Developer Update - 10 August 2022

Loving these updates, the transparency from the Dev team is remarkable, night and day difference from how it has been previously before the EAC event. I have one thing I feel needs added in, and it’s a big one that will protect users. True shader anticrash. Particle limiter is already great, but the majority of VRchat crasher avatars are utilizing shaders that cause your game to crash when rendering. TSAC would correct this and give users more security. Make it default on, non toggleable as there is no drawback to it being implemented and on.

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If you can’t wait for avatar scaling.

GoGo Loco version 1.6 introduced IPD ajustement with the GoLocoScale variant.

Set the size wanted then reload the avatar by:

Changing avatar and go back, toggling measurement, ik, locomotion, calibrate are all valide way to do it.

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It could be cool to implement friend notes into the game’s nameplates instead of on just the website since not a lot of people check that when they’re in game. I’ve also been thinking about a way for people to nickname their friends locally (the same way some twitch extensions allow you to nickname chatters from your perspective). Just a little UI quirk in later installations possibly, maybe? Keep at it though, can’t wait for the open beta.

I don’t know about friend notes, they’re clearly meant as a personal reminder of who someone is, if you forget about them after not seeing them for a while. You can open their profile and get a quick reminder to jostle your memory and not look dumb in front of them. The nameplate is already crowded, especially when you have status on, and even more with the quick menu info shown.

Nicknames are interesting in their own right, but I don’t think allowing you to set a nickname to other people is a great idea, it gets into a gray area about one’s identity. Though I can understand wanting it especially when some of your friends set their name to 〘🅶🅰🅼🅴🆁Ⓢⓝⓐⓒⓚⓢ〙 or something. But that could be fixed a different way, mostly by disallowing non-ASCII latin characters (diacritics still allowed) in display names.

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Would an icon indicating “Avatar hidden by ID” help alleviate this? I also use ShowAvatar a lot (over 2,000) and would love to be able to hide the annoying meme avatars some of my friends use without having to guess when they’ve turned it off so I can show them again.

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Despite not being a member of the team I’ll add to Tupper’s answer. It’s true stopping rips fully will never happen. Everything you see on screen can be ripped. That’s just a law of computer sciences.

While the VRChat team is doing notable efforts to try stopping rips in the end there is a huge group of crackers who tirelessly continue to crack the formats.

I tend to take Netflix as a comparison example. Netflix is a multi billion dollar company and they invested millions into DRM together with high profile companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and others. I’d believe that the entire Widevine DRM library which is currently used for most online streaming components is worth several times more than the entirety of VRChat. They make sure that in many cases, even screenshots are not even possible.

Yet: if a new Netflix series is coming - it’s a matter of hours until it’s online.

VRChat is doing efforts to make it harder - it’ll never be impossible.

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In this post: https://ask.vrchat.com/t/questions-about-the-new-developer-update/10470

Tupper said this.

A lot of the methods mods used were pretty destructive, so we want to be careful. Also, for obvious licensing concerns (some were MIT, but others were under more restrictive licenses) we can’t look at their code or even their methodology.

We’re looking into every avatar crasher that we have on file (and oh boy do we have a lot). We also have very good working knowledge of the ways people crash other people. We’ve got a method we can’t talk about yet (and, honestly, we may never talk about too much, sorry) that’s far more effective than how modifications ever did it, but it’ll take a bit longer.

It’s clear the team is looking into these things. As with all things, patience will be rewarded.

hello,
is it possible to make it possible that everybone can be animated even if its to small for physikbones? cuz i want to update my avatars from dynamic bones to physikbones but alot of hair bones cant be animated cuz they are to short/small.

another question would be if its possible to implement a setting for avatars that have to many polygons/other stuff? like how its done with the Download size setting? cuz ive seen many people getting crashed by crasher that use avatars that have millions over millions on polygons and or partical on them. and it kinda looks like they avoid the safty settings…

and yes im posting this again cuz im not sure if it was readed or not… and sorry for my bad english…

Thank you for the acknowledgment! Honestly, that is all we wanted, just to know we were heard in some of those specific things. So again, thank you for the acknowledgment.

I understand how tough it would be to handle all of these requests all at once, so good job so far organizing everything as much as possible Tupper (and obv vrc dev team).

I guess everyone in the community is worried that their (subjectively) ‘most important mods/feature requests’ aren’t just going to be left in the dust. So just the acknowledgment that this feature is at least “being looking into” means the world. On the flip side of that coin, it sucks when the community as a whole has been burnt before on features being indefinitely “looked into” which is why we are so skeptical and worried about them being left to rot.

Anyway, thank you again for the acknowledgment, and I am looking forward to hearing more from you soon!

Feedback: Avatar scale plz

But in all seriousness, having an avatar scale would be an immense help to me and just about everyone I talk to. I have 9 of the same avatar uploaded and 6 of those are just different sizes of it. And they each have parameters on them that I can’t realistically set to be saved, so every time I swap avatars for whatever reason, whether I’m getting smaller to squeeze into a crowded gathering more easily or getting bigger so people can see me more easily, that’s around 5 parameters I have to manually set each time depending on the situation. Not to mention the amount of lag it causes people around me, and it’s like… I’d love to just have the option to Not.

