Developer Update - 20 October 2022

Has the–legacy-fbt-calibrate option been stopped fully as it was my only good way of calibrating

Nope-- while you’re wearing FBT, open your Main Menu settings tab, it’s in the IK section.

I have a bad feeling about this. Rarely has anything good ever come from an external application controlling the files or state of another. Not to mention: Are the VRC SDK updates forced? I would hope not.

I haven’t heard about VCC until now, and I’ve finally gotten into a workflow that I like for avatar and world creation. I do not feel comfortable having a VRChat-built application controlling my Unity projects, especially since I have multiple drives, folder structures, and workflow preferences.

I would prefer if you kept providing SDK packages so more advanced/veteran users can adjust and transition at their own pace. Forcing creators to learn a new workflow for the sake of… nothing, doesn’t seem smart.

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This VCC tool is looking quite manual, I’m telling it to add a project, then I tell it to migrate the project over to the new system, now it’s giving me a fair range of versions of the VRChat SDK from 3.0.9 to 3.1.9

2022.06.03.00.04
VRCSDK3-AVATAR-2022.07.26.21.45_Public
VRCSDK3-AVATAR-2022.10.18.19.47_Public

I see a problem here, I’m not able to connect a VCC copy of avatar SDK with a non-VCC copy of avatar SDK. I updated to 2022.10.18.19.47 and I’m unable to find any mentions of 3.1.9 or vice versa.

I can see that being a big roadblock for getting some people onto the new system. I think peoples should be able to migrate from like the June SDK to a 3.x.x that is the exact same version. I guess since I was able to download both 2022.10.18.19.47_Public and 3.1.9 on the same day we can assume those are the same version of the SDK?

Edit for bonus info: June copy of SDK3.0 worked fine to upload earlier today for what that is worth :smiley:

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@Saigo this issue on feedback.vrchat seems best to upvote

i have concerns about the VCC being forced for updates so soon, especially when the tool is only in a beta state now without its UI being finalized. but also “in 2023” could range anywhere from Jan 1 to Dec 31, an idea of what quarter is being targeted could help

content creators have to make specific step by step and click by click guides for avatars they sell for the end user to upload, and this will not only break those with minimal announcement to the wider community, but i don’t think those users are going to switch to the VCC right away. instead people will be passing around the SDK in discord servers and people will upload their avatars manually as they have been because it’s all they know.

i don’t doubt the tool can be a good companion, and i for certain understand wanting people to upload with the newest sdk rather than have year old versions still in use, but i feel the rollout may be very bumpy

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Q1 day 1.

A huge problem we’ve been dealing with for years is people doing exactly that-- passing around old, busted SDKs that are missing features or fixes.

Old SDKs cause a massive amount of problems for both new and seasoned creators, and there’s a good reason “please update your SDK!” is the first item in our troubleshooting list. It’s a huge headache for our creator onboarding, too.

We realize things will be changing up. Change is always hard. This one’s worth it, for a bevy of reasons, not just the one I cited above.

Have you tried it out? It’s been in development since last year, released into Beta in May, and has had a huge amount of smoothing out and fixing since then. I’ve used it to migrate old SDK3 Avatar and World projects myself, and even used it to “rescue” a project that I had borked completely with my own ham-fisted methods.

For a variety of reasons (many of which we talk about in the Blog post), we need the VCC. It represents an evolution in the VRChat creator pipeline and permits us to do a ton of things we haven’t been able to do up until now.

“It’ll be rocky and rough to start” is what I’d normally say, but it’s already past a lot of the rocky stage. Not saying its perfect right now, but it will not get better without people getting involved, using it, giving feedback, and figuring out how it could be better.

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i did try it for worlds some months ago, but i’ll be giving it a go for avatars soon now too

thanks for the clarity on the launch date, too!

It’s changed and improved a TON in the past few months. Please try it again!

So there’s a feature from the April dev stream from last year that I’m still curious about whenever it drops, and that’s the world persistence/player persistence. Partly cause of how much of an important the feature it would be for certain VRChat worlds. So will the feature drop sometime either near the end of this year or somewhere in like the 1st to 2nd quarter of 2023. Would love to know.

