Developer Update - 10 August 2022

[tupper]

Hello! Welcome to the latest VRChat developer update for 10 August, 2022. For context, you might want to check out yesterday’s update.

Schedule Change

As we mentioned yesterday, we’re going to change the frequency of these posts.

Starting next week we’ll be posting these twice a week (on Tuesday and Friday) versus the daily schedule we’ve had for the past two weeks.

Eventually we’ll be working our way to doing them just one per week. Once we hit that point, we’ll stay there for the foreseeable future.

Release Plan

2022.2.2p3 Release

VRChat 2022.2.2p3 (let’s just call it p3) is scheduled to move to Live soon! We’re aiming for tomorrow, August 11th. Of course, this might slip depending on many factors.

Check out the patch notes to see what’s in it.

2022.2.2p4 Live Beta

We’re aiming for another Live Beta right after p3 goes out, or perhaps on Friday just to spread the workload a bit. p4 isn’t locked yet, so we’re not sure exactly what will be in it. It will include many of the features we’ve been talking about in these updates, but haven’t released yet.

Feature Work

Desktop Camera… or wait, is it?

Lots of people have been asking for this! We looked into it and built a prototype:

This still has some way to go and we’ve got some controls to work out, but we thought you’d like to see the prototype!

… Now, the more astute among you are probably saying “Hey, wait a minute. That’s basically drone mode! Does it work in VR?!”

It doesn’t work in VR yet, but it should. So, we’re moving onto that next. There might be a version or two where this is a desktop-only feature, but we want to work on a VR-controllable drone mode so you can move your camera lens around without having to physically place it.

Since users can do a lot with a drone mode, we’ve got to make sure there’s things like reset buttons, control guides, and more. This mode could also tie into other features people are requesting, such as a camera animation system. (That one isn’t in design or engineering yet but we like the idea a lot.)

This task is undergoing further iteration and design.

Earmuffs

We’re trying out adding an option that also affects avatar audio. In public instances it works REALLY well!

We thought about maybe having it interact with world audio sources too, but this has some serious knockons that will almost certainly break a bunch of worlds – so we’re avoiding it.

This is currently in iteration and has a prototype!

CPU Affinity

We’ve added in the ability to tweak logical processor affinity for advanced users.

You can set which logical processors VRChat is locked to by using the --affinity=BITMASK launch option. For example, to lock VRChat into using only the first 16 logical processors, you’d add --affinity=0xFFFF to your Steam launch options.

Most users won’t need to use this option, and it is mostly useful for high-end AMD CPUs to deal with CCX latency issues. Please look up your individual CPU to find out the best configuration.

Next up is looking into defining process priority as a launch option.

Hide Avatar Globally

This feature lets you hide an avatar globally, which means you won’t ever see that avatar, no matter who is wearing it! The only exception will be if you explicitly have “show avatar” turned on for a specific user.

This task got moved into QA, but got passed back into development due to some edge-case failures.

TTT Chatbox

We’re getting a new internal build of the TTT chatbox ready that has a bunch of fixes and tweaks.

Some of these include networking improvements, a visual indicator of when a message you’re typing won’t be able to be displayed due to settings, shifting the chatbox settings from the Action Menu to the Quick Menu, and adding a new option to change the transparency of the chatbox.

Additionally, we’ve added some OSC endpoints for folks to play around with:

/chatbox/input s b – Input text into the chatbox and either show it immediately (bypassing the keyboard), or open the keyboard and populate it with the provided text (but don’t send it).
/chatbox/typing b – Toggle the typing indicator on or off.

Here’s a quick video:

We’re also looking into ways to adjust the position of the chatbox, since looking over someone’s head all the time might get tiring.

This feature is currently in QA. It might make it into an upcoming build.

Text to Speech (TTS) and Speech to Text to Speech (STTS) are also in this particular team’s task list, but they’re focusing on one item at a time. Thankfully, community-created applications (such as RabidCrab’s STT or Wizard’s TTS-Voice-Wizard) paired with the OSC inputs into VRChat’s textbox system should cover a lot of bases until we get to native implementations.

Other Stuff

Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Updates

Sorry if this bit sounds a little stiff – it’s legal stuff.

