Developer Update - 1 December 2022

Official Dev Updates
1

Welcome to the Developer Update for December 1st, 2022!

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If you’d like to catch up, you can read our previous Developer Update from November 17th.

We skipped a week because last week was a holiday! But we’re back in it today. This month, we’ll have Dev Updates on December 8th and 15th.

Groups is FINALLY in Live Beta!

Yesterday, we released the long-awaited Groups update to the Live Beta!

If you don’t know what Groups are, check out our latest blog post, or watch this video Dev Update:

So far, we’ve seen people making thousands upon thousands of groups, joining groups, trying out the features, breaking stuff and just generally putting the system through its paces.

As Strasz points out in the Dev Update video, this is a “preview” release of Groups. We have a LOT of plans for more features, add-ons, additions, and polish for Groups. We’re far from done.

We believe Groups is a core feature of VRChat. We think it will change how people use the platform from now on, and our hope is that it will help our experienced community gather and organize while also allowing newcomers to the VRChat universe to find their people in VRChat, just like all of us did too.

If you want to try out the Live Beta, hop into our Discord and scroll down to #open-beta-info to learn how our Betas work.

If you have feedback for Groups, check out our Groups feedback boards. Make sure you search to see if your idea, feedback, or bug report has already been posted!

Finally, if you still have a question about Groups after the blog and video, you can check out the VRChat Help Desk’s section on Groups!

OSC Trackers

Last week we released OSC Trackers into Live Beta! In case you missed our previous Dev Update, up until now, VRChat only spoke the “SteamVR tracker” language for full body. This has been great, but limited use of trackers to PCVR. It also limited DIY setups to those who knew the dark mysticism of writing custom SteamVR drivers.

Our solution has been to invent an entirely new type of “tracker language”! We call it “OSC Trackers.” This system has two main goals: to allow trackers to work on any platform (so, Quest FBT!) and to make it simpler for anyone to write an app that can control trackers.

Starting with VRChat 2022.4.1p3, VRChat speaks both “SteamVR tracker” and “OSC Tracker.” Once recognized in-app, these trackers function identically, allowing you to calibrate into full body tracking while in VR.

We’ve been excited to see how quickly people have been working towards adding support for OSC Trackers into their apps. Massive appreciation for anyone putting in their time to work on this!

Here are some examples that we’ve seen of OSC Trackers functioning:

SlimeVR (on Quest!):
ZRock35 on YouTube

Dqmageduwu on YouTube

Kinect (on Quest!)
K2VR’s Amethyst

Kinect (on Quest!)
Driver4VR on YouTube

HaritoraX (on Quest!) via shiftall_jp on Twitter

Xsens:

Sony mocopi

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Finally, some big news: Sony has recently announced their “mocopi” mobile motion capture system!

We worked with them to ensure that mocopi’s companion smartphone app can send tracking data directly into VRChat via OSC Trackers. That means totally mobile and wireless FBT on Quest!

You can learn more about it here: https://twitter.com/VRChat/status/1597428720687779840

Hey, what happened to 2022.4.1p3?

So, we had a beta with a bunch of cool stuff included with it, like OSC Trackers. That beta got merged with the Groups update.

Right now, p3 has a bug in it that’s fixed in Groups. We’ve been trying to fix the bug, but it’s been just out of reach.

So, we’re playing it by ear. We’ll try to get p3 out when we can! Thankfully, all of its features are folded into the current Live Beta, so you can just use that for now.

Unity Upgrade to 2019.4.40f1

Our Live Beta has an update to Unity 2019.4.40f1! This is a minor upgrade to the final version of the Unity 2019 LTS.

For your own projects, the upgrade is simple. You don’t need to worry about it right away, though. Wait until the relevant update goes live, and then migrate over.

Creator Companion Reminder

We’ve released an in-app banner for the VRChat Creator Companion Getting Started guide! We’re doing this to get people more aware of the impending migration in January 2023.

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SDK2 Deprecation Reminder

In addition to moving our SDK management to the VCC in January 2023, SDK2 will be deprecated simultaneously. SDK2 will no longer be available for download.

At a future date, SDK2 worlds and avatars will no longer be permitted for uploads. We will support existing SDK2 content within VRChat for as long as possible.

