, as usual in cyubeVR, very nice high-res 8K textures.

The gecko is a relatively small animal, while the lizard is a relatively large animal. They are both extremely detailed, the gecko is likely the most detailed animal in the game yet.

And did I mention yet that the geckos lick their eyes? If you want to see how they lick their eye, check out this clip from KroyVR on Twitch where he ways playing the beta build of cyubeVR with geckos: https://clips.twitch.tv/ClearAgreeableNarwhalBudBlast-3mo0NNq3OvbJlciC

The monitor lizard also has a nicely animated tongue. If you're close enough that your nose touches it, where you can really admire the 8K textures, maybe the lizard will sniff you back.

One really cool thing about the geckos is that they appear in billions of different color combinations. They all look completely different, even the eye color of every gecko is different! You'll never find two geckos that look the same.

For example, here's a screenshot of different color combinations of geckos @Tino posted in the cyubeVR Discord:



The gecko is small enough that you can carry it around with you in one hand, same like a rabbit. I know you always wanted to have a pet gecko in the game! With the amount of color variations it has, you'll have a lot of fun trying to find the perfect pet gecko to take home with you.

If you have some luck, you actually might even find a gecko that has scales and eyes which glow in the dark!



Previously, only an iron shovel and iron sledgehammer existed. With this update, the whole set of tools is now also available as iron tools.

Same like the iron shovel and sledgehammer, these new iron tools are very, very strong. If you like to build big, you'll love them!

The iron pickaxe is very quick at destroying stone. Quick enough that one hit of it destroys stone. It's still a precision tool though, so it does not make area damage like the sledgehammer does. The iron sledgehammer is the tool to use for quickly clearing big areas, while the iron pickaxe is the tool to use for quickly gathering resources and precision work on builds.

The new iron axe is an axe made out of... wait for it... iron. Now that was a huge surprise, right? Want to hear another surprising thing? The axe is quick at destroying wood! Yes! One hit is enough to destroy a block of wood and convert it to processed wood. And additionally, you even get 5 pieces of processed wood from any wood block when you use the iron axe to process it. So much wood! The iron axe is also still a precision tool, so no area damage.



Trees now use a completely different algorithm for the wind animation on them. This fixes trees doing the visually unpleasing "jumping / flickering" while trees were loading / unloading, and it also slightly improves performance as this new wind algorithm is cheaper to calculate.





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):

Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ChibiArcher, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, David O, texhnobees, KroyVR, SkgBlaze, Adrian Sawn, Algiz, Lucas van Leiden, Netshaman, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Jackerino, SingingFluffyUK, gunair, WarChi1d

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.



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 10 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 a few words. Writing a positive 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 over 1500 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!

Hey everyone, Update 44 for cyubeVR is live!

This update brings an update to the latest Unreal Engine version, a lot of internal code refactoring, some new convenience features regarding inventory management, new graphics options and more!

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

• Engine Update to latest Unreal Engine version (4.26.1)
  
• Some big internal refactoring of some code, fixing possible crashes and improving performance
  
• Added new "View Distance" setting in the ingame-settings of the game
  
• Added Free C Disk Space check and warning
  
• Added a new bloom setting, called "Best"
  
• Added some small new convenience features for inventory management
  
• Added a new graphics setting "Shadow Quality"
  
• Improved tree visuals in 8K screenshots
  
• Fixed LOD chunk not being visible if it contained invalid blocks
  
• Fixed custom blocks of different types directly next to each other being incorrectly displayed as only one type in LOD chunks
  
• Renamed "Default" bloom setting to "Crazy"
  
• Improved visuals of the particles of the torch you see in your hand
  
• Renamed "Medium" bloom setting to "High"
  
• Renamed "Distance Shadows" graphics setting to "Distant Tree Shadows"
  
• Optimized performance of "Distant Tree Shadows" a bit
  
• Fixed "Blocks Mined in 10 Minutes" stat not always working correctly
  
• If the view distance is set to be higher than 50, the game now automatically disables "Distant Tree Shadows"
  
• Various Optimizations
  
  

An engine update again! This is roughly half a year worth of changes from the hundreds of programmers working on UE4!

Engine updates always mean millions of lines of code changed under the hood, and hopefully lead to improved performance and better compatibility with new hardware and new features like DX12. DX12 works significantly better with cyubeVR now than before, DX11 is still the default though. If you want to run the game with DX12, simply add "-dx12" as a launch option in the properties of the game in your steam library.

This is also one step closer to raytracing support, DLSS support, Linux support, and OpenXR support!



With the last update, Update 43, a super awesome new view distance system was added to the game, making it possible to use near real-world view distances:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/619500/announcements/detail/2948135824505035085

To enable those, it was necessary to edit an INI file though. Now, there is a new "View Distance" setting in the ingame-settings of the game, allowing you to adjust the view distance directly on the fly in the game, instead of having to change values in the INI file and having to restart the game to apply them!

