Developer Update - 26 August 2022

I was super excited to hear there were camera improvements (infinite camera range grab, camera size adj., hide all buttons. (these three are basically just make it function like the new portable mirror, that grab system/scaling and distance is perfect.)

…and then realized the changes are going to make grabbing even harder as you can now accidentally CLOSE the camera…

If the FSR implementation doesn’t suit you, why not add AMD FidelityFX CAS (Regular sharpening shader) ? :slight_smile:

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I’m glad you guys are working on performance now! Keep up the good work, and I hope you guys do implement Nvidia VRS soon!
Though, I’m curious on if you guys plan to upgrade to a newer unity version in the future, because unity 2019 seems to run worse on newer GPUs than older (I’ve tested this myself).
I’m aware how monumental of a task it can be to upgrade unity, but I’m sure that at some point it will be nesisarry.

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Unity 2020 drops support for the OpenVR APIs in favor of Unity’s XR plugin system & OpenXR. This would require reworking their entire input system, as well as implementing missing features wholesale, per Phasedragon:

There’s other changes and removals in 2020 to my knowledge, all of which affect VRChat in some fashion as well.

Newer Unity versions may also only see gains when using the SRP, instead of BIRP upon which all VRChat content is built upon. Outside of bug-fixes, the BIRP remains mostly unchanged to my knowledge. So gains could be minimal depending.

A lot to consider.

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Appreciate the updates on the much requested camera drone and other improvements, and am actually very intrigued by the VBR implementation you’re trying out.

Personally hoping for more news regarding avatar scaling and implementation of post-processing/bloom settings, as both Cannys I believe are still being upvoted and commented on. Excited for new camera goodies, though.

Looking forward to the next update.

Also snap angles for personal mirror pls.

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Would love this

Just a small question… when are you going to make really important updates, like an anti-crash or finally protect the avatars and worlds that the community creates because your update does not protect the game at all, on the contrary I crash more often… I would really like you to protect these creations that take us so much time to create, because stealing them is extremely easy, if at least the id of the avatar was not on the site VRChat. Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

Asked is the previous post, don’t know if you saw it so just gonna ask again

Is there a reason why contact receivers still count towards avatar performance rank if they are set to local only and only running on the local machine.

I get that it’s a very small percentage that uses devices like haptic vests, but it could even benefit people that use osc as a whole, if you add either a local only contact that will never be multiplayered and don’t count towards performance rank or just make contacts that have local only checked not count towards performance rank

It’s only yourself that your hurting if you spam local only things, so i really don’t get why they count towards performance rank

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We did have a mod (Advanced Safety) that pretty much allowed you to tune specifics about what an avatar can have and inherently tune avatars that use too much VRAM. So it is absolutely possible.

It would be nice if you enabled a more advanced settings section, or had clearer details/advertisement in game on the settings.json.

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While we definitely do want to improve various aspects of our Safety and performance systems (trust me, this is a STRONG personal wish), as far as I’m aware of the functionality of the mod, it did not account for or allow you to account for video memory usage.

We’ll have it informationally provided with the next Main Menu update, and we’ve been gathering data to establish limits over time.

Keep in mind that the majority of the VRChat userbase does not have access to a config.json file.

No, this is pretty much a “we haven’t gotten back around to this yet” thing.

We’ve talked about this in basically every thread for the past few weeks, but tl;dr? “We know you want it, we’re talking about the best way to implement it without it causing issues.”

On the way, please check previous dev updates.

Yes, but doing so recklessly incurs… problems. Including making all of our current content unusable. So we need to be careful.

If you used SteamVR, then it would still work. If you use Oculus (the Rift PC client), then you’d be out of luck as I understand it.

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Tupper’s response to @codel1417 explains the reasoning better.

Loving the camera stuff.

could this be optional?
Its not uncommon to get disconnected mid-DJ stream, being able to load back into the world and have all your pre-positioned cameras stay where they were saves a lot of time during an already hectic moment.

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I support. Sharpness did an excellent job.