Not planned for this year, but definitely still planned. No ETA currently set.

Hello @tupper I’m interested in having some feedback about this question as well, I’m mostly using Linux nowadays, I’d rather not have to go back to Windows just to update the projects.

Your question’s partially answered here: CLI | VRChat Creator Companion

Short answer: Yes, updating your SDK via the vpm tool works fine on MacOS right now. Linux isn’t tested, but it likely works fine as well with a bit of manual config editing.

Notably, we don’t directly support Linux or MacOS content development for VRChat, but we don’t go out of our way to break it and we try to do things in ways that don’t make it harder. We just don’t have the resources to directly support creation tools on more than Windows right now.

The UX/UI upgrade to the VCC will make it completely cross-platform, as far as I know.

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Thanks for the feedback, it is appreciated :slight_smile:

It’s to have exclusive distribution over the SDK, that’s pretty much the unspoken reason I feel. Whether it’s to keep people from using a modded SDK or to be able to implement features that only work if they’re the soul way to distribute it [ie. creator verification, ability to upload to the creator economy, enforce copyright, charging for uploads (which I believe is unlikely), etc].

The ability to have everything more easily set up and reliably updated with more tools is nice, but the main point is to obfuscate their SDK behind proprietary software so they have more control of it.

I’ve migrated a couple projects over, and it’s been relatively easy-going, haven’t had issues with it, but I feel like people need to keep in mind that this move is motivated not purely to make creation easier, it’s also to have more control.

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Heads up, there’s still issues bringing up the social pages of people, usually when trying to see the page of an avi’s creator, gotta do it twice in order for it to work. Also if you have a friends social page up in the main menu when switching worlds, you have to open up the page again in order to get an option to invite them.

Also Avi rescaling, camera animations, and freezeframe when

This is incorrect and misrepresents our intent as illustrated in our blogs, docs, and posts here.

The intent, heavily summarized, is to create a set of tools that maintain themselves, provide better documentation on themselves, and help users set up projects and get started more easily. additionally, VCC will make it possible to find powerful and commonly used community created tools without digging through GitHub pages or Discord servers.

We also want to make it much easier to avoid extremely common issues, usually arising from years-out-of-date SDK packages, and to make migrations far easier.

We have no intent of obfuscating the SDK or it’s processes, and certainly not in a way that makes it harder to work with or to use.

Please exercise care with your wording. People tend to believe things at face value on the internet, even when surrounded with evidence to the contrary.

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Thank god, going threw the menus to find all this stuff is a pain.

Thank you for keeping MacOS and Linux in mind even though you don’t have the resources to fully support it.

I’m exclusively on Linux for both the VRChat client in VR (via GloriousEggroll’s Proton) and using the VRChat SDK (native), so knowing the team is aware of this minority and having a path forward (even if it’s more effort for us to set up) means a lot. :orange_heart:

Edit 2022-10-26: Basic commands seem to be working!

I followed the macOS instructions as suggested for Linux, also using sudo apt install dotnet6 as I’m on (K)Ubuntu 22.04. I’ll look into actually migrating soon™.

user@hostname:~$ vpm check project "$HOME/path/to/digitalfox-Avatar/"
[22:15:32 INF] Project is LegacySDK3Avatar
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Excellent! Yeah, the core is just a .NET application, the UX is just a wrapper around its functionality. I’m glad its working for you, thanks for doing some testing!

Timely anecdote: During the 2022.4.1 open beta update we had yesterday, we actually had to scramble to fix an SDK issue that the VCC would’ve been able to handle without an issue, but it isn’t considered “the standard” yet. :cry: So we had to take some extra steps to address the problem.

I know people will resist change even if it is for the better (sometimes especially if it is for the better, I’ve noticed) because change can be workflow-disrupting. However, I’ve been using VCC for my personal projects for the better part of this year and it didn’t change anything about my workflow, aside from making it very easy to grab SDK updates. :S

I hope everyone else’s migration goes as easily as mine! We should probably make a separate forum just for VCC issues. Maybe in the “Help!” section.

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