I know, that’s why I brought it up. VRCX has local favorites, so it would nearly eliminate the need to buy VRC+ to store more than 50 avatars. I already do it for worlds.
People talk about “community impact” and “negatives” to avatar search or better avatar/world recognition. I.E: A better community content explorer.
But I don’t get it. Yeah, there may be some potential negatives. But that’s why you try something first. If you try to anticipate issues that haven’t happened yet, you’ll get stuck in limbo.
I am tired of hearing of the “potential downsides” to a community market/content explorer. No one has actually provided real negatives that can be proven by example, nor have they the forethought to realize we can solve the problems as they happen.
A community content explorer system/network/interface would be a huge positive to this platform, alongside the new groups and other social features.
I think that these search worlds are on a line. I’m not personally sure which side of the line they’re on! They clearly illustrate a need for us to establish new avatar types or permissions. They also illustrate a burning desire for avatar search. If nothing else, that’s very valuable data.
Especially with the new change-from-website feature, I wouldn’t think that the avatar search is doing anything particularly wrong. It doesn’t feel any different to me than searching a third-party database that stores metadata for avatars and then clicking the link to the VRChat website, which itself wouldn’t really require anyone to interact with VRChat services in any way unsupported by the official tooling to begin with (since we can check if an avatar is public, see its name/creator/picture, and change into it from the website, and obtaining the IDs only requires reading log files already present on users’ PCs… if anything that feels untoward is being done here, it’s in aggregating IDs from many users’ log info, and I’d personally argue that should be allowed if the users consent to pooling their logs).
I certainly agree that a new kind of permission is needed, whether it be a third type of “semi-private” avatar altogether, or allowing private avatars to be shared among a small list of other users, or whatever, since there is a fairly large rift between some users’ expectations and reality regarding what a public avatar is supposed to mean to begin with (and some of these expectations seem to be entirely due to the lack of a proper restricted-sharing solution).
Adeon is referring to the user thumbnail which by default shows the avatar you are using. VRC+ users can set it to a custom gallery image in app, but currently the only way to reset it is via the website.
Previously this used to be doable in app, but the button to do so seemingly went missing in a small oversight back when the new main menu UI was released.
changing and favoriting avatars on the site? FINALLY! by the way, how’s that new portal ui coming along? haven’t heard of it in a while.
You could walk them through using VCC to install Unity and prepare a UnityPackage where all they have to do is click Upload.
I think a one-time upload token to upload on others’ accounts would be a better solution. Though I think part of the future plans for Creator Economy are Avatars for subscribers-only, I can see them using that work to put in more avatar privacy states.
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The amount of time that we’ve had an idea or that an idea has been suggested is not exactly a factor in how quickly we implement something. I think this is the second, maybe third time I’ve linked this video in Dev Update threads? It’s very good. (as is Satisfactory)
I assure you, we are very aware of these issues. It’s how a lot of accounts get hijacked. Stop sharing passwords, people.
Honestly that signal is a bigger indicator that making avatars is too hard and needs to have an easier pathway in addition to the current “advanced mode”.
Interest? Absolutely!! We’ve been interested for years.
Assuming that we’re interested (we are) the priority remains about in the middle of the road. There are things more important than it, and things less important than it.
The issues is that there are just… a lot of things that are more important and higher priority. We have to wait for resources to become available. Game dev!
If I could push a button and magically generate a designer, a few engineers, QA testers, and all the other people needed to get this kind of feature out? Yep, I’d slap that button right now. But then those people should probably be working on the more important things that we’re lagging behind on, instead… and we’re back to square one.
None! There’s no ETA. Interested, want to work on it, no ETA.
Oh, you have two sections of this. My responses apply to both.
I know that probably seems like frustrating answers, but development is a constant exercise in triage. You have to assess what’s important to address short term, continue on your long-term projects, plan for the future, handle critical bugs and scaling infrastructure, all while growing your team – which is not, as you might imagine, an automatic speed increase, too many cooks and all.