We have updated our Terms of Service (or “TOS”) and our Privacy Policy, both of which are effective as of today (August 10, 2022). You will be prompted on your next log-in to VRChat to accept the TOS changes.

These changes mostly consist of general course updates to ensure our documentation aligns with our operations, and to ensure these documents make sense with ongoing changes to regulation around the world. The changes also include specific updates relating to the integration of EAC into VRChat.

Feedback

There’s been a lot of chatter in these threads about a lot of feature requests – shoutout to Avatar Scaling and Avatar Search. Consider those two requests heard, loud and clear. That being said…

It is important to note that just because we aren’t actively working on a feature suggestion you’ve made (or that a lot of you are making), that doesn’t mean we aren’t taking your feedback into the development process, or that we’re ignoring you!

It just means that we don’t have anything to say about that item just yet. Give us time! We’re working on a lot of stuff.

Please keep giving us feedback! The info we get from these threads is exceptionally useful and has already made changes to features that are available right now.

Conclusion

That’s it for today! As mentioned above, we’ll be trying to release 2022.2.2p3 tomorrow. We’ll also be trying to get another Live Beta out sometime this week – maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday. We’ll keep you posted!

[ThatGuy]

Thank you for the hard work on these updates!! The rate of progress has been great, but please make sure you don’t experience burn out!

It’s kindly like to re-suggest a VRC+ feature for the future; “world instance history”. It would be great to be able to world hop and easily return to an instance that you really enjoyed. I’ve commented in detail to a Canny post of the same title:

Canny

Thank you!!!

[codel1417]

@tupper

It is important to note that just because we aren’t actively working on a feature suggestion you’ve made (or that a lot of you are making), that doesn’t mean we aren’t taking your feedback into the development process, or that we’re ignoring you!

It just means that we don’t have anything to say about that item just yet. Give us time! We’re working on a lot of stuff.

I think people just want to know their feedback was heard, Setting canny status, responding if its something that might be added to the roadmap. Like me pushing for a total post processing toggle (including tonemapping/grading), which I will continue to do until I have a newer response to it.

[kousakayou]

User count used to be shown on home page. Now only the number of friends in a specific instance is shown. It provides almost no information: most of the instance show a friend count of one, they all look the same.

[WeeWDiedrich]

i’m loving the look of the new chat box stuff! i wonder if there will be improvements to the keyboard, as typing with the current main menu keyboard can feel somewhat clunky at times, especially with the fact it has no haptic feedback.

[greybell]

@tupper

Give us time! We’re working on a lot of stuff.

Appreciate the hardwork but you know, VRC could’ve postponed the Security Update in the first place so we could give you time to implement these.

And yes, people are impatient and VRC should’ve seen that coming. Anyway, I still hope all these updates will come very very soon

[ItsKindaTitoish]

Absolute massive win for desktop players! The funny thing is I was mentioning a Desktop camera in the last two update posts, AND I AM HYPED to have it added! so excited

[Salbug]

@tupper

Hide Avatar Globally

This feature lets you hide an avatar globally, which means you won’t ever see that avatar, no matter who is wearing it! The only exception will be if you explicitly have “show avatar” turned on for a specific user.

This task got moved into QA, but got passed back into development due to some edge-case failures.

I offered some feedback for this in a forum post back when it was simply “Hide Avatar by ID” regarding being overridden by “Show Avatar”. Please consider giving it a look over!

Feedback regarding 'Hide Avatar by ID' and being overridden by 'showAvatar'

Originally was going to provide some feedback in the Discord server but didn’t want it lost in the void of users and since it’s not out yet in a Live Beta build so opted for the forums instead. Will repost to the canny once that’s out in the live beta if that’s fine. Okay onto the topic on question regarding ‘Hide Avatar by ID’ being overridden by showAvatar (Choosing to refer to it by it’s internal name). [5PAxa6yKK0] So I’m actually rather mixed about it being able to be overridden by anyt…

[tupper]

@codel1417

I think people just want to know their feedback was heard, Setting canny status, responding if its something that might be added to the roadmap.

Yes, that’s true. It’s just… a lot of feedback, and a lot of it gets repeated even though we make a statement somewhere. Part of the issue is that we allow people to submit feedback in a lot of ways, so there’s no central location to look and see if your suggestion has already been made and noted as “yep, we saw this, interesting idea”.