Also, since the size I default to is 23cm, a lot of worlds have me swapping avatars a minimum of two times just to turn a mirror on when I join. For a lot of worlds even my 69cm avatar is too short to reach important things so that’s 3 avatar swaps right as I load in because I don’t know if 69cm is tall enough or not and I get kinda anxious when I go above 80cm. For crowded event worlds, that can be crippling to a lot of the lobby to just be smacked with loading 4 avatars when I show up.

Multiple systems have already been made that use mods or OSC, for example DexProtect, which are extremely powerful and extremely successful at protecting your avatar. These methods are so debilitatingly difficult to circumvent you can openly share their general function without concern: they generate blendshapes and move all the avatar’s transforms around arbitrarily and use a decryption to restore them to a non-scrambled state, as well as obfuscating your animation controllers. The method has been hard-tested and it does indeed protect model ripping against all but the most painfully dedicated that are willing to put in the great time and effort to reverse the whole process. You COULD sit in the same lobby as them, and try to use a runtime 3d capture, but that’s a nightmare and good luck with armature and blends etc.

This is more of an API endpoint issue. We were able to see all users in an instance back in 2018, i remember actively utilizing this to avoid “gang” members i knew by name, checking if a lobby was safe or worth joining. It was highly beneficial, and i never understood why the endpoint was closed, as it only let you inspect public and friends+ and friends instances on the api url to my knowledge anyway.

Would it be better to have a Public Trello Board so the Audience can see what is in progress what is planned, paused due to technical limitations, etc.

This allows for anyone to look at live progress for the board
Epic Games Store Does Trello Boards as examples for their audience to have more transparency with the developers.

I’m taking advantage of this to link a canny for anyone reading this to also share their feedback

Public Trello Board for VRChat | Voters | VRChat

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Theres still hope for avatar scaling lads! pray for the best me lads! :pray:

Im really hoping the ability for Priority change for VRC will be my saving grace, as it seems VRChat can no longer efficiently run on a 1650 GTX. Next step is to get a new PC =/ I had seen an update for high end PC but not for the low and this is unfortunate.

All the other updates are really awesome though.

Those updates are getting better and better. Please keep going and VRChat will be very good for sure!

I was wondering if there was a way to toggle the portable mirror to not be affected by the camera? Along with the visual aid for the earmuffs?

As I love both these features on, but I’m a vr photographer and its a bit annoying to have to turn both off when im trying to catch a good photo

All these rapid fire updates have been really exciting to see. Thanks a lot for letting us in in what you guys have been up to~😁

This isn’t a pressing request, but a mod my friends and I had a lot if fun with was “Avatar Limbs Grabber.”
Basically, it worked like Physbones in that others (with permission settings) were able to grab my arms and legs, and manipulate them. It could be set to stay in place (with a reset button), or simply snap back once let go. I could also allow them to pick me up and throw me. There was also the ability to temporarily disable the feature in the current world I was in, until I changed worlds.

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This is a fantastic idea. It’s an all-in-one place to get a quick snapshot of everything that is happening internally that can be publicly stated. Very concise, very efficient. VRC could even create their own custom board that serves the same function if they desired.


There’s a couple things i myself made cannies for, both pretty self-explanatory.:

Make canny posts have better discord embeds and discoverability
This would help “spreading the word” about desired features and fixes.
Make user volume slider linear
The volume slider per-user seems to have a logarithmic curve or something, making most of the slider effectively useless, and having to fiddle with the low quarter percents.

Also i wanted to take this moment to point out something i’ve observed and had to deal with myself or seen others having to deal with - that is the issue of blocked users being completely invisible. When in a lobby and there’s a blocked person, you get this weird effect of seeing apparently schizophrenic people talking to ghosts. This is fine if they are not near you or involved with your conversation group. But the moment they approach the group you are a part of, you run into multiple issues extremely quickly. One of them being the issue of not knowing when you are talking over eachother - this disrupts others. There is also the issue of standing inside one another without realizing it, which also is a bother to others. When conversations are happening and flowing, blocked users easily miss out on part of the conversation, and while this is expected, this can happen without you even knowing there is a blocked user present and makes things very confusing. Overall the current system for blocking is very socially disruptive.

There’s another thing i suggested a while back, that i’ve had countless people ingame agree with me about, and that being showing the world locations, but not joinable instance id, of where people are that are on orange status or in a private lobby. Orange status has become a plague where there is an active dichotomy between those who use it and those who observe others using it. People who use orange status usually have reasoning like “i don’t want x and y groups to mix” or “i don’t want random people joining on me” or whatever, and some of them even use it to filter “who really cares about me”. But this is a behaviour which gets a different result than they expect - because orange status provides zero information about what a user is doing or up to, it’s an active deterrent to even attempting to interact or request, which most people do not bother, especially when they request and never get any responses (unaware if they are sleeping or busy etc), making orange have a very similar effect to red status socially speaking, which is anti-social and not beneficial to the community. The existence of orange status has held a lot of social interaction back for a very long time. Showing just the world they are in i think is a good solution because it provides at least information on whether they are at an event or sleeping or what have you.

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There’s clearly some great work going on here, but I’m concerned you’re starting to focus on some of the more “nice to have” features instead of some that people really need. For example I have been unable to change the UI colours since the EAC update making it more difficult to see as I am visually impaired. Please don’t lose focus on essential accessibility features.

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We’re still working on it! We don’t update every feature we’re working on every day, and a lot of stuff is still being touched on behind the scenes.