Developer Update - 20 July 2023

Official Dev Updates
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Welcome to the Developer Update for 20 July 2023!

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Today’s Dev Update thumbnail features Karl Kroenen’s world commissioned by heartwrend, A LONG DREAM! A humble cabin in a private valley invites you to take a few minutes to stop and touch grass smell the flowers.

If you’d like to catch up, you can read our previous Developer Update from June 29.

Important Info / Announcements

VRChat 2023.2.3 Patches!

It’s been a bit since our last Dev Update! In that time, we’ve released a few patches for 2023.2.3.

These patches had fixes, but 2023.2.3p2 in particular included Custom Emoji, which we talked about in a previous Dev Update!

You can check out the patchnotes for all three of the 2023.2.3 patches in our docs.

Jummer!

We’ve recently completed one of our two annual internal “jam” weeks! During these weeks, we tell our team to go wild and develop new features, ideas, or pitches for VRChat.

However, we want to make sure the ones we show off are ones that you’ll eventually get to try out yourself, so we’re going to wait until the approval process is done before showing those off. Keep an eye out for these in a future Dev Update.

VRChat Home Site Tweaks

Speaking of Jummer, we had two “easy, ship it” projects that went live already!

VRChat External Service Login Form

We’ve updated the external login form that you see when you authenticate to sites like our Feedback boards, our Ask Forums, Ready Player Me, and some events like Furality!

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As you can see, this interface has received a fresh lick of paint, with simplified design and clearer messaging.

Change and Favorite Avatars on the Site

We’ve re-written a lot of our avatar page and added a few features. You can now change and favorite avatars via the VRChat website!

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While managing your own favorites and changing into one of your own avatars is a huge use case of this, it also allows avatar creators to easily share avatars they’ve made on social media by linking to it: VRChat - Home

Users can then switch to the avatar, or add it to their favorites for use in-app!

Ongoing Development

Avatar Scaling (still) in Open Beta!

On June 22nd, we surprised you with a new Open Beta that included Avatar Scaling! However, it turns out that implementing Avatar Scaling properly is kinda hard. So, we’re taking our time.

We’ve got further patches on the way for Avatar Scaling. There’s been a lot of hunting for edge cases and fixing that we’ve been doing, so keep an eye out for further patches as we work towards a full release.

If you’re interested in checking things out, hop on our Discord and read the #open-beta-announcements channel.

Recommended Searches

The Search page will soon feature a new “Recommended Searches” bar!

This gives you easier access and control over your saved searches, marked with a bookmark icon. This also allows us to serve up a few catered search suggestions for special events, search suggestions based on your language preferences, or other future suggestions.

Saved searches now appear in this bar. They can easily be removed by hovering over them and hitting the trashcan icon. No more sifting through the Main Menu Worlds page in order to remove a saved search (though, you can still do that if you’d like).

If your game is localized to a language other than English, or if we detect that your operating system language matches a language we have search content for, we’ll generate a special recommended search for worlds that might cater to your language.

In the example video, the client is set to translate tooltips to Spanish, so a special “Español” suggested search appears, giving you quick access to a bunch of content in Spanish!

Conclusion

That’s it for this Dev Update! Our next update is scheduled for August 3, 2023. See you then!

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cool to see even the real small stuff that’s gonna be a big use for creators :3

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We can set a VRC+ profile override in-game but we can only remove it using the website! Can we get a reset button in-game too?

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Is there any decent estimate on when Avatar Scaling could go live? I have a friend with a world that’s waiting to be released, holding for Avatar Scaling release first.

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Will VRChat ever do anything about the avatar search worlds that have recently popped up?

Historically VRChat refused to add public avatar searching under the basis that they wanted people to explore to find avatars, and they had no way to differentiate between “this should just be global” public and “this has been uploaded for a specific reason” public. The avatar search worlds literally go against VRChat’s own design choices.

Also renders avatar worlds useless for the most part because people can now just use those search worlds, which I doubt was in the wishes of many of the people making avatars for avatar worlds either.

There’s at least 3 avatars that I’ve uploaded exclusively for their respective owners (who have never shared them or had cloning enabled) that show up in these worlds for anyone to use. I’ve reported it, the VRC staff don’t care, despite it being clear abuse/misuse of the API (as it’s to circumvent cloning being disabled).

And to anyone that says “bUT PuBLIc iS puBLic!!111” - there’s no “X person only” functionality, this is the best we have.

