Welcome to the Developer Update for January 30.
Today’s featured world is Ritual by DrMorro.
Leeeet’s get into it!
Announcements
Age Verification is Now Available for VRC+ Subscribers!
Have VRC+? You can now get Age Verified via Persona! You can read more here.
We strongly suggest reading the FAQ (which can be found in the linked blog post above).
One question that we’ve received a bunch that isn’t answered in that blog post, however, is what our plans are for the future.
The honest answer? We aren’t ready to say yet! That’s why it’s listed as Early Access!
How Age Verification works could change in the future. It might be tied to VRC+ forever… or maybe it isn’t tied to anything at all. We don’t know yet and so we’re leery about making any absolute statement.
There are a lot of questions that need to be answered behind the scenes, and some of those can only really be answered (intelligently!) with data, collected from the general response to Age Verification going out to a lot more users.
HTC VIVE is Looking for Avatar Creators!
Showcase your work on VIVE’s socials for their Spotlight Sunday! See the YouTube video description for submission guidelines.
To submit, please join the Discord (Join the VIVERSE Discord Server!) and DM “Madeline”/@syafire for details!
The Next Jam
We’ll be announcing our new World Jam on February 24!
Want to discuss your excitement or plans for the next Jam? Join our Discord and check out the #vrchat-jams channel!
Development Updates
We’ve Updated the Experience of Uploading Avatars and Worlds
We’ve made a handful of design revisions, focusing on improving the visual hierarchy and information presented in our SDK’s UI. We’ve wanted to create more prominent, understandable headers to emphasize key interactions, in order to make the process clearer.
Our goal was to make the overall process more understandable to novice creators and more streamlined for experienced creators.
The Build section has been reworked to more clearly define the various build and publish options, and to allow creators publish to multiple target platforms at a time, including mobile. We also added new tools to help us scale the SDK with more options in the future, like:
- We’ve improved the way you can capture thumbnails with a more responsive preview.
- We’ve made it easier to choose & manage the content warnings and tags for your creations (giving us more room to also add any new options in the future).
These design changes will hopefully help new creators feel more comfortable uploading content, optimize the workflow for advanced creators, and help us more easily add new features and options in the future.
Oh and one more thing…
We’ve Added Multi-Platform Build Automation to the SDK
You can now select multiple platforms you’d like to target when building content! The SDK will build them in the order you select. If any of the selected platforms fail, you’ll be able to see why under, “Review Any Alerts.”
(Don’t worry – if one fails, the others can still progress!)
Small reminder that if the iOS option is grayed out and not clickable in the platforms dropdown, you need to follow these steps to install the iOS module via Unity Hub.
After that, you will be able to select iOS as the target platform in the platforms dropdown of the SDK Build panel.
ClientSim Quality of Life Changes
We’ve made it easier to hide the ClientSim Pause Menu when you don’t need it.
ClientSim’s settings window, seen above, now includes a “Hide Menu on Launch” entry, which will automatically close the menu after entering Play Mode. Note that you will see it flash on the screen for a brief moment before disappearing, this is currently necessary to set it up properly but we’ll remove this in the future if possible.
We’ve also added logic to close this menu when you move your Player in the editor, the same way that the QuickMenu closes when you move in VRChat. In the video below, we call up the menu and then dismiss it by moving forward, three times in a row so you can see the effect.
Thanks to NGenesis for suggesting the menu setting and submitting a PR that inspired the rest of this work!
We’re Updating the Main Menu!
Hey there, it’s Fervid and I’ve got some exciting news! A brand new Main Menu layout is headed your way!
We couldn’t help but notice that the tabs on the bottom of current Main Menu were becoming really crowded. For mobile users, and truthfully, for our VR users too, these tiny tabs were starting to become uncomfortable to use.
They also muddied up the user experience for players that weren’t as familiar with all of those icons as our veteran players were. These tabs generally made it hard to locate the core features of VRChat.
I mean, just look at all those tabs!
Our solution? Why don’t we take some of those tabs and push them somewhere else!
Introducing the new “Universal Header!”
We’ve extended the vertical size of the Main Menu a bit and have added a new header that houses a few of navigation buttons. This header design should look pretty familiar as we added a similar header to the Quick Menu a while back.
On the left side of the header, you’ll see your user profile information. Clicking in this region will bring you to your profile page.
In the middle of the header, we’ve added a clock to the Main Menu. Truly innovative! What will they think of next? This clock element will respect your clock style settings that you can set by clicking on the Quick Menu’s clock.
On the right side, you’ll find buttons that link to common Main Menu pages including the Search page, Notifications, the Safety Settings, Help & Info and your General Settings. You can also click on the VRChat Credits box to access the Marketplace page.
This new header has allowed us to free up a ton of space for the bottom tabs. We’ve greatly enlarged the tabs that we feel are the most important experience elements of VRChat and have added localized text labels to each one. This should hopefully make it a bit easier to “focus on the fun” and keep newer users from being overwhelmed by a busy row of perplexing icons. This should also generally make it more comfortable to use these tabs on all platforms, especially mobile.
We’re expecting these new menu changes to ship on version 2025.1.2. Please let us know what you think about the new layout when it goes out to open beta!
Here’s a couple more shots of the new Main Menu with some fancy themes and backgrounds:
…Oh! And one last thing! While I was here, I made a small adjustment to Streamer Mode.
If you have Streamer Mode enabled, your VRChat Credit balances on all top-level pages (as in, pages that take 0-1 clicks to get to) will be censored! This should help give our content-creating friends a touch more privacy!
Hope you enjoy the new menu layout! Apologies in advance for shaking up those years of UI muscle memory! The new layout took a little bit of getting used to myself, but it didn’t take long. Once you’re used to the new layout, it’s tough to go back!
(Pictured: Fervid givin’ you a thumbs up. Hell yea. Thanks Fervid.)
Conclusion
That’s it for this Developer Update! We’ll see you again February 13!