VRChat New Years 2023

The VRChat New Years world is looking good! … but I don’t have any previews yet. :smiley: We’re still polishing it up!

I’ll see if I can sneak you some previews in one of the other Dev Updates this month.

Don’t forget about the VRChat Entertainment Network! If you don’t know, the Entertainment Network is a 26-hour-long video stream we’ll be running! You can contribute a video for us to play during the stream!

Check out this post to learn more. You can make a video and submit it right now! The deadline is listed on that page.

Ongoing Development

Curated Community Packages

Last week we announced that the VRChat Creator Companion now includes some of the community’s best custom packages! They’re available right now, and adding them to your VRChat projects has never been easier.

  • AudioLink
  • VRWorld Toolkit
  • EasyQuestSwitch
  • Avatars 3.0 Manager

Adding these packages only takes a few clicks. And they’re easy to update, too - Instead of searching the internet, updates show up directly inside the Creator Companion.

Creator Companion UI / UX Rework

Here’s the most up-to-date view of our current WIP for the VRChat Creator Companion’s new UI!

  • New List view in addition to Grid View for your projects
  • Better organized settings
  • All in-progress (creation/backup/migration) screens are in
  • Adding existing projects, making backups - all implemented!

And a new, much more graceful view when you don’t have a Unity Editor selected in settings!

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VCC Community Package Listings

We’ve also done a bunch of work on the VCC Community Package listings auto-generated website, which anyone will be able to take advantage of when making their own VCC-compatible listings.

Improved VRChat Search UI Flow

We’re updating a few Main Menu Search flows to make them feel a lot better.

It’s challenging to demonstrate this with just a video, but if you play around with the Search in-app right now, you’ll agree that it feels just a bit… off.

Hopefully, this video demonstrates the issues we’re addressing with these changes!

Improved Settings Page

The Settings Menu headers have also been updated to be more consistent with the styling of the rest of the Main Menu.

Before:

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After:

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We’ve also fixed up the Controls page a bit, which happened to be totally broken in Live.

Before:

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After:

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The controls menu also failed to detect other control schemes, so functionality has also been restored. VR/Controller players will no longer be stuck on the Mouse & Keyboard Controls page.

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Toxicity in VRChat

In previous updates, we talked about our observations and thoughts about toxicity in VRChat. During these threads, a few people brought up ToxMod.

If you’re unaware, ToxMod is a voice chat moderation system built by Modulate. It uses AI and machine learning technology to flag bad behavior in voice chat and lets moderators respond to that behavior appropriately. It can also optionally take action against especially egregious behavior automatically.

We had previously been in talks with Modulate about integrating ToxMod into VRChat. We have no current or future plans to implement ToxMod into VRChat. If our plans change to include ToxMod, we will let you know and communicate these plans to the VRChat community.

Notably, VRChat was inadvertently listed as a ToxMod customer on the Modulate site for a short period earlier this year before we gave approval. This appeared in Archive.org listings, and some posters in previous threads pointed it out. This caused a bit of alarm and rumors started flying, so we wanted to clarify.

We hope this addresses these concerns.

Improving Safety in VRChat

Part of the reason we’ve been bringing the toxicity discussion up in these threads is to see your viewpoint on both the problem and the solution and to watch discussions as they evolve.

We believe that the solution lies in a combination of Groups, better self-moderation tools, better teaching of self-moderation tools, continued improvement on VRChat’s moderation policies and processes, and most important of all: better onboarding.

VRChat’s been around for quite a while, and we’ve been burning at 110% speed for a long time. A lot of these systems haven’t had the attention they deserve. So, in 2023, one of our focuses will be on improving safety for all users in VRChat in mindful, constructive ways that will help everyone enjoy VRChat more instead of letting some jerk ruin their night.

We’ll continue our conversation in further posts!

Conclusion

That’s it for this week! We’re still working on Groups updates and fixes, and we’re also trying to get p3 out to Live when we can.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time!

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There has been discussion that group creation is limited to vrc+ only for now to avoid botting and to not stress the system too heavily. Will this restriction be lifted down the line?

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I don’t want to guarantee that it’ll be lifted, but that’s the idea. We wanted to slow things down for the first release.

Later on, we very much want to consider changing/lifting group creation restrictions.

