Developer Update - 28 March 2024

[FlareRune]

Welcome to the Developer Update for 28 March 2024!

Today’s Dev Update thumbnail features City of Liliya by Shopow! Explore this miniature city by taking a stroll by the river or enjoying a seat at one of many restaurants.

If you’d like to catch up, you can read our previous Developer Update from 14 March.

Important Info / Announcements

Space Jam Submissions Close April 5th!

We have a World Jam ongoing until Apr 5th at 11:59pm EST / 8:59pm PST with cash and miscellaneous prizes! Read our blog post to learn more. Don’t miss out!

Ongoing Development

Web Updates!

We’ve squashed a number of bugs and made improvements to the VRChat website over the past couple of weeks. Here are some highlights:

• Messaging around Email One-Time Codes has been revised to make things clearer when logging in.
• Friend list location updates should no longer get “stuck” when a friend comes online, or changes from “ask me” or “do not disturb” to “join me” or “online”.
• Cookie consent settings have moved under the main settings page.
• The number of users in an instance is now shown in addition to the number of friends on the home page and “Join Friends” page, more closely matching the VRChat client.
• Notifications have had another round of small improvements, including full text for your response options when you “View more…”.
• Layout improvements have been made to user profile pages. It should now be more consistent and usable across screen sizes.
• Viewing/Creating/Editing public group posts for web is now available.
• “Owner Names in Udon” will now reflect the correct status upon Product creation.

Group Ownership Transfer is live!

Yes you heard read that correctly! On the website right now you can transfer a Group to someone else! Some restrictions apply, but the process is smooth and straightforward!

You can see further details about the process on the website group settings section itself, or one of our previous Developer Updates where we first talked about this.

Also, have a video!

Groups get the Everyone Role!

Now that the big client release is out we’ll be rolling out some changes to the Groups permissions system! Expect these to appear at some point over the next few days.

There are more details in a previous Developer Update, but the short summary is:

The Everyone Role: A role with permissions that apply to everyone in your group. Changes to this role immediately apply to everyone. You cannot assign this role to anyone.

Assigned on Join: A flag you can set on a role which will make that role automatically added to users when they first join the group.

These serve slightly different purposes, so use whichever makes more sense for your group!

Updates to our Canny!

We recently made some additional updates to our Canny board, where we collect feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.

You can now visit Canny WITHOUT logging into your VRChat account.

Psst - you can also enable a dark theme on our feedback board. Try it out by enabling it in your browser settings!

Conclusion

That’s it for this Dev Update! We’ve been busy with yesterday’s release, so today’s Developer Update is a little light.

Our next text update is scheduled for April 11. See you then!

[Patroll]

Shout out to whoever makes dedicated thumbnails for each of the Developer Updates. They’re fun and showcase cool worlds

[FlareRune]

That’s Gunter on our art team! I’ll pass the shoutout along :)

[willendler1993]

finally an update that’s actually good

[MondoCat]

Can you update the API docs with the group info that has been missing for… months?

Like Group, Group+, etc?

Thankssss <3

[DAG-XR]

Just hoping next for Content Tagging for Groups!

[VoicesShiature]

@FlareRune

Group Ownership Transfer is live!

awesome

[Duskstar_Shine]

Some smaller accessibility things…

1: Since the action menu got updated a little bit ago, it now made it so the gesture toggle on/off is way more buried than before. When most avatars these days rely on the gesture menu of its toggles, or even gogoloco, it’s frustrating to have to navigate through the sea of submenus in your action menu just to turn your gestures on/off.
It would be great if instead, the gesture on/off setting were part of the “quick actions” submenu (sub-action menu area where you can change your avi height).

• This is good for if your playing a game (such as murder), or putting down my controllers for a bit, so you don’t make face expressions while holding objects, or have closed eyes while your controllers are down while eating; both of those wanting to just temporarily turn off your gestures real quick. It would be much more convenient if it were where you would change your avatar height, so it’s located real close to your avatar custom toggles and such, which is the main action menu section most people are in by default espeshally with 90% of avis having gogoloco these days for non-fullbody people/quest users.
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2: Perhaps making an option (particularly for quest users) so any time you close and open the game, it clears your cache / has an option so it clears your cache after so many restarts of vrchat (say every 3 times you restart).

• Quest users are very uninformed about why they get the “memory issue”, and use other not-so-good ways of getting around it, like turning their headset on and off again to force vrc to allow more avatars to be shown, which is just gonna give them the very problem that the memory low “issue” was implemented to fix, crashing due to too many avis!
• Having it automatically do it every now and then would make it way less likely questies would need to clear it themselves, or even not encounter the issue.
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3: Loving imposters, however, I think we need a more clear indication that people are seeing an imposter. I get a lot of people now (in fact, most ._.) don’t know they are seeing my imposter, and just assume the no emissions and looking cruncher is just part of the avi, assuming just because they aren’t seeing a default generic public fallback, that it it’s just a normal avatar (the same a problem people have that upload their own custom fallbacks). Even if you’re friends, quest doesn’t un-imposter you until they fully show your avatar. I’ve had full hour long convos with people until they realised they weren’t seeing my avi and were seeing my imporster/fallback.

