Welcome to the Developer Update for 28 September 2023!
The featured world for this Dev Update is Archipelago | アーキペラゴー, by Artsy Glitch. Global warming hit kinda hard didn’t it
If you’d like to catch up, you can read our previous Developer Update from 14 September.
Important Info / Announcements
Spookality 2023!
Spookality is upon us! Submissions for both avatars and worlds are already open, and will close on October 16th at 12PM PT. Make sure you get yours in before submissions close!
Avatars and Worlds will be showcased between October 20th and November 11th. Avatars will be shown in the default VRChat Home with a special additional section, and worlds will have their own World Category where you can browse through.
VRChat 2023.3.3 Open Beta
The latest version of VRChat, 2023.3.3, is currently in Open Beta! Check out the full patchnotes here.
If you’d rather wait, our Patchnote Video will make a return alongside the Live release!
Unity 2022 Open Beta
Our Open Beta is currently testing a version of VRChat running on Unity 2022! This is a change from our current version, which is on Unity 2019.
No reuploads are required. All content from Live VRChat works in this build.
A 2022 SDK isn’t available yet. Stay on 2019.
Open Beta will remain on Unity 2022 going forward. This will allow users to use and test Unity 2022 while playing VRChat normally, so you can easily find and then report bugs.
If you have content you’ve uploaded to VRChat that you want to make sure works fine after a Unity upgrade, test it NOW. We want to minimize the number of people who say “wtf my stuff is broken!! nobody told me this was happening!!!” on Live release day… Tell your friends, tell everyone.
Submit a bug report if something’s broken. If you don’t report it, it won’t be fixed.
Rough Roadmap
Here’s an approximate plan of what you should expect.
- Unity 2022 VRChat is in Open Beta right now, and will stay on Unity 2022 even if future test builds need to go out.
- At some point during the 2022 Open Beta, we’ll push a Beta 2022 SDK and provide migration steps. It should be fairly straightforward, especially with the Creator Companion handling it!
- Eventually, once we’re OK with the state of Open Beta, we’ll push to Live.
New Web Profiles
In our previous Dev Update, we talked about new web profiles on the VRChat Home site.
It’s live now! Go check it out, it’s very clean
Ongoing Development
New Search Algorithm
Search is now using a different algorithm, which is already live! You hopefully are seeing more relevant results in your worlds searches.
In particular, we’ve worked on improving exact matches, multi-word searches, and tweaked the overall balancing of text matching with popularity. Search is still under ongoing development right now, so things may continue to change!
You’ll also be seeing a small UI update coming soon to make it easier to search for worlds, avatar worlds, and users in one place:
Conclusion
That’s it for this Dev Update! A little leaner than usual, but we’ve got our heads down hard at work on lots of big projects like the Creator Economy and VRChat Mobile.
Our next update is scheduled for October 12th, 2023. See you then!