Update 49 for cyubeVR is live! Adding a great new control scheme, and much more!

Hey everyone, Update 49 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds an awesome completely new control scheme using a "Half-Life: Alyx"-inspired Radial Menu with fully ambidextrous tool/block selection and additional Shoulder Slots! It also adds DLSS Support, improved bow controls and mechanics, a significant upgrade to "Astronaut Deer", some funny commands for streamers, and many other significant improvements, bugfixes, and optimizations!

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

The game now has a great new control scheme using a Radial Menu on both hands and Shoulder Slots! (Much more info below)
New bow controls, and various improvements to the bow mechanics
Added DLSS support
Big upgrade to "Astronaut Deer"! Launching deer now have flames coming out of their rear end, and they explode!
Added a "hover to pause" button to rotating crafting recipes
Added a visual indicator for where to attach a tool to a wall mount, visible when holding a tool near a wall mount
Added two new options to the "Night Darkness" setting: There's now the options "Dark", "Realistic", "Brighter", "Brightest"
Added some funny commands for streamers
Updated all the controller button mapping overviews for the new control scheme
Updated all the tutorial pages for the new control scheme
Added a message showing up explaining that SteamVR needs to run to play cyubeVR if you attempt to play cyubeVR without SteamVR installed
Significantly improved the visuals of hint texts
Updated all the torch icons to look better
Improved how custom block icons are displayed in the briefcase UI
Adjusted the wallstone recipe, it now gives 24 wallstone instead of 16
Adjusted the glass block recipe, it now gives 32 glass blocks instead of 50
Improved loading screen: The loading screen % now has one decimal digit and there is less of a freeze at 20%
Improved where the wood block items spawn when hitting a tree with the stick, it is now much more predictable, and they won't sometimes fly away
Added a hint text explaining how to use the bow
Added a hint text explaining how to make processed wood
Added a hint text explaining that you can put a crystal into the bucket
Improved the regular stone block texture
Improved the dark processed wood texture
To move the block placement distance slider on a hand, the finger now needs to hover for a minimum of 0.2 seconds over it before it moves in any direction
Made the overlap area between the index fingertip and the block placement distance slider smaller
Unprocessed wood blocks placed with crystal assisted block placement now always drop blocks when destroyed
Sledgehammers on crystal blocks now never drop any crystals
Added two new screenshots to the community screenshot showcase in the main menu
Improved behavior of preview block, when finishing placing a lot of blocks the preview block now immediately is at the new location
Adjusted the "less than 100 MB free space" warning text to make it clear that there is a difference between actual free space and free space that is usable for the game
Added "Chunk you're currently standing on" stat to the "Stats" tab of the settings
Moved the coordinates to the top of the "Stats" tab
Made gravity glove aim more forgiving for items up close
Made aiming at the crafted structure of multiple items easier with gravity glove, and improved the grab position when grabbing them that way
Moved the "drop behind shoulder" area forward a bit, to make it easier to hit even if someone drops it "on" the shoulder instead of "behind" the shoulder
Made it so that successfully crafted structures lose their physics when adding them to the bucket, to not make the physics make them fly away sometimes
Scrolling in the briefcase UI is now also possible with the right thumbstick on Index controllers, and not just with the right touchpad
Cleaned up all old SteamVR input actions
Made sure that the UI in the main menu is fully rendered in front of the white lines, not behind, on the desktop mirror too
Reduced brightness difference in torchlight between damaged and undamaged blocks
Made the "Brighter" Night Darkness setting a bit darker than before ("Brightest" is now identical to what "Brighter" was before)
Leaning over an elevated chest will no longer "move you up"
It's now no longer possible to use gravity gloves on wall-mounted tools (to prevent accidentally removing tools from a wall mount)
Improved smoothing of briefcase (anti-shaky-hands)
When having the Astronaut Deer setting at "Off (Boring)", the physics of the deer are now even more boring than before
Arrows shot from the bow now have a certain minimum speed, so even when not drawing the bow much they won't just "shoot at your feet"
Updated compiler to the latest version
Enabled more aggressive compiler optimizations
Added a sanity-check that makes the game crash when it detects a chunk would incorrectly get regenerated
Fixed game music sometimes restarting for some people before the track was done playing
Fixed a duplication issue with chests and item quick drop feature
Fixed flickering when damaged blocks finished healing
Fixed a possible issue with the bindings setup
Fixed there being a blue glowing dot in the left hand in the main menu
Fixed ground mesh objects staying placable at last valid location while placing when first pointing at the ground and then pointing into the air
Fixed the first block preview visually moving a bit when placing blocks with crystal assisted block placement while walking at the same time
Fixed it being possible to move the block distance slider while it's invisible
Fixed the shot arrow projectile looking smaller than the arrow in your hand
Fixed stick sometimes being greyed out after dying
Fixed the iron sledgehammer being set to drop more items from blocks than the copper sledgehammer
Fixed inbuilt thumbstick deadzone not being applied everywhere where thumbstick values are read
Fixed the "can't mine this" hint text sometimes incorrectly coming up when hitting stone with the stick
Fixed the hand not always visually keeping its grip closed when holding a tool
Fixed the item quick drop hint text incorrectly mentioning "touchpad" on Oculus controllers
Fixed swapping a tool with a tool in the stick slot incorrectly deleting the tool
Fixed the sliders on the hands being visible in the main menu
Fixed opposite hand staying in placing mode when placing the last one of a mesh object type
Fixed there sometimes being a few floating pieces of melting iron/sand in the furnace
Fixed wall mounted colored torches having incorrect color on their wall holder mesh
Fixed there being a black "Death Star" above the player when using a very high view distance
Fixed spawning of Christmas presents, it now works again the way it was intended to work
Fixed Christmas presents sometimes containing "Buggy Stone"
Fixed one very rare, long-existing rare crash
Fixed crash when successfully gravity-glove grabbing an item while it's getting sucked into the bucket
Fixed crash when holding a burning block item in the hand until it's fully burned out
Fixed that deer were still sometimes headbanging
Fixed the game sometimes not playing audio when it's not in focus
Various small optimizations

