Developer Update - 13 April 2023

Official Dev Updates
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Welcome to the Developer Update for 13 April 2023!

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Sneaky Strasz Edit: it’s tiiimeeee, enjoy horse

Today’s thumbnail is graced by horse looming over the mountains in nprowler’s Horse Mountain. No, you get to ride the horse. The mountain isn’t made of horses.

If you’d like to catch up, you can watch our previous video Developer Update from April 6.

Old Unused Account Cleaning

We will be cleaning up some old, unverified, completely unused accounts from our databases. If you have used an account at all, this does not apply to it.

This means that if the account has ever been logged into, verified, interacted with, etc beyond just creating the account-- you’re fine and don’t need to worry. We are not deleting inactive accounts.

There is no ETA on this, we’re just letting you know it’s happening soon.

Avatars For Everyone Jam

Last week we concluded our “Avatars for Everyone” jam! Of 310 submissions, 74 have been added as default avatars to VRChat. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, and thank you to each and every participant! We didn’t expect so many high-quality submissions, and we’re blown away by what you’ve created.

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Read more about the contest and its winners here.

All previous default avatars have been moved to the ‘Legacy’ row. All participants should either have received a rejection on vrchat.com, or an email with feedback from our judges. If you didn’t, please get in touch with us!

By the way – the announcement video was missing three of our finalists. Here they are:

You can find the full video with all other finalists and winners here! See you at the next jam!

VRChat 2023.2.1

We’ve just released VRChat 2023.2.1! This release includes a handful of new features, including native Eye Tracking!

Check out the patch notes video below or the full patch notes here.

Judging by some of the early bug reports we’ve gotten, we’ll be preparing a patch to fix some new issues soon, so keep an eye out for that.

Quest 1 Deprecation

Within the next few months, we will be deprecating support for the Quest 1, and we will no longer support using that headset for standalone VRChat.

Within the next 3 to 6 months, Quest 1 may stop working entirely. This is primarily due to Meta’s deprecation of the Quest 1 SDK, which will prevent us from keeping VRChat updated properly on the device.

Of course, you can continue to use Quest 1 with Quest Link, Virtual Desktop, ALVR, or any of the other “tethering” methods to connect your Quest 1 to a Windows PC. This will not change, at least until those particular methods stop working.

Quest 1 deprecation does not mean we will be increasing Quest limits. The Quest 2 has been our performance target already for a long while and still suffers even with our current limits. There’s just no headroom available!

We’ll keep you up to date.

Ongoing Development

Server-Side Avatar Analysis

In an upcoming update, avatar stats (material count, mesh count, etc.) will be delivered to you from our servers instead of calculating locally.

This means that if you set your Minimum Allowed Performance Rank to Poor, avatars that exceed that rank will never download!

This will result in better performance when using the Minimum Allowed Performance Rank system since you don’t have to calculate those stats on your computer, and you never load avatars that go over your defined rank.

Conclusion

Not much at all this week – we dropped a ton of new stuff on you in the last two weeks, so this week is quieter.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll catch you next time!

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Server-side avatar analysis is extremely big news! :eyes:

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Will the avatars available in VRChat home be updated? The slot next to himiko on page 3 makes me feel sad. Whatever avatar was there is there no more. Also there is a tutorial world with a mirror and some choices.

Also thanks for bringing the dev post back over to the forums.

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That’s honestly cool for the server side avatar analysis stuff. It would be nice to get a total/active system but how bad will that be on the server end?

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Let’s get this question out before people panic. The server side check will only check for perf rank related things and never more, correct?

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Glad work is finally being done for ServerSide checking

Is there anything Development is BLOCKED because Staff is either waiting on Unity or Valve to fix?
I’m aware Valve recently did an update to Steam Audio, so hope that blocker finally out of the way

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Server-side avatar analysis sounds awesome!
Will this also be able to detected crasher Avatars and prevent them from being downloaded?

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Ooh, appreciate the server-size analysis! Will it calculate VRAM as well? Hopefully will let us more be able to block by VRAM

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We have a lot of ideas for server side avatar analysis! That being said, we aren’t ready to talk about anything except for the avatar stats for now.

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Yes, it can do this, since VRAM affects avatar perf ranks we account for it.

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with the imposter system coming in the near future, will that mean we might have other tools for avatar optimization?

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so it sounds like what the server-side Avatar stuff the imposters and the downloading smallest file size avatars first people with low-end computers and slower internet connections will have a much better time

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I mean, doing server-side analysis would in-turn save on bandwidth costs, wouldn’t it?

Rather than sending 300mb Avatar to 20 players and spending 6gb of bandwidth just for it to be blocked, and PAYING for that bandwidth. Doing one server-side check per upload/update ends up being better for the total VRC bandwidth

(if VRC can do that, they can also run avatar checks to stop corrupt asset bundles, mitigate crashers, check if an avatar has been stolen,
vrc pollution
)

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Not sure how it could check for stolen avatars reliably. I guess a hash, but just adding a single thing would change that.

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Will the server side analysis handle older avatars as well or only newly uploaded ones?

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OMG, I used to use Quest1 for Quest world testing.
I hope upcoming Android client can test VR-mode… :thinking:

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I think they will, especially if any changes are done to stats later on.

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The udon# I wrote yesterday to read the local time to update the UnityEngine.UI Text is invalid today.

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While server side deciding to not load unwanted avatar at all is a great change, i wanted to ask if there will be a step forward from it - is there any sort of “VRAM background Wiping” system we could potentially get? >_>
What i mean is unloading avatars of people who already left the instance, so their avatars are just a waste of space in VRAM. I know Vram cleans itself from unused stuff every 2 switches of the instance or so, but ongoing unloading would definetly be even better, especially for parties or perfomance events(including talent shows, Improv, Stand-up etc) where there’s a big flow of people.
Not sure if it’s Unity limitation or not thou as i have very little idea how everything work behind the scene. :sweat_smile:

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They are already doing that?