Developer Update - 16 February 2023

Do we know when/if we move up to newer unity version? If so would we just skip 2020 since its LTS is expiring i believe?

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Nothing announced yet, but we’re working toward an eventual upgrade. We’ll let you know as soon as solid plans begin materializing.

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From what I understand a lot of older shaders stand to break with the next unity version jump so there had been a ton of concern from creators. A lot of old assets, including shader heavy worlds are at risk of breaking

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Will the VRam usage be added to the avatar stats too?

It’s been in there for quite a bit. :smiley:

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Oh I must’ve missed it :sweat_smile: Sweet!

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Thanks for the answers!

Would it be more performant to split meshes up into smaller meshes when large amounts of blendshapes are involved? Or would you recommend still keeping it as one mesh. It would be nice to know the best practices involved for avatar optimization.

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Awesome blog.

I’m happy to hear so much about the QM tab for world creators after only just asking about it in a recent post. Thanks for addressing the topic so quickly. I feel heard!

And it’s great to hear about perf points that have long been unnoticed will be getting that much needed attention. Good job giving us that transparency in the explanation of the values!

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Will we be getting some form of post/put call so that we can also save json data back to an web endpoint?

The VRAM thingy was totally needed, since i’ve seen people with avatars that used 200-1400mb vram, they’re just savages that don’t think about other people…

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Most modern shaders wont be affected by this upgrade. Many shaders are not affacted by stereo pass thing in the fist place.
The amount of content that would break is very small in reality wont be that large compared to what wont break

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Yes, the most performant method is to split off blendshape-affected verts to their own mesh, and minimize the vertex count on that second mesh. CAT’s plugin has a module in the “Bake” function that can do this automatically.

Personally, I just split off the head/face of my avatar, since that’s where almost all of my blendshapes are.

We note this in our docs.

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Actually 4x1k will take up the same as one 2k, because textures are 2d so doubling the dimensions multiplies the pixel count and thus memory by 4 (you can tile four 1024x1024 squares in a 2048x2048 square). But other than that technicality, that’s correct.

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Ah yes your right, brain fart on my behalf there. XD

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So which is more performant, 633 vrc physbones, or 633 unity constraints :thinking:

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Glad that the constraint error is being taken care of. As well as some cool new features to play around with in future updates.

Hopefully the Vram info will help keep things more optimal in large instances as creators now know that they are exceeding that limit.

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Absolutely 100% 633 physbones.

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Have there been any thoughts of adding more customization to the menus/loading screens? We can make our menus cheese themed and i was wondering if some thought has been put into something similar for loading screens! Being able to swap or change the look of them would be cool! Id love to be able to make loading look like 2017 again for instance :grin:

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We’ve definitely thought of it a few times! It’s one of those “man that’d be cool to do” things that sits on TODO lists behind all of the big items we’re working on. :sweat_smile:

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that is extremely impressive, goodness