This update adds a completely new control scheme to cyubeVR, using a "Half-Life: Alyx"-inspired Radial Menu as the main way of selecting tools and blocks, with two additional "Shoulder Slots" for even more convenience!

This new control scheme makes the controls way easier to learn for new players, and it also just feels better.

All the tool and block selection controls are now fully ambidextrous and symmetric, meaning you are no longer limited to only being able to select tools or blocks on the right hand quickly - it's now all available on both the left and right hand, making the game way more convenient to play especially for left-handed people, but also for everyone else due to way quicker tool selection on the left hand, and the additional benefit of now being able to place blocks with the left and right hand simultaneously! Dual-wielded block placement! It means twice the possible building speed if you can coordinate your two hands well enough! Placing blocks, placing torches, placing decorative items, using crystal assisted block placement, it all works the same with the left and right hand now.

A lot of effort was put into making the radial menu feel super polished regarding its visuals, animations, sound effects, and haptics. Every beta tester so far loved it, so most likely, you will too!

An important change accompanying the move to a Radial Menu is that instead of previously having separate 4 "Tool Slots" and 4 "Block Slots" to use, there are now simply a total of 8 "Radial Menu Slots" which you can freely use for both blocks and tools, plus additionally 2 "Shoulder Slots" which can also freely be used for anything.

The Shoulder Slots allow you to equip tools or blocks by simply grabbing behind your shoulder with either hand. So you can put your most-used tools/blocks there for super quick and convenient access.

IMPORTANT: If you did any manual changes to the SteamVR Input Bindings of cyubeVR in the SteamVR Bindings UI, you will have to reset your bindings back to the default. The new control scheme uses many completely new input actions.

Improved bow controls and mechanics

For the new ambidextrous tool/block selection using the radial menu, one more button was needed on the left controller - so this was a great opportunity to much improve the handling of the bow in cyubeVR. Instead of being bound to a special button that was doing nothing else than enabling/disabling the bow, the bow is now a tool like any other in cyubeVR. So the bow is now getting selected through the Radial Menu, the same as any other tool.

The second radial menu slot is now the "Bow Slot", just like the first radial menu slot is the "Stick Slot". You can override the bow with another tool if you want to, and you can always get it back if you remove the other tool/block from that slot again, same as the stick. So you can never lose the bow. But you can loose the bow! ;)

Another big improvement of this is, the bow can now be selected on both hands, using the radial menu. So the bow is no longer only available on the left hand, it's fully ambidextrous now! Having left-handed bow controls has been a request for a long time from left-handed players, as especially with a bow, it's hard not to use it with your correct hand. So now, everyone should be fully happy in this regard!

The way how you draw another arrow and shoot was also adjusted to be easier and more convenient: When you hold a bow in either hand, moving your other hand behind your head and then pressing and holding trigger now grabs a new arrow. Releasing the trigger at any point drops the arrow. Moving the hand to the bow while keeping the trigger pressed, nocking the arrow, drawing back the bow, and then releasing the trigger is how to shoot the bow now.

