Developer Update - 16 March 2023

I see that the upcoming UI feature actually has clickable links!
Will this be available to everyone or a gated feature like opening links in VKet etc?

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For Udon UI, would like to see ~~ for strikethrough and * for italics, ala github flavored markdown, which is in widespread use, such as discord, many editors, etc.

Check the video out. Markdown support is already there.

Access to the internal components of the GameObject and its children, which is not something that a layman would be accessing in the first place.

As noted previously, the default assetbundle compression does nearly as well as crunch. I’d encourage you to look at your actual assetbundle download size with and without crunch across a few avatars-- from how it’s been described to me, they’re usually within 1-2%.

That post makes a few assumptions that don’t hold up for most VRChat content-- that the person developing the content is a professional game developer (so they know when to use it, and when not to), and that the content doesn’t need to be ad-hoc downloaded (it’s already on disk, which means its super fast to read no matter what).

There are exceptions where Crunch can be useful, but we think it is being overused for the wrong reasons. This is why we permit upload even if stuff is Crunched, and even let you turn off the warning at the project level.

I’m not familiar with VKet’s requirements on booth sizes! If I had to guess, they’re counting pre-assetbundle compression size, and not post.

Likely gated

To be specific - the public interface of avatar pedestals will not change, so you’ll still be able to set avatar ID and use through udon.

This change prevents you from getting the children of the pedestal and grabbing the image or modifying the internal gameobjects/transforms of the pedestal.

Take a closer look at the demo video. In the video ~~this is italics~~ and *this is strikethrough*

That appears to be a bug in the editor UI. When the tester adds a new field at ~14 seconds, the ~ converts to * incorrectly.

Oops, no - that’s there to make sure that links parse properly for readme files included in packages. We don’t currently have plans to allow everyone to open web links with Udon.

???

Unless I’m blind and missing something… which is possible lol

Nevermind, tupper explained it above

Keep in mind - we’re sharing very-much-in-development work. Analyzing tiny details in a video is not going to tell you as much as just asking us if you have a question :smiley:

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This is true when loading directly off disk, but in VRChat’s case everything we use gets compressed into AssetBundles, which have their own (much tighter, lossless) compression method. The load-time improvement discussed there is just ‘it loads from the disk faster’, which is true regardless of compression method, as long as the ratio is the same. Putting the AssetBundle compression on top of Crunch just adds another layer of work to get to the end data, and compression methods don’t usually stack well - you gain very little from zipping a 7z.

That being said, there is some potential uses! There is some situations where you’d want explicitly lossy texture compression to make your download size more manageable. So we’ve left the option open - it’s just not applicable to the general case.

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“Auto Fix” here will just turn off Crunched texture import settings, which will put you back with the default texture settings (DXT1 for RGB, DXT5 for RGBA). You bring up a good point though, it’s possible some folks would have uploaded uncompressed textures expecting them to be small based on the Crunched size-on-disk. I’ll look into it!

Crunch compression can give a noticeable reduction in filesize

I took my normally crunched compressed avatar and un-crunched all textures, comparing the vrca filesize from build and test;
Crunched size 28.4Mb
Un-crunched Size 35.1 MB
My avatar is almost 20% smaller with crunch compression

I often join instances where I don’t have the majority of users cached, having to wait for avatars to download, I would certainly appreciate downloading avatars (upto?) 20% faster even if I hitch on load

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Enough about the udon and the SDK and the important things!
I just want to know how the portal UI is progressing!

sure, but on the flipside, I couldn’t tell if that was deliberate or a bug, so figured I’d bring it up

What quality setting do you generally use? It’s true that lossy compression can save you some download size, hence why we’ve left the option in place to use it if you really need it - but it’s still going to be better for everyone if you pack textures or consider a different texture format/size.

I’m also hoping that Download Prioritization will make load time less of an issue for everyone!

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Anytime I use crunch it is set to 100% quality

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Would love to be able to include things like user names on vrcurls to use in our own APIs. Also still waiting for an update on groups to include invites to non-members.

I believe most my textures are reasonably well packed, resolution could be lowered but at a greater quality loss than I’m willing to accept

As far as I’m aware DXT1 (Normal quality with no alpha) gives the smallest size without crunching, unless you know a format that gives better compression (Low quality also uses DXT1).