We’re not ignorant of what you want, because we play VRChat too. A lot. Our development team consists… idk, I’m handwaving, 60-70% community hires?* People that played VRChat before working here. So, in addition to talking to the huge swathe of communities we have and many of us basically living in VRChat in various ways, we also have first-hand knowledge of how hard it is to make avatars, or how big of a pain it is to send one to your friend.
Unfortunately, it’s all a game of resources and triage, and sometimes the thing you want loses out. I’ve watched TONS of features I want and go wide-eyed seeing we FINALLY have in development get proposed, only to get shot down with “yeah, sorry, we simply don’t have time or resources, other things are more important. we’ll get to it later.”
* this is a ridiculous percentage btw, i’m not aware of very many (if any) companies our size and composition that has this kind of stat to tout
no news sadly
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Are there any official plans to support localization options for other languages?
The importance of localization for social software needs no elaboration, and the percentage of players in other languages is certainly not insignificant.
I believe we plan on getting the rest of the languages we have already planned for done, and then assessing next steps at that point.
Will external auth be more available to the public in the future? Things like VRCX and even the official SDK still requires username and password to be input directly and having a single login portal on vrchat.com seems like it would be more secure
(While on this topic, a remember password button on the site too thank you)
any news on depth of field ever being fixed? potentially for the future Unity upgrade?
what the maj deployed add, I don’t understand the maj of this week
Well, the issues are a bit more predictable than you might think, though not largely pervasive, VRChat just wants to play it safe and release something when it’s a somewhat rounded package. But again, like i said, the main issue is the amount of groundwork that needs to be done, and as someone who’s talked to devs a few times, it’s clear that it’s not just face talk that they are definitely struggling with allocating resources to pervasive features like this.
If that’s something that could be fixed across the board that’d be nice… Really tired of broken DoF in worlds. I don’t necessarily hate it, it’s just always scuffed; somehow the stereo is broken. It’s possible it’ll be fixed on unity version transition if not manually fixed though, because stereoscopy method will be changing.
This is why i can’t understand the depreciation of SDK2, why not just integrate it into SDK3 or something as “old/simple mode”; brush it up a bit so it plays nice with modern stuff a bit better (maybe include an extra script or something that lets you assign some parameters to animators placed anywhere on the avatar hierarchy, as well as the existing built-in parameters) and bob’s your uncle. Half or more of the dev work is already done. SDK2 was stupid easy for stuff that didn’t need any fancy features.
If I recall correctly,the main purpose of EAC was to block mods, especially avatars searching from the menu as it dramatically increased their bandwidth and servers costs. Its just a question of time untill they realize that avatars search worlds are negatively impacting their costs and defeat the purpose of exploring worlds and avatars. Let them lose money if they can’t learn from their mistakes
Is there a way to disable portal placement on group instances? It would be a good function for events.
It’s not just that it’s been there for 5 years, it’s that it’s been there as one of the top requested features for 5 years. Not only that it’s been requested multiple times, and there are lots of cannys for very similar features or ideas.
Whats the point of submitting and upvoting stuff on the Canny if it’s just going to be ignored for years and years and years? Something in the process is broken.
- Apr 2018, Avatar creators can allow specific users access to private avatars - 614 upvotes
- Aug 2018, Player-Player Avatar Sharing - 5 upvotes
- Jan 2019, Cloning Only For Friends - 771 upvotes
- Sep 2019, Friends only models - 206 upvotes
- Jan 2020, Better way to transfer custom avatars. - 91 upvotes
- Oct 2021, Sharing Private Avatars - 16 upvotes
- Apr 2022, ‘Friends/Whitelisted Only’ publicity setting for avatars. - 123 upvotes
That’s a combined 1820 upvotes, which would put it in as the #8th most upvoted feature request on Canny. If that doesn’t tell you just how much the community is asking for this feature then you would be an ignorant fool. What more do we need to do? How many upvotes does it have to get until this actually becomes a development priority? Give me a number. 1000? 2000? 25,000?