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pretty awesome Quest full body that’s a good idea. :+1:

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There’s been a lot of proof that this is limited to VRC+ and that’s not good for those of us who either cannot afford it, or choose not to get it.
We have a lot of other glaring issues that GROUPS will not fix, so I find it very difficult to believe that avatar and world rippers will cease their productivity on VRChat when your focus is on something that the social / friends menu already does on its own much better than what I’m seeing through multiple viewpoints.

I would much rather you have focused more on world / avatar security, than things like this. It’s not something that is needed or necessary, and the fact that you’re calling it “one of the most requested items” when this is the first I’ve even HEARD of this thing, is at best asinine.

It seems that you have no ability to speak to your non-beta userbase, so allow me to be one of the voices that contact you from those who aren’t paying you money:
“BETTER SECURITY OVER ANY NEW FEATURES!”

Thank you.

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Re: some Groups being locked behind VRC+

I think that’s a wonderful way to drive VRC+ adoption and pay for the extra costs of supporting a new ingame feature set. Has the team thrown around the idea of releasing features into the free tier of the platform as new ones come out?

I.e. when the next feature that makes sense to put behind VRC+ comes out, Groups is unlocked.

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I’m very happy about the fact that Toxmod was dropped, I knew VRC didn’t wanna be NSA 2.0, Thanks guys <3 Very well appreciated

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I am really excited for Groups! When it comes to their moderation, it would be nice if there would be a way to message an offline moderator. I worry about trolls joining public groups to harm a targeted community. This is already an issue in worlds tagged with “furry” or any other fandom tag.

(Since this will probably be the last patch of the year, I hope everyone at VRChat has a wonderful holiday season!)

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Echoing moon here as well, very good to see ToxMod dropped. Even if it did achieve real change in user behavior, the community response would probably have not been worth it.

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We have been doing a lot of things to reduce ripping. We can’t tell you about almost any of them. :sweat_smile:

Ripping will never fully go away, but we’ve taken many measures to reduce it significantly. Since late July, we’ve seen a MASSIVE reduction in asset ripping.

I must reiterate that it is still possible (it always will be), but the incidence rate is way, way lower.

Although VRChat has grown, we’re certainly not AAA-sized. Massive global companies have tried to stop asset ripping, but nobody has succeeded. Pragmatically: we’re probably not going to make a breakthrough here!

We can continue to make it a pain in the ass, though.

Importantly: it can be hard to talk about what we do to stop ripping. Showing our hand can make it easier for bad actors to work around our mitigations.

Unfortunately, I have to say things like “dude, trust me” when I say we’re working to improve it.

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That list view is beautiful :pleading_face:

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I assume you use user reports to determine ripping activity since there’s no simple way to have the client detect it (for the current GPU side ripping tools)?

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Please post any Groups-related feedback to the Groups feedback board! Trying to keep it centralized. :smiley:

:melting_face:

To reiterate what the blog, video, and several of our posts have said, putting it behind VRC+ was almost entirely a “let’s slow the flood” measure.

We have lots of metrics, including user reports.

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Yeah I caught that, I just also think it’s pretty reasonable for features like Group creation to be behind VRC+ long term.

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We don’t need Toxmod. It isn’t the answer to solve the toxicity problem in VRChat. VRChat can be self moderated by the use of the block button and mute button. Better self moderation tools would be nice and “better teaching of self-moderation tools” because I guess people don’t know how to use it. Self moderation is one the great things about VRChat imo.

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just a Queston are you guys ever going to update the report system. i feel it have been left untouched for quite some time now. i think this will help out with the toxic behaver if we had the right report user also how do we report users if they are using clints and there no report button to report them under the right problem at hand?

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is there a fingerguns unicode emoji? no? huh

anyways yeah that’s one of the systems in desperate need of work.

Ahh I misunderstood. Sorry emma

We’ve thought about it, but don’t have any plans. We’ve updated favorite limits for free users though

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ok cool becure i have run into people useing clints but unsure how to report them. it would be amazing if this can be updated soon.

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Reports do work, but there are a lot of them and they lack a lot of context.

You can always submit a ticket at https://vrch.at/moderation

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About Unity Upgrade to 2019.4.40f1

This doc page already guides to use 2019.4.40f1. so…?