@codel1417

Like me pushing for a total post processing toggle (including tonemapping/grading), which I will continue to do until I have a newer response to it.

We talked about a version of this a few updates ago, it’s still in dev.

[tupper]

@WeeWDiedrich

i wonder if there will be improvements to the keyboard, as typing with the current main menu keyboard can feel somewhat clunky at times, especially with the fact it has no haptic feedback.

Yep, we wanna redo the keyboard eventually.

[codel1417]

I thought that was just bloom and other sliders? I’m talking about a blanket toggle for the entire Post processing stack

[myrkur]

still would be nice if scalable avatars would be added back now that its no longer possible thanks to EAC, already was a feature in the AV3 beta builds but was chopped from the Release candidate.

[tupper]

@Salbug

I offered some feedback for this in a forum back when it was simply “Show Avatar by ID” regarding being overridden by “Show Avatar”. Please consider giving it a look over!

I saw your post and we got your feedback! It was considered, but there’s a lot of hang-ups-- mainly that we don’t expect the majority of users to have so many showAvatar moderations. (Data supports this, for what its worth)

Show Avatar is meant to be a “screw it, show this avatar no matter what” button. Making any particular feature override Show Avatar gets confusing, because now you start getting into cyclical checks of “where did I hide this avatar? Why isn’t this showing?” that most users wouldn’t be able to detangle.

@codel1417

I thought that was just bloom and other sliders? I’m talking about a blanket toggle for the entire Post processing stack

I think I know the answer to if it has a full post-processing stack disable option but I need to confirm it before saying it does or does not.

@myrkur

still would be nice if scalable avatars would be added back now that its no longer possible thanks to EAC, already was a feature in the AV3 beta builds but was chopped from the Release candidate.

Definitely heard you and the many others stating that you’d like avatar scaling! As we noted in this Dev Update, we don’t have any info on what we’ll do with that feature request just yet.

[wolfy_527]

Thank y’all for acknowledging the suggestions people have been making. Even if you aren’t currently working on it, people like to know they’re heard. It can be hard to centralize communication with your community when information is posted in various locations. Maybe you guys could look at starting up some PR streams or weekly videos that talk about what’s going on, the concerns and suggestions y’all have seen from the community, and just address that they have been seen and are planned at the very least!

Nonetheless, thanks for the update and I’m looking forward to future updates!

[TheVdo]

Avatar viewpoint tweaker?

[shizuku_kira]

Neat, Desktop camera! If only you can tilt it or some sort, or has another mode where you can grab it as an item in desktop…

Overall, can’t WAIT for the update!

[myrkur]

nice to see that the feature is being consider again then unsure why it was chopped from the Release Candidate, it was a very nice feature to have and im sure its saved a lot of space in terms of data without people having to upload multiple avatar versions of different sizes when that can be accomplished by one avatar, a float and an animation. though I don’t understand what you mean by “we don’t have any info on what we’ll do with that feature request just yet”

[Salbug]

@tupper

I saw your post and we got your feedback! It was considered, but there’s a lot of hang-ups-- mainly that we don’t expect the majority of users to have so many showAvatar moderations. (Data supports this, for what its worth)

Show Avatar is meant to be a “screw it, show this avatar no matter what” button. Making any particular feature override Show Avatar gets confusing, because now you start getting into cyclical checks of “where did I hide this avatar? Why isn’t this showing?” that most users wouldn’t be able to detangle.

Understandable…

[tupper]

@TheVdo

Avatar viewpoint tweaker?

We’ve heard this one too a lot. Our idealistic point of view is “wouldn’t it be nice if avatar authors set their viewpoints properly?” Of course, this doesn’t seem to be realistic ().

Not working on addressing the problem this request points out, but definitely heard.

@myrkur

I don’t understand what you mean by “we don’t have any info on what we’ll do with that feature request just yet”

That means that “We see you asking for this, and we know you’re asking for it, but we aren’t quite sure when, how, or if we’ll implement the feature yet.”

[Salbug]

A good point was brought up to me though, why can’t ‘Hide Avatar Globally’ work similar to ‘Avatar Distance Hiding’ in that there’s a checkbox for "allow override with ‘showAvatar’?