Welcome to the Developer Update for February 15 2024!
Today’s Dev Update thumbnail features Finishing Touch - Art Studio & Gallery by Mixie! Draw and enjoy the new animals update while sketching your latest creation in this interactive art gallery.
Avatar featured is Grillby by Lotus.
If you’d like to catch up, you can read our previous Developer Update from 1 February.
Important Info / Announcements
Submit your Application to join VRChat’s Creator Economy!
We’re ready to accept a few more sellers into VRChat’s Creator Economy!
If you are interested in setting up a store in VRChat, please fill out this application:
Seller Application - Creator Economy
The Creator Economy is still under development, so we can only accept a limited number of sellers. Thank you for your patience!
Your responses will also help us learn about VRChat’s prospective sellers, which will help shape the future of the Creator Economy.
Creator Economy SDK Update
The next release of the VRChat World SDK, 3.5.1, will include the libraries for testing and using the current Creator Economy features. Everyone will be able to use the “Store.OpenGroupPage” functionality to make it easy to open a Group Page from Udon, but the rest of the system will remain limited to Creator Economy sellers.
We will expand the Creator Economy to more creators in the coming months, and look forward to eventually rolling it out for everyone!
Ongoing Development
Standard Lite Improvements for Worlds
Standard Lite is getting a few extra features aimed at world creators!
A number of world creators have taken advantage of a feature available in Bakery to bake Spherical Harmonics maps instead of traditional lightmaps, allowing you to have ‘realtime-looking’ lighting in a scene without actually using realtime lights.
Unfortunately, it’s never super clear how using one of these shaders will play out on Quest or Mobile if you can’t test yourself, so most creators have disabled this on their mobile versions. We’ve done our own vetting and porting, and can say with confidence our version is totally mobile-ready! (it’s seriously, like, free – only extra cost is the memory for the additional lightmap)
We’re investigating a few other mobile-ready upgrades for world creators as well, stay tuned!
And for those wondering, yes, we’re going to fix the shadowcast/fog/etc issues with it on Desktop while we’re at it. Coming soon!
Localization for VRChat Continues
Earlier last year, we introduced our first step towards localizing the VRChat client with translated tooltips.
We’re happy to share that we, along with our incredible volunteer localization community, have been working hard to translate the entire VRChat client.
We’ve still got a lot of polishing work ahead of us, but at long last, the tools required to bring this feature to light have been built and it’s really starting to come together!
We have more languages available, but this should hopefully give a broad look at what we’ve been up to!
As a reminder, if you’d like to help contribute to the localization of VRChat, read our document and join the Discord here.
NEW: AnimatorPlayAudio State Behavior
We’re adding a new animator state behavior: the AnimatorPlayAudio State Behaviour! This is a new animator state machine behaviour that can do a bunch of changes on an AudioSource when you enter a state. Most notably, you can now change the clip or play it automatically. This makes any audio work on an avatar much less tedious, as you no longer need to create individual animations to trigger each different sound effect. On top of that, you no longer need to create a new AudioSource per clip – you can use the same AudioSource for many different clips, saving on performance!
Check out this demonstration from QA. The avatar went from using 7 audio sources to only 2! According to QA, this change was “a blessing” with “no need to consider Write Defaults or create animation clips”:
“In this video I am demonstrating the prop. Notice that the next sound does not interrupt the previous sound, and I am able to play a third audio source with a toggle. Each slash alternates the audio source playing the clip, and my fingerpoint gesture switches the clips being played for a different effect.”
Interface of the state machine behaviour:
VRChat on Web Update - (Honse)
As many of you noticed, we updated our login screen on web last week!
We now cycle through VRChat worlds with credit! No more horse jumpscares unless?
Conclusion
That’s it for this Dev Update!
Our next text update is scheduled for February 29, 2024. We’ll also have a video update on February 29 focusing on the Creator Economy. See you then!