Other cannys that also relate to avatar permissions:
- Dec 2018, Give Public avatars a “pedestal only” option - 1.1K upvotes
- Dec 2022, Group Only Access Avatars - 76 upvotes
Other cannys that relate to avatar upload permissions and uploading for others:
- Oct 2019, Generate one time key for asset upload for commissions - 40 upvotes
- Nov 2019, Avatar Upload Access Tokens - 126 upvotes
- Apr 2020, making sharing models simpel and safe - 136 upvotes
- Feb 2022, Avatar Upload Key - 6 upvotes
Now we’re looking at over 3000 upvotes. It’s loud and clear, people want to share avatars but exert more control than just a private/public toggle.
Talk to your lead developer and have them task a developer to spend an hour or two scoping out the minimum work required for a feature like this. Doesn’t need all the bells and whistles, just a simple avatar whitelisting functionality and an interface to add and remove users. There’s probably some hidden gremlins involved in changing something like this but given that cloning publics is already a feature, it’s not the kind of thing that should need a bunch of developers and weeks of development.
In terms of features, I really can’t think of anything that provides a better development time to positive community impact ratio.
This is a core issue to VRChat that has existed long before VRChat released on the Quest platform, released the Avatar 3.0 SDK, introduced Udon, introduced Physbones, or updated the UI. The idea that this issue has persisted through 5 years and yet still isn’t a high priority really is a slap in the face to your creator based community who have been waiting for this feature for a long long time. VRChat owes its success to the talented creators who put content onto the platform to make it what it is today.
I’d love to rant, but I know that’s not constructive. I really do want to put forward a passionate argument that this should absolutely be higher on your list of priorities.
The longer someone uses VRChat the more likely they are to have their own avatar. It’s the one thing I know that nearly everyone does eventually at some point in their VRChat life. I can think of plenty of things that could be done to improve the avatar creation process, but most of those are huge projects in their own right.
To create a good quality, great performing avatar, you need a lot of skill in 3D modelling and rigging, along with a knack for understanding Unity’s systems, shaders and quirks. The whole mess with write defaults alone is enough to make you just wanna
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To require that kind of knowledge for all of the hundreds of thousands to millions of users who upload stuff to your platform is neither realistic or sustainable.
But this request, this is a relatively small scoped feature that would greatly improve the quality of life for so many creators and regular players users alike. It would also free up VRChat staff resources otherwise occupied dealing with compromised accounts.
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One thing that has always worked against vrchat creators is model theft.
Doesn’t vrchat seem to have considered encrypting the packaging of avatar assets?
If conditions allow for asymmetric encryption vs. symmetric encryption, then it’s best to choose avatars that need to be retrieved from the server when loaded and run the decryption process on the player side.
It is still possible to crack the EAC and mount it to a dll.
However, as technology advances, as long as we have software that prevents modification, such as technologies like TPM2.0, it is possible to move the parts that need to be protected to the kernel, or to use protectors in the kernel to protect our process or process-critical data.
However, even today’s security technologies are strong enough to prevent thieves from using root to force modifications, even if the TPM 2.0 and related components in the operating system are isolated and can be verified remotely, without extremely sophisticated means such as cheating.
All that is needed is a legitimate signature to place the “malicious” driver into an isolated kernel space, which can still be modified by force.
There’s nothing you can’t do in a legitimate operating system, as long as you’re root and have full rights to add signatures to the GUI.
It’s just that these tactics undoubtedly raise the bar significantly for all sorts of things to be done by people with insufficient skills and relevant capabilities to avoid theft, and thus the threshold for theft rises dramatically.
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Cool, if VRC implements a even more invasive anticheat like Genshin or VALORANT has i’m quitting this game. Fuck that. Ripping will always be a thing, no matter how hard you make it.
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I think the typical response has been that any encryption that’s worth doing would impact performance too much to be worth it, and at the end of the day, it still has to be decrypted to be displayed on the GPU, and as long as something is rendered, it can be ripped.
Much larger companies than VRC have tried and failed to solve the ripping problem.
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