A lot of small details of the bow mechanics have also been adjusted: The hand now grips the bow at a more realistic position (higher up), the arrow now rests on a more realistic position (higher up) and the arrow now more realistically points "a bit towards the inside".

It's also now possible to have the bow active in one hand, and a tool or block placement active in the other hand. Only once you draw an arrow, your arrow hand drops what it was holding before and grabs the arrow.

DLSS Support

Not much needs to be said about this - you probably all know what DLSS is by now, and cyubeVR now supports it! So if you use an Nvidia RTX GPU, you can now enable DLSS in the options for either better visuals or improved GPU performance. Depending on your VR Headset, SteamVR render resolution, and your GPU, the exact impact it has will vary.

Astronaut Deer Upgrade

Astronaut Deer got a big upgrade! Launching deer now have flames coming out of their rear end, and there's an explosion when they are at their apogee. Hopefully, this will now make it 100% clear to everyone that cyubeVR's "Astronaut Deer" are an intended feature, and not a bug, and will even further increase the laughter people experience when first shooting a deer in cyubeVR ;)

And of course, you can still disable this with the "Astronaut Deer Off" option in the game if you prefer realistic deer over astronaut deer.

Funny commands for streamers

There was an interesting suggestion from streamers a while ago, what if viewers of a cyubeVR stream could trigger some fun events to happen for the streamer in the game? It was easy to implement some commands as an experiment, so these commands now exist:

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q now teleports a deer to the current player location
Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W now makes all chests within 10 meters around the player open and close their lids
Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E now makes a (placed) dirt block appear randomly in an area in front of the player
Pressing Ctrl+Alt-Shift-T now randomly knocks one wall-mounted torch close to the player off the wall

They have been in the beta build for a while now and tested by various streamers, and yes, indeed, it's very funny to make blocks or deer appear in front of streamers while they play cyubeVR ;) If you want to make use of these commands for your stream, you will have to set up some software that converts chat commands to local key presses, there are various free tools available to do that which you probably know if you're a streamer, this one, for example, seems to work well with cyubeVR for this purpose: https://streamer.bot/.

Additional Hint Texts

As part of every update, I try also to do something that makes "learning" the game easier - it's easy to just focus on 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 ensure that new players have a good time when they play the game for the first time! For that, the game now has some additional "hint texts" that appear if the game thinks the player might not know something and would benefit from some hint.

Added screenshots to community screenshot showcase

In the main menu of the game, cool screenshots of builds from the cyubeVR community get showcased. This update adds two new screenshots:

A Winter Scene | Built by: Sceptrex

Mountain Home | Built by: Talsma

If you also have also built something cool that's worthy to be showcased there, simply post it in the #screenshots channel in the cyubeVR Discord, and it will be considered for the showcase in the main menu.

Thanks very much to all the Patreon supporters!

A big thanks to everyone for supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working full-time on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation, highest first):

**ChibiArcher, Al Raw, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, Shanya / Sabrina, SkgBlaze, WillyVR, KroyVR, David O, Tiddlez, Austin Flores, WarChi1d, Jackerino, Sceptrex, David R., Lucanes, mazzawoollza, Tom Hörberg, Arados, Dark Slaughter, Netshaman, Lucas van Leiden, DiamondHunter, HeyMika, Lordoldmanrets, gunair, texhnobees, MightyDuck, Adrian Sawn, Daniel Crawford, Algiz, Lynx, Bucket Codes, joerkig, Connor A, TinyMrMan (MB), Curzek, Saltshine, Yasha, SingingFluffyUK, MurphChops, Dave Pearson, Talsma, VenturePopTV**_

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.

More awesome new custom blocks

Recently, more new custom blocks were added to the workshop! Let's mention some of them here:

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/

You can find Christmas presents in the game!

Until December 31st, you can find Christmas presents in the game! Santa flew over your world and lost some presents on the way, containing various useful items, including gold and rainbow dye! You can also find Christmas presents in some of your chests.

As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 46 separate beta builds! That's a lot of 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 you just write "good game". Writing a positive review is the easiest way you can support the game because indie devs like me are very dependent on the Steam Algorithm recommending the game to new people to be able to afford to keep working on it!

Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) We're over 3000 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, please tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also 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](www.roadmap.cyubevr.com).

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

Cheers!

cyubeVR update for 19 December 2021

New control scheme with Radial Menu and Shoulder Slots!