• I think perhaps the little fallback icon is too small and overlooked since people see it so much and are used to it. Perhaps a more obiouse thing would be good (appearing now and then, so it isn’t there all the all the time), such as; a hula-hoop around the waist of the avi, either with text on it saying “imposter” or “fallback”, or just a simple coloured hoop; or even a little sign next to or on the front, telling people it’s a fallback/imposter would be good!
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4: Lastly! We need a better/more clear way of reporting someone’s emojis as currently it’s quite unclear what to report it under if you see someone with an emoji of something that isn’t safe for work, or that’s a hate symbol (you know what symbol I mean). I’m guessing it’s under “Image”, but perhaps it would be better to have it’s own option, or sub option.
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Also question!

Do/will you ever consider making the GOGO-Loco a default thing on every avatar? (ofcourse not the newest version that has the… nsfw positions on it ._.
). It’s almost unheard of now for creators to not put gogo on an avatar, as it’s a MASSIVE accessibility feature for Quest users that can’t get/use OVR, PC players that don’t have fullbody, AND ESPESHALLY desktop players! Since without it, they just have to crouch with friends at a mirror and look natural, but with it it allows them to sit normally and naturally with their in vr friends.
I feel it’s a must have these days, which is why it’s rair to see public, or P2U avis without it!
Having it implemented would mean, (just like scaling) It can be used on almost every avi! :D
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Looking forward to the next dev blog and news on the Persistance update! ^o^ Super exciting! :D

[FlareRune]

Can you update the API docs with the group info that has been missing for… months?
Like Group, Group+, etc?
Thankssss <3

if you’re talking about https://vrchatapi.github.io/ , that’s driven by the community! We don’t maintain it! You may need to ask for help on their community Discord.

[Fax]

@willendler1993

finally an update that’s actually good

Nice! What are your favorite changes?

@MondoCat

Can you update the API docs with the group info that has been missing for… months?

Like Group, Group+, etc?

Thankssss <3

Would you like to see those docs on docs.vrchat.com? Or on https://help.vrchat.com/hc/en-us/sections/11719560642963-VRChat-Groups ?

[Fax]

By the way - we also made some changes to https://feedback.vrchat.com!

• Our feedback board now has a dark theme (if enabled in your browser’s settings)
• You can also visit it without logging into your VRChat account!

We hope this makes it easier for you to browse your feedback.

[polyjitter]

Hey, cool update! Is a bump for a-test on its way? I know you’re working on no-performance drop workarounds, but it would be nice to have if those aren’t right around the corner. Thank you <3

[docteh]

When was the last time language options for BIOs were updated? Personally I only speak english, but I stalk the canny and occasionally see requests.

In two weeks this’ll be a year old:

Add these 16 languages to the website language selection | Feature Requests |...

This was prompted by a question on reddit, but here is a 2023-07 canny also asking for Irish as an option

[unexcept]

@FlareRune

Expect these to appear at some point over the next few days.

These changes are out!

Newly created groups will already have the everyone role, but existing groups will find that the everyone role just appears over the next day or so as we backfill.

[Yukiidayo]

I really dislike the new quick menue update, since i cannot easily acess the afk detection anymore, wich really annoys me. But now i actually have to use the big menue for it

[Patroll]

It’s in Action Menu->Options->Avatar->AFK Detection. You don’t have to open Main Menu.

[big]

They were actually updated fairly recently to include a bunch of the languages being worked on for the UI localization :]
Some of the suggestions in the canny post are still missing but it’s progress nonetheless.

[genesisaria]

@FlareRune

Psst - you can also enable a dark theme on our feedback board. Try it out by enabling it in your browser settings!

Finally my eyes are saved from the infernal hellfires of discord light mode.

[peepymou]

Hii I just wanted to say that I second every point that you made 100%. I don’t think gogo loco could ever be implemented like that since it’s a community-made creation, but some features of it could be implemented like the floating or sitting/crouching without changing your actual height (like you can in desktop mode). Also as for the gestures, I think people should really start learning how to add a gesture/expressions toggle to their avatars. I don’t like disabling gestures in the action menu since it disables my hand animations, so instead I always include a toggle to disable facial expressions controlled by gestures (and options to override the expression via the expressions menu) so that way my hands still move. It’s surprisingly simply yet many people don’t incorporate it, so maybe adding a default controller with gesture controlled expressions and a parameter that’s set up as an “disable expressions” toggle would help newer people implement it.