Developer Update - 16 August 2022

[YourBoyJayVR]

Last week the camera drone was mentioned, is the idea as of right now a controller to fly it around or would it be creating a track for it to follow. The latter would be the most optimal.

[tupper]

@cyanyde1

I just feel the text chat should be treated just as equally as the voice chat setting/feature.

That’s been the approach generally, but we’re trying to be very careful. As I noted above, if we change our mind, its much easier to loosen restrictions later vs tightening them.

@codel1417

could always make it a toggle

As I noted above, we’re already absolutely overloaded with toggles. I can’t imagine how to fit the technical explanation required to explain animators being culled into a single line.

We’ve been considering it, but… this is just a really complicated set of issues. We’ll probably go with the renderers-off version to start and then see how it rolls out. We can always come back and change/add things in later.

@razor5982

Will you plan on adding Camera Animations to the game?

@YourBoyJayVR

Last week the camera drone was mentioned, is the idea as of right now a controller to fly it around or would it be creating a track for it to follow.

It’s been mentioned a few times in some previous Dev Updates, but having animation keyframes where the camera moves between would be nice. Not in active development but firmly in the “we wanna do this” psuedo-roadmap.

[YourBoyJayVR]

Will freeze frame ever be considered, where you can freeze your avatar in positions or set up a recording it will follow while in game.

[gorgorath]

Hey, is there any plans on being able to rotate the position of your hands? It feels like when I’m holding my wrists straight that my hand in game is rotated about 15 degrees forward and it feels rather awkward. This may vary controller to controller, as I use index and my issue isn’t probably apparent on quest, for example.

[Jackboog21]

@tupper

That’s not on the books for now, apologies. The Quest 2 is being pushed to its absolute limits as-is. We try to add as much as we can any time we re-assess.

With stuff like Avatar Hider being added, isn’t this a good time to re-assess?

Also, speaking of performance, I have a few suggestions:

With Avatar Hider, I believe it should be enabled on Quest by default; maybe at a high value but still on by default instead of the sliders maxed out and perhaps “Show Avatar” overrides should be disabled by default on Quest due to the amount of Quest users who “Show Avatar”.

I believe we should also be given a button similar to “Show Avatar” called something like “Load Avatar”; this setting could bypass performance settings like Show does, but does not bypass Safety settings. I believe this would be much better for a lot of Quest users who frequently get avatar crashed due to showing everyone’s avatars.

Lastly, an “Avatar Physics” safety option would be a good addition. This could toggle off any “physics” on an avatar; PhysBones, Dynamic Bones, Springjoints, etc. These systems can be used intentionally to lag or crash people, so a safety setting for them would be good.

[codel1417]

@tupper

I can’t imagine how to fit the technical explanation required to explain animators being culled into a single line.

maybe something like a command line argument can enable ‘Experimental Options’ which are toggles that offer no support or documentation.

[Lyeco]

Ctrl+F → Third person camera → No results found

[ThatGuy]

Thank you for updating me and the rest of the community on the progress of VRChat, and thank you for all the excellent work the Dev team has put into these QoL upgrades!!

I’d like to present another point of view on why “World Instance History” could prove to be a transformative experience within VRChat. (Please UI Devs)

Every time you start a session, you automatically create your personal timeline that you can pass through in Public/Friends+ with ease. You can retrace your steps to not only the same map, but the exact same place in virtual space. Hopping to new instances doesn’t have to mean the severing of ties to the last instance and the people in it!! Maybe leave yourself and friends clues in your new semi-persistent universe. Surprised Pikachu Face

If you think this is an idea worth implementing, please upvote or comment on the Canny post here:

Canny

Thank you for your time, and thank you Devs for the hard work on these updates!

[reverse]

@tupper

Right now, the method you use to pull up the keyboard is the Action Menu. However, there’s been asks for other bindings, such as the traditional “T” key on the keyboard.

Im sorry but this problem does touch such a small demographic and is fixable in udon. If this is such a problem, why not allow to edits keys like most games?

[guitarrero1996]

for me dont make sense. having a public avatar search helped to find people who violated the creators’ rules.

[Snuffandstuff]

Right? Or like… 12-15 physbone components/ 100-120 bone allowance, yaknow?

[Salbug]

@tupper

That’s a big concern for us too. Unfortunately, because of Write Defaults, dead-ends, and other non-deterministic animator qualities, we’re backed into a corner.

Any plans of SDK warnings or the like concerning Write Defaults? I would assume because of the implications concerning WDs and Avatar Hiding it’d probably also be enough to warrant a big mention of it in the release notes.

[Jackboog21]

I’d suggest more like increasing it to 12. You can squeeze a lot in 10 megabytes, two more gives you a lot of room if you know what you’re doing. Honestly, I’ve never not been able to squeeze and avatar into 10 megabytes, but I do run into issues with some where I’m having a really hard time and it’s under 12; so 12 would be ideal for me.

[thakyuu]

Thanks for all the great updates!

Looking forward to the Live release of 2022.2.2p3.

Now, I assume this release will include a copy/paste button on the keyboard.
We have confirmed that the current behavior prevents saving in some game worlds, including UdonTychoon and others.

I’m afraid that releasing a game world in this state would destroy the ability to play continuously for a long period of time.
Canny’s is not tracking status on it, but have you already checked the situation internally?

Canny

[tupper]

@YourBoyJayVR

you can freeze your avatar in positions or set up a recording it will follow while in game.

We actually had a feature that someone built a few years ago in a jam that did basically that (and also had additional features)

I’d say it’s on the “would be cool, no plans yet” list

@gorgorath

It feels like when I’m holding my wrists straight that my hand in game is rotated about 15 degrees forward and it feels rather awkward.