Would you rather I just said “fuck you” to my friends and didn’t help them? I guess really a lot of the pushback comes from the greedy people who are now happy to have access to a lot of avatars that they shouldn’t, which isn’t surprising given much of VRC’s userbase.

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Pretty nice :+1:

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I think a better fix for this would be to make private avatars shareable by the creator with a locked link (perhaps time-expiring, and where whoever favorites from it retains the permission to use but not share it indefinitely), and otherwise continue with “public is public”. The recent change to allow favoriting from the website seems like it’s a good stepping stone towards this.

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Can we please get an update to VRC+ that enables us to public more than one world to community labs a week?

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Any news on the IK update? (eta or etc)

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About that ‘Switch to Avatar’ button.
You just gave me infinite favorites! xD
Bookmark avatars and hit switch.

Does mean I can finally make that mega nerd Ben 10 watch avatar though, just need an OSC application that can open links in a browser and hit the switch avatar button. :thinking:
Maybe VoiceAttack with an OSC plugin can do it with programmed macros.

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As a pro open-sourcer, i see no issues with any of this. Avatar worlds rarely have anything worth going to them for, and if they do, people will go there regardless of the avatars. Vast majority of people don’t like having to go to someone’s (often unoptimized or low effort) world just to grab an avatar. People want to go to worlds to go to worlds, and go to avatars to get avatars, going to worlds to get avatars is an extra annoying step that doesn’t need to exist.

If you don’t want your avatars on those searches, just contact them and ask for it to be removed, these things have the respect to include such functionality.

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Will there ever be an avatar whitelister? Other vr games have this such feature, as it is extremely usefull and safe for avatar buyers and creators.

This allows sellers to not have to upload avatars to people acount (or have a pubic “privet” avatar) and lets the owner make a private avater only usable by spacific listed people. This means people dont have to log into your acount to upload them, and if someone brakes the tos of the creator, they can be unwhitelisted, without the worry of the buyer simpley making the avatar public.

This also solves the problem public “privet” avatars have coming up in avatar search worlds, as the creator can just have it privet, and make a whitelist on it to those who it belongs to.

This also allows avis to say who there true creator is, rather than having it uploaded to the buyers account and not saying the true owners name when looking at the auther.

Lastly, it would be extremely usefull for updating avaters. If there is an update that changes the way avatars are, or brakes the avatar, it can easly be fixed and uploaded onto the single creators account, allowing everyone whitelisted to get the updated avatar, without the creator having to go though everyones accounts and singurly re-uploading it to everyone who bought it.

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I’m excited to hear more info on those summer jam projects! The two small improvements to the website are already nice.

In a previous developmer update, you discussed adding hard limits to the amount of physbone components, are there any plans or desires to do the same to constraint components? Having avatars with hundreds of constraints can cause issues in club or event worlds when someone changes into an avatar with all those constraints. This happens a lot with the unfortunately popular avatar cloning system.

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VRChat has been around for a long while now. I think that avatar worlds are becoming a thing of the past and avatar searching will eventually come to being implemented by VRChat natively. It’s a a lot easier to search for a specific avatar than visiting multiple avatar worlds and not find it.

But definitely before that happens, they should definitely make a “X person only” option for public avatars or something similar to that. I think that would be the easiest way to fix that problem you mentioned with the avatars appearing in worlds.

edit:
People in publics can obtain avatar id’s easily (ex: vrcx)

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I couldn’t help but notice that you’re using OAuth for the external service login.

Are we going to be able to get client credentials in the near future? It would sure beat the “hacky” solution everyone uses today to create 3rd party apps that consume the VRC API.

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I have a quick question about last dev updates shader revisit, are you guys planning on adding support for bakery light volumes?. I apologize if this has already been answered, or if it is and I just messed up a test I did a few months back

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You don’t even need a mod to get the ids, the info is freely available in the game logs.

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Keep it going!

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The Update gods are happy :sunglasses:. Also reminder to drink water (Its hot out) :hot_face:

I do not mind waiting for the scaling if it means it will be in working order. :+1:
The fact the team will not put something out unless its good to go shows the quality of what we will be getting. Keep up the good work. :trophy:

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So I presume this means you modified the API to be able to push a change (swapping avatars) to VRChat? Does this mean that VRCX should be able to take advantage of it? That would be awesome.

Edit: I do want to say thank you to everyone on the team for their hard work in the past year. I know I used to be a bit arrogant and harsh towards everyone, but I’m glad that first of all, I turned that around, but also the impression I get is that the dev team has been kicking ass and doing a fantastic job lately. Keep it up. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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