I’ve been using the OpenVR FSR Mod for the past year, so I’ve probably see the artifacts you’re talking about, but didn’t recognize it as an FSR issue, and it didn’t detract for the experience enough to make FSR not worth using. Could you share images of what the issue actually looks like? I’m not convinced the tradeoff is worth it. Bi-linear upscaling is just too blurry to be usable in VR, FidelityFX CAS doesn’t address the performance issue, and VRS doesn’t work for the hardware that needs it the most.

Also, is there any interest in creating an official add-on system? All these new features do not address the core issue here: the VRC team and the user-base are never going to agree on everything. A cleaner way to extend the game, especially in ways OSC cannot do or cannot do well, seems like necessity for VRC to continue to be seen as an open platform for creators. However, I do understand if that’s not the direction the VRC team intends to take the platform, there are already other products that could fill that niche better.

It has been suggested to me there are ways to apply FSR to SteamVR itself, outside of VRChat. I cannot confirm if this is true, but if you play VR, this may prove an avenue worth researching.

This is what the OpenVR_FSR mod did. It would replace the openvr.dll and function as a man in the middle vector. Later the developer behind OpenVR_FSR depreciated this mod for their newer VRPerfKit which sits in between DirectX instead which also provides Nvidia’s NIS as an alternative to FSR as on option and also provides Nvidia’s VRS. Unfortunately these aren’t mods for SteamVR directly and have to be dropped into the game folder which EAC blocks.

What would be nice is if they could whitelist things like OpenVR_FSR, VRPerfKit, and ReShade in EAC.

When will avatar search be released or do you guys have any plans for an avatar search to be in the game cause that would the most helpful feature when it comes to helping people find their avatars that they want

ReShade is whitelisted and continues to work (I think this is a global EAC thing since it’s worked in other titles I’ve tested in the past). While I’m not personally against the idea of allowing other open-source injectors like VRPerfKit, it makes sense that VRC would be somewhat averse to the idea- given it can and does break advanced content; plus it continues the trend of inherently exclusionary feature requests for the majority of VRChat users. (this specific example makes sense due to platform technicalities, but it’s still a trend that VRChat is naturally- understandably wary of)

This will always be an endlessly complicated question because it’s essentially asking for VRChat to open Pandora’s Box by putting a ton of work into providing yet another vector for people to utilize on their platform. A whole new dedicated team, extra work for the existing security team, more complications for the support team, and that’s on top of the fact it would essentially move towards driving VRChat back into the “Wild West of conflicting ethics” days the modding community heartily touted around on the backs of the entire rest of the playerbase, which VRChat ostensibly wanted to get away from in the first place- given EAC.

So I’m reasonably confident that’s never going to happen; at least… not in the way some people think it will. They’re 100% going to continue expanding existing avenues for content creators to make even more advanced content (exposing Udon functions, additional AV3 parameters, more/better OSC & MIDI input capabilities, etc.). And, as more increasingly complex freely-available public Prefabs become available, you’re going to see more “feature requests that birthed mods” trickle down into the World/User space (per VRC’s design philosophy) in such a way that intriniscally bolsters consent from both world creators and users!
(stuff like teleporting to people in-instance, noclipping, and a third-person desktop camera are all possible to have with existing tools and there are prefabs available for all of them- albeit not everything is free/open-source… yet :smirk_cat:)

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You completely misread, actually. But let me rephrase.

Someone in the Discord managed to get the OVR FSR to work directly with SteamVR itself, rather than individual games, affecting ALL VR. I don’t have any way of confirming how, but purportedly it is possible.

Official builds of ReShade are purportedly also whitelisted by Epic themselves in EAC. Other members of the discord have managed to load it with VRChat. Only custom and third party builds are blocked.

In the former case, essentially you’re hooking into the VR compositor, so it itself renders and reports a lower resolution, before being upscaled. This can still have the same negative effects as it did hooking into VRChat, but for VR players used to the effects, it won’t make much of a difference beyond affecting other VR titles.

Third person when?