Developer Update - 15 February 2024

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!

17 Likes

horse.

4 Likes

horse.

1 Like

peter the horse is here xd

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hi honse.

Been waiting for this! Audio sources have always been one of the things I’m constantly running against when making my avatar.

5 Likes

WHOA! AMAZING! Like that’s actually really useful.

Huge! Now we can just have one Audio Source if we really wanted to, right? Does this inherently use PlayOneShot by any chance? Or does it just use Play? PlayOneShot is great because audio can overlap, which is good for things like gunshots.

Edit: Fax said it only uses Play. I made a feature request to add PlayOneShot.


Just going to take this opportunity to share a few important feature requests:

1 Like

horse.

1 Like

honse :horse:

1 Like

I like that much better lightmaps Worlds :+1:

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my favorite thing about the site update is that i had no idea that it happened, until i open the site and there’s just a horse staring me down.

world is pretty good though

Thank you for featuring my world! :heart:

7 Likes

so new there are audio on quest ? with the new coponent ?

Chipi chipi, chapa chapa
Dubidubi, dabadaba
Mágico mi dubidubi boom, boom, boom, boom :D

3 Likes

Quest Avatar Audio is something they probably wont add any time soon, as Audio is just too heavy for it.

AnimatorPlayAudio State Behavior

Oh my GOD, this is a BOON We’ve been asking for something like this for so long! Thank you! Sounds were the most annoying part of doing more intricate props imo. Aaaa!

3 Likes

Would you perhaps consider adding a section on the official VRC website for viewing avatar performance stats for your uploaded avatars? For those that like to optimise their older avatars, or upload a base avi and slowly make and plan changes to it to make it a better performance rank (which I know you want every creator to do and actorly care about performance!), it’s very hard and annoying, because you can’t look at the stats of your avatars out of game.

And worse, those creators that are exclusively PC, or exclusively quest, you also cannot see what the other platform ranking stats are on your avatars for the opposite platform either. And just as opening up VRC just to check the stats of an avi is a hassle, loading up a unity project just to look at the stats is also not convenient.

I always have to ask quest users what my performance rank is on my avatars as I barely get on and use quest; and It’s extremely annoying to screenshot the stats (as you have to scroll down and take multiple screenshots) on quest, then send them to your pc to view them and review them better to see what is causing the rank to lower, without having to compare the pc stats it shows ingame, to the quest stats on the performance rank chart.

When re-making an avatar based on an old uploaded model, or updating an already uploaded avatar, it would be extremely useful to see all it’s current performance stats for both quest and pc platforms on the website!

4 Likes

It just uses Play!

2 Likes

Chipi chipi, chapa chapa
Dubidubi, dabadaba
Mágico mi dubidubi boom, boom, boom, boom :D

same
also thank you all for the honse comments, this fuels my day. i’ll wait for other developers to respond regarding audio questions.

2 Likes

Would it be reasonable for me to make a feature request for this to also have PlayOneShot as an option? Or is there a clear blocker there?

Edit: I made a feature request for it.

honse

Excellent additions! Thank you!