The new "View Distance" setting in the ingame-settings has 5 options:

20, 50, 100, 200, INI

The default value is 20. If you set it to "INI", it will use the ChunkViewDistance value from the Game.ini. Otherwise, the setting from the ingame settings will overwrite the value you set in your Game.ini.

There also is an "info" icon next to the name of this new setting, which displays a big "tooltip text" when hovered, explaining how the view distance system of the game works, and where to find the INI to enter custom values, if needed.

If you previously had a higher view distance in your INI set, you now have to make sure to set this new setting to "INI", otherwise your view distance will always just be the default of 20.



When adding a block to the inventory, while there's a fully empty block quick slot, the block is now automatically selected in that quick slot.

Also, when adding a tool to the inventory, while there's an empty tool quick slot, the tool is automatically moved to that quick slot.

These changes mean that, especially at the start of the game, you can collect blocks/tools and directly place/use them without ever having to open the briefcase.



Bloom is an interesting topic where the opinions of people hugely differ! So the only way to make everyone happy is to offer as many options as possible, so that everyone can pick the ideal option for themselves.

This update improves the names of the bloom settings, renaming "Default" to "Crazy", because "Default" has not actually been the default any more for years, so the name was just incorrect. It also renames "Medium" to "High", as "Medium" really was quite high already.

And most importantly, this update adds a new bloom option, called "Best". The existing bloom settings were all not perfect before. "High" and "Crazy" both are too strong for most people, as they made the image appear significantly less sharp, and you also noticed the low resolution they internally use for their calculation when you turned your head.
"Low" was also not perfect, as it only introduced very low-scale bloom, less than what physically accurate bloom would be, it still had too strong contrasts between dark and very-bright areas. What was missing was a very high quality, closer-to-physically-accurate bloom between "Low" and "Medium", and that is what "Best" now is!
It's the most performance intensive option out of all, as it's internally using a higher resolution to render than all the other options, but it's also, hopefully, what most people would consider "the best looking" one.



A new setting has been added for adjusting the shadow quality! You can choose between "High" and "Ultra". The default is "High".

This new setting allows you to significantly increase the shadow quality at medium distances, if you have performance to spare. This is especially useful if you use a high view distance and you want to have good looking shadows on trees at a medium distance. The "Tree Distant Shadows" become more expensive with a higher view distance, and quite slow once you try to use a view distance higher than ~50. The "Shadow Quality" at "Ultra" has the same cost no matter if you have a View Distance of 50, or 500, and additionally looks better than "Distant Tree Shadows" at a medium distance. So if you have a fast GPU, and use a high view distance, disable "Distant Tree Shadows" and put "Shadow Quality" at "Ultra" for the best experience.

Also, if the view distance is set to be higher than 50, the game now automatically disables "Distant Tree Shadows" and hides the setting for it, as it would not be worth the performance cost any more. In that case, the new "Ultra" shadow quality should be used instead.



It happened multiple times that people wondered why cyubeVR crashes after a few seconds, when the simple explanation was that there was 0 MB free space left on their C:/ drive, causing the game to crash when trying to save the world.

Now, the game automatically checks once every second how much free space you have on your C:/ drive, and displays a big red warning message if it detects there's less than 100 MB free space, as the game will likely soon crash then when trying to save the world. The game needs some free space on your C:/ drive, as your world data is stored in the AppData folder, which is on your C:/ drive.





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):


Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ChibiArcher, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, David O, texhnobees, Adrian Sawn, KroyVR, Algiz, SkgBlaze, Lucas van Leiden, Netshaman, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika,
SingingFluffyUK, Jackerino, gunair, WarChi1d


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.



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 22 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 a few words. Writing a positive 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 over 1450 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!

Hey everyone, Update 43 for cyubeVR is live!

This update introduces a complete rewrite of the internal chunk visibility system, which means the game now supports crazy high view distances! Plus the usual smaller improvements, bugfixes, and performance optimizations.

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

• New chunk visibility system, allowing for crazy high view distances (for more info, and screenshots, read below)
  
• The view distance settings in the INI file now work differently than before
  
• Adding or removing custom blocks from the workshop no longer requires the instant loading files to be reset
  
• Sand in further away LOD chunks now looks better
  
• Further improved the look of grass blocks on LOD chunks in some edge-cases
  
• Increased resolution of tree textures, and adjusted the color variation
  
• Added two new stats, one showing you the global rank of your "Blocks Mined in 10 Minutes" score, and another one displaying the name of the current world record holder
  
• Adjusted "can't modify the world here" warning message
  
• Added new "Ultra" setting for "Distance Shadows"
  
• When starting a new world, the first "block" quick slot now automatically already has "Torch" selected
  
• Updated compression library to latest version
  
• Enabled LTCG (Compiler Optimization)
  
• Fixed that you were able to put a block of any type into the crystal slot in the bucket
  
• Fixed "Local Record" for the "Blocks Mined in 10 Minutes" not always showing the correct value
  
• Fixed custom mod blocks sometimes changing their color in weird ways when far away or looking at them in a steep angle
  
• Fixed controllers of an Oculus Quest or Quest 2 being incorrectly detected as Index Controllers
  
• Fixed "reset to default" button for "Light Shaft Quality" graphics setting not working
  
• Fixed crash related to chest block items
  
• Fixed a small bug in navigation code
  
• Optimizations
  
  

TLDR: cyubeVR now supports crazy high view distances!