We’ve seen this feedback sometimes and we know about it. I don’t know anything about it other than “we know about it”, though. I’ll ask.

@Jackboog21

With stuff like Avatar Hider being added, isn’t this a good time to re-assess?

I am unsure if I agree with the implied statements here. Avatar Hider is good, but we shouldn’t benchmark Q2 performance based on having Avatar Hider active.

We target Quest 2 benchmarks and limits per Meta’s recommendations.

We’re very aware that the Quest 2 has some serious crashing issues, and we’ve got methods on the way to help address that. The ideas you mention have some merit, but I’d consider them work-arounds instead of us addressing the core issue. We get lots of nice crash logs from Meta, so we know with a pretty high level of precision what’s causing Q2 crashes.

I don’t have more to add for now.

@codel1417

maybe something like a command line argument can enable ‘Experimental Options’ which are toggles that offer no support or documentation.

Keep in mind that the majority of our users can’t use launch options. :S We try to avoid using launch options, unless its PC-specific stuff-- and even then, we try to keep it to super technical tweaks.

As previously noted, we’re considering how best to move forward with the animator issue, but for now we’re probably going to stick with the renderer solution.

@Lyeco

Ctrl+F → Third person camera → No results found

That’s because we haven’t mentioned it!

We don’t have plans for a third-person camera. My personal opinion is that I think we should just make it easier for world creators to implement it via Udon, because in some worlds it might make no sense (or even damage the way the world is meant to work) to have a third person camera.

I think if we did make it a native feature, it’d be something world authors could allow/deny in their world, and then you could enable per-instance creation, maybe.

Again, opinions, not feature announcements, etc etc.

@ThatGuy

“World Instance History”

We have definitely seen your posts, definitely seen your Feedback post! We know why the feature is a cool idea. Definitely in the “we know about the request, good idea, let’s see about getting it in sometime” bucket.

(Please stop copying and pasting the same thing every thread. )

@reverse

Im sorry but this problem does touch such a small demographic and is fixable in udon. If this is such a problem, why not allow to edits keys like most games?

It’s fixable, but there’s no guarantee that the author is around to implement the fix in a timely manner. Adding in key editing would be a whole new feature that we want to do eventually, but don’t have planned. That’d be a massive increase in scope for the Chatbox project, which has already expanded to include a keyboard revamp!

We’ll probably just release with the T key binding and add an option to turn that binding on and off, to start.

@Salbug

Any plans of SDK warnings or the like concerning Write Defaults? I would assume because of the implications concerning WDs and Avatar Hiding it’d probably also be enough to warrant a big mention of it in the release notes.

I desperately want to add more warnings and “Auto Fix” features to the SDK but there simply isn’t developer bandwidth to do so right now.

Besides, using Write Defaults isn’t necessarily “wrong” (depending on which Unity engineer’s post you read), even though I personally have a vendetta against it and it comes out in my writing.

Since we’re doing the renderer thing and not the animator thing, no need for a big mention in patch notes… yet.

@thakyuu

We have confirmed that the current behavior prevents saving in some game worlds, including UdonTychoon and others.

I have noted this bug on the appropriate internal task.

[ARCThe1andOnly]

Make rotation constrains quest pls
ty

[cherry_3]

For the chatbox, it would be pretty nice to have an option to where you can make to where its in your hand or you can grab it yourself like a board and with the keyboard below it, its feels slightly weird personally for me to have such a huge keyboard screen in front of me wheneveri need to say something. Amd it would also be pretty cool to be able to grab the text box and place it any where you want to have it, so its comfortable just for you and others to see, but this is only a suggestion!

[blackrobe]

Some ideas I’ve been wanting:

1. The ability to make portals to a Friends+ instance, i.e. groups of people visiting other friends, etc. How it currently is where say a group of 10 of us wants to go visit friends/worlds is always a struggle to have what I call “chain joining”; where one person join the instance, then another friend on that one, then other friends of friends off them. For safety, perhaps a toggle in either the owner of the instance or the instance itself allowing “friend portals”?

2. The ability the create a “party” so that when the party leader switches worlds, each player gets a prompt whether to join the group in a new instance. I love exploring new worlds with friends and this system would be wonderful, especially in enormous worlds, where you can’t gather everyone up to head to the next one.

3. Instance history, for world/public hopping. For example, on the rectangle of the instance in the world list, where the name, instance type and player count there could be an additional listing of “Last Visited: 1hr 31m ago” or something similar.

[agenderwitchery]

@tupper

We’re planning on putting the new Main Menu into Beta very soon! Unless something changes, it should be live-compatible, so you’ll be able to use it while we iterate and improve it during the beta process.

So this means you can add avatar scaling soon, right? Right?

@tupper

We’ve received some feedback regarding the positioning of the chatbox. By default, we’re going to have it remain in its current position, which typically will be over a user’s head.

We realize that this might not work well with all avatars, so we’re looking into providing a second “middle” option that will move the chatbox up or down the chatter’s avatar to match the viewer’s height. We think this will help out users with shorter avatars.

Would an avatar component that the chatbox can attach itself to be a viable thing? Where it would use a default position as it does now, but if someone wants to manually place where the chatbox is with a specific avatar, they can.

[reverse]

@tupper

We’ll probably just release with the T key binding and add an option to turn that binding on and off, to start.

Oh sorry, I think I misunderstood what you were saying originally. I thought you were saying the Text chat would still need to be only unable-disabled(?) from the wheel. Thanks for answering .