Hello, and welcome to the Developer Update for the 30th of August, 2022!
As always, for context, try checking out our previous update, which you can find here.
Today’s content might be a bit thin – we had two releases today!
Schedule Update
As we mentioned in the last Dev Update, this is the final week we’ll be doing two Dev Updates per week! Starting on the week of 4 September, we will be reverting to one Dev Update a week, probably on Thursday.
This change in pace also allows us to cover things that are less “active development” related, such as proposals, ideas, long-range plans, or even interviews with team members. We’re also considering good ways to highlight community content that stands out.
Assuming nothing changes, we’ll have future Dev Updates on these days:
- Friday, Sept 2
- Thursday, Sept 8
- All following Thursdays
Releases and Betas
P3 Release!
Earlier today, we released 2022.2.2p3! There’s a TON of cool stuff in it, and we hope you enjoy the new features. If you want a rundown, check out our Update Notes for 2022.2.2p3!
Thank you to all the Beta testers who helped out a TON with great feedback on this Live Beta. Without your help, we wouldn’t have been able to get all these issues tracked down and solved, and the features we’ve added have only improved with your added feedback.
We like this rapid iteration process, but we need to tune it a bit so we don’t end up with Frankenstein’s monster… looks accusingly at the overly crowded Quick Menu Gear tab
Anyhow, you can find the patchnotes here. We also tried out a new format of delivering info with the Update Notes that lets us embed video and images more easily.
Getting this patch out means that we can now look forward toward the Main Menu 2.0 Open Beta! We’re hoping we can get this out later this week or early next week.
VRChat Creator Companion Released!
We’re excited to announce the 1.0 release of our Creator Companion tool!
The VRChat Creator Companion is designed to help make creating content for VRChat easier. It’s been available as an Open Beta since our “Creator Toolbox Update” announcement three months ago, and is now ready for general use.
In the future, the Creator Companion (and our VRChat Package Manager) will be the primary way to install the VRChat SDK and keep it up to date, as well as manage add-on packages like UdonSharp, ClientSim, and more.
Read more in our latest blog post, where we show off the VCC in all its glory.
If you want to dive right in, check out the Creator Companion docs.
The Creator Companion is available for download on our site.
Main Menu Beta
We talked about the new Main Menu in a Dev Update from last week, where we provided a bunch of little previews! These previews won’t have to hold you over for too much longer, though. With p3 out of the way, the focus turns to preparing the Main Menu update for a Live Beta release.
A ton of the work so far this week has been preparing for this beta! There’s a lot of technical work too, because we’re getting ready
In addition to all of the features of the new Main Menu, we’re also going to be bringing in a bunch of additional polishing and work on other features
Features in Development
Camera Updates
We’re continuing work on the camera that we mentioned last update. Right now, it’s in QA, which means that it’ll hopefully be ready to be put in alongside the Main Menu update, or soon after.
Portal Placement
This task is getting some further art polish! Here’s another look at how we’re thinking the graphic for the portal will look, as we weren’t too happy with the previous one.
Some other possible candidates we were looking at.
Rocktopus said they wanted to make it more exciting so they gave me this image too.
Other Features
We’ve talked about a lot of features in previous Dev Updates that haven’t made it out yet, like the Visual Adjustments feature or the Earmuffs avatar parameter.
Don’t worry, we didn’t forget about these! They’re sitting in a post-QA state and awaiting full integration into VRChat. They’ll make it in alongside with the Main Menu beta, or soon after.
We try to include updates when there’s improvement other than “a bug got fixed that QA reported, yay!” but towards the end of the development cycle for features, that’s kinda what ends up happening a lot.
Conclusion
That’s it for today! Once again, you’ll see the next update on Friday – after that, you won’t see another until Thursday!
Guess this means the next VRCBilliards release will end up supporting U#1.0/VCC rather than the release after that, as was originally planned. More pool tables for everyone! 
