Happy Leap Year!
This Developer Update was turned into a video, which you can find below:
Developer Update Video Transcript
Howdy! It’s Strasz from the VRChat team. Today, we’re going to be talking about a bunch of stuff: more Creator Economy updates, how we’re going to be surveying users to get better feedback, Udon 2, persistence, and future updates to VRChat Plus. Yeah – there’s a lot! So let’s get into it!
First, let’s talk about the Creator Economy!
CE Updates
As we mentioned in our update last month, we’ve opened up applications for new sellers! We’ve received a ton of interest so far, and are currently in the process of inviting new people into the program. We’re excited to get more people making cool things into the Creator Economy!
We also wanted to reiterate that we’re working hard on expanding some of the features for folks that are already in the program. Last month, we already touched on some of those features – like one-time purchases and automatic subscriptions – and we’ve been making good progress on their implementation. We’re hoping to have them out in the first half of this year, but of course, things could change.
But let’s get into some of that new stuff I mentioned earlier!
Udon 2
Let’s talk about Udon 2!
As you can probably guess, Udon 2 is the successor to our scripting runtime, Udon. It’s been in development for quite a bit, and we’re happy to announce that it will be entering closed beta very shortly!
Udon 2 will be a powerful upgrade for creators, bringing support for most of C# to scripting for worlds. For those of you that are already familiar with Udon, this means things like allowing the use of Lists, custom classes that aren’t Udon Sharp Behaviors, static variables, and much more.
Udon 2 should enable world creators to develop more engaging experiences with less effort. Even if you aren’t a creator, this will likely dramatically improve your VRChat experience: you can expect cooler, more interactive, higher-performance worlds once creators start using Udon 2.
We’ve been pretty quiet on the development of Udon 2 so far, but as I said a second ago, it’ll be entering into closed beta shortly. With that said, there’s no timeline right now for an open beta, as we’ll want to work with our closed testers to incorporate as much feedback as possible before bringing it to a larger testing group. Keep your eyes open, though, as we’ll be updating you on the progress of Udon 2’s development in our biweekly updates on the Ask forums.
(Oh – and speaking of the Ask forums, if you are a Creator, you should check them out – we’ve recently revamped them. There’s a link in the description!)
Udon 2 isn’t the only thing entering closed beta soon, though! There’s also… Persistence!
Persistence
Persistence gives world creators the ability to save certain bits of information to individual users. This allows users to essentially load into a world, and immediately have that world recognize them.
On a small scale, world creators could use this system to allow users to save their settings in their world. So, every time you jumped into your home world, for example, all of your post-processing, chair, and mirror settings would automatically load in.
World creators could also use this system to create inventory and XP systems. If you wanted to, you could theoretically create a whole full-featured RPG in VRChat.
Some of the possibilities these new features unlock go far beyond the examples here. We anticipate that creators will use persistence in novel ways that we can’t quite predict – and we’re really excited to see that happen in real-time!
For the more technical minded folks out there that might want to know how persistence works, this is done through both Player Data and Player Objects.
Player data is a synced and persistent key-value store, perfect for storing preferences and progress that you want any script in your world to access easily, from anywhere.
Player objects are, well… objects which get automatically instantiated (with networking) for every player in the instance, similar to existing player pool prefabs and all their various uses. All synced data inside of player objects is also persistent by default, though you can disable that per-object if you want sync but not persistence.
Once again, as mentioned above, Persistence will also be entering closed beta soon, but just like Udon 2, we don’t have a specific timeline for when it will reach open beta.
We’ve been building both of these systems alongside a lot of conversations with our creator community, and we anticipate a lot of feedback as they get a chance to play with them for the first time.
User Research
We’re doing research… on you!
We want to make sure that we’re doing things that make VRChat better for everyone. To do that, we’re going to start using user surveys to better understand who our users are, what they love about VRChat, what they use it for, what they value, and what’s missing that could make their experience better.
This isn’t going to be about bugs or feature requests (those should still go on our Feedback forums), though – think more design and user experience stuff. We’ll be conducting surveys, interviews, studies, and more.
The purpose of all of this is to collect data to make VRChat better. Any information we collect will be explicitly taken with user consent (meaning, you’ll have to sign up to participate) and only used to improve VRChat. We’ll be sending out invites to this sort of thing frequently in the future, but if you’d like to volunteer to get your voice heard now, you can check out the link in the description.
VRChat Plus Improvements
Finally, let’s round things out by talking about something a little different – improving VRChat Plus!
One of our goals for this year is to give folks that subscribe to VRChat Plus a little bit more value, and we’ll be doing that by adding in a few extra features throughout the year. Two of the things we’re looking at right now are increasing the amount of custom emoji slots and adding in animated emoji! Both of these things have been requested quite a bit last year, so we’re hoping to get them into the client in the first half of the year.
That’s not all, though. While we aren’t ready to share anything just yet, we have a few ideas for how to give VRChat Plus subscribers a bit more bang for their buck, so stay tuned!
Conclusion
That’s all for this Developer Update! As always, if you’d like to keep up on the day-to-day development of VRChat, I strongly suggest keeping an eye out for our biweekly updates, which are posted to our Ask forums.
As usual, thanks so much for loving VRChat as much as we do.
We’ll have more details in our persistence documentation!