Here are some screenshots beta testers took with this new system:





The bridge you see in the distance here is around 2.5 km (1.6 miles) away:



cyubeVR is a voxel game with an amazing looking terrain generation, and an infinite world for you to explore and build in. People have always enjoyed playing around with high view distances in cyubeVR, as a very high view distance just makes the world feel even more immersive and real. So with this Update, there comes a big change in how the game internally manages what's visible and what isn't. The old system for that was too complex, fragile, and had some rare hard to fix bugs, and it was not designed for very high view distances.
The new system is way simpler, way easier to maintain and improve, and way more performant in what it's doing, and it allows for very high view distances with significantly less RAM usage and CPU usage.

This is basically a complete rewrite of many thousands of lines of code, but the results are really worth it :)

Same as previously, this is the file where you can adjust settings like the view distance:

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

With this new system, the settings in there now work differently than before:

Previously, there was the one setting ViewDistance=X. This setting has been removed now, and replaced with two new settings, ChunkLoadDistance=X and ChunkViewDistance=X. ChunkLoadDistance defines until how far away chunks are fully loaded (meaning, you could place a block there immediately), while ChunkViewDistance defines until how far away chunks are visible.

Having these two settings separately allows you to use a very high view distance, while keeping a moderate load distance, which will need way less RAM and improve CPU performance compared to fully loading every visible chunk. In most cases, keeping the load distance at the default (20) will be good, while increasing only the view distance to values your CPU and GPU can handle.

What's important to understand is that only a chunk that was at least once loaded (with this new Update) can ever be visible. So if you start a new world with a load distance of 20 and a view distance of 40, while not walking around at all, your view distance will still appear to just be 20, because chunks further away were never loaded yet. Only once you've walked around a bit, to load more chunks, you will benefit from a view distance higher than your load distance.

For fun, here is some interesting math I did, because I wanted to know how close to "real" the possible view distances in cyubeVR now can be, considering that real-world view distance is limited by the curvature of the earth:

On earth, for an observer at a height of 2 meters (human), the horizon is away ~5 km. In cyubeVR view distance, that would be 315. The game can definitely handle that now, 315 is totally possible while still having good CPU and GPU performance! So if you're standing at "sea level", you can have a fully real-world-like view distance in cyubeVR! Isn't that quite amazing?

For an observer at a height of 250 meters, which is roughly the max height in cyubeVR on top of a mountain, the horizon would be away ~50 km. In cyubeVR view distance, that would be 3150. I think that's not quite possible with perfectly good performance in cyubeVR (yet), but it's really getting impressively close!

If you want to see some of the great view distance "in motion", here is a stream ChibiArcher did a few days ago where he explored the world around him, and at the end you can see all the great view distance around him (timestamped link):

https://youtu.be/OWwgeLpIfME?t=12419

ChibiArcher has actually been doing a lot of cool cyubeVR videos on YouTube, here is one of the recent Let's Play episodes from him where he also showed some great view distance at the beginning:

https://youtu.be/78AZ8VTSraQ?t=153

And the end:

https://youtu.be/78AZ8VTSraQ?t=2777



cyubeVR has 4 different control schemes, and 4 different tutorials, to make sure that the game feels perfect to play on all major 4 controller designs (Vive Controller, Index Controller, Oculus Touch Controller, WMR Controller). Oculus Quest and Quest 2 controllers were previously not detected as Oculus Touch controllers though, the game thought they would be Index Controllers, and so the game also showed you the tutorial for Index Controllers, which was not ideal. This has been fixed now, and both Quest 1 and Quest 2 controllers should be correctly detected as what they are.



WIth Update 41, the "Blocks Mined in 10 Minutes" stat counter was added to cyubeVR, allowing all cyubeVR players to compete against each other regarding who can manage to mine the most blocks in 10 minutes! There have been some great and fun to watch world record attempts. Currently, the world record for that is held by Doughber, at 38766 blocks mined in 10 minutes.

Previously, you could see your own record, and the world record in the "Stats" tab of the briefcase. Now, it also displays you the name of the current world record holder, and it tells you what your global rank is:



The above is a screenshot from this recent stream from KroyVR, where he tried to beat Doughbers Record, but didn't quite manage to do it:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/865718925?t=0h4m54s





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):

Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ChibiArcher, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, ErrorNull, David O, texhnobees, Adrian Sawn, Algiz, KroyVR, Lucas van Leiden, Netshaman, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, SingingFluffyUK, SkgBlaze, gunair

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.



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 32 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 a few words. Writing a positive 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 over 1400 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!