I have red the feedback on “Booping” in the comments and can only approve the criticism so far.
PROS:
It is a nice gimmick.
CONS:
With a clear lack of direct communication between users aka direct messages or chats, this feature is making it even more apparent that there is a lack of said messaging service. Almost all users still have to rely on external software like discord as a proper messaging service (even for groups) to organize a get together or event. The messaging in VRChat is done by attaching a message to an invite, which was appropriately called a “wierd ritual” in the comments and has a lot to be desired for in a game called “VRChat” (emphasis on “Chat”).
There are also a lot of questions regarding the moderation of said feature and while I am okay with it not being a “off-by-default” feature, I can imagine that this feature can get rather annoying or even be abused. Imagine you are a streamer and someone sents you a custom image with NSFW content on it, absolute horror.
As I know that this was rather harsh criticism, I would like to re-iterate that I personally love the game and just offer my sincerest concerns as feeback.
TLDR;
Booping → Nice feature. Needs controls to moderate. An actual chat would be nice.
I just find the whole thing strange. VRChat staff values development time and have pushed off features due to social concerns or dev time before.
But in this case, these are super blatant flaws that weren’t even considered, and are kind of not being directly addressed in this thread. Plus, I don’t understand what actual value this is providing to VRChat, both in community + revenue (besides the mention of VRC+ for custom boop emojis).
It’s almost like VRChat is encouraging users to stay on DnD, as well as unfriend or block other users. This feature in its current iteration is the antithesis of this platform.
Revisiting this now that I’ve seen other people’s thoughts on the booping system.
I agree with the sentiment that in its current state, booping just feels like something that will end up cluttering our notification feeds because there’s no way to actually convey any useful information through them unless you own VRC+. (But even then, I don’t think people are going to waste half of their emote slots on boop-specific emotes :/ )
I can already see myself receiving boop notifications and closing them immediately without acknowledging them because there’s no precedent for taking them ‘seriously’.
I personally really think this should just be reworked into an extremely primitive message-sending system that you happen to be able to attach emojis to as a novelty. Not sending emojis as the entire feature.
i’m liking what i see with the boops upcoming, i’d of course also enjoy a message system but even just at this level it’ll be very convenient for a quick in-game poke from friends
In the current state, I don’t think boops are a good idea. Unless it were to re-brand to a short messaging system, with quite the customization available, I think it’s best to focus on other things.
My main concern is that this is just going to turn into another chatbox thing.
If we are given the option to turn them off and people use them in annoying ways, people WILL turn them off.
Then what happens to the people who actually want to use it for its intended purpose? You just can’t? It’s exactly what happened with chatboxes and I don’t want it to happen again.
Features shouldn’t be implemented in a way that incentivizes users to turn them off. I’d rather it be tossed back in the oven and made into something everyone can make use of.
I don’t want to come across as cynical either, to be clear! I think something like this has a lot of potential if done right.
between my friends we already have a shared understanding of a given emoji meaning a certain thing, as a specific example there is an emoji that means “please rescue me from this social situation”
so i’m liking that this would allow for that message to be more quickly sent than opening the desktop overlay, a chat application, sending it, and then the recipient opening their overlay to view it
having proper messages would also be a plus, but even just the emoji gets a message across!
Again, I don’t mean to be cynical or anything with my feedback. I just don’t want to see this feature come out half baked, I think it could use more time in development. I think if done properly with a lot of communicating with us and devs, it can become a feature that makes sense, is useful, and is non-intrusive. I would rather get the rough edges sorted out now versus later.
The VRC Constraints look so good!
The simplified world constraint is a great addition but it may result in an increase of active constraints (Though does it matter if it’s really performant?) Currently, we make items we wish to constrain children of a world constraint with their own constraints that are disabled upon dropping. So while you might have 5 on the avatar, only the world constraint is active along with the prop you’re adjusting in world space. (While all the others are frozen with their constraints off already)
Could you unlock the fields of Position/Rotation at Rest for animation? Currently we CAN animate these fields on standard constraints even if the constraint is locked if we enable the debug inspector. (Position/Rotation Offset on sources too, but that may be free edit?)
Thanks for the updates! Hopefully you consider at least 100 vrcconstraints on pc for poor rank or better. That would allow a lot of neat multi-limb avatars and camera systems to still be viable.
I’m part of a small group who’ve been working on an optimized centaur-type avatar that uses FIK and about 95 regular unity constraints and some clever component ordering and toggling; we’re seeing 100+ fps with 6 in world. Hope vrc constraints provide a big performance uplift and unlock more flexibility in our work!
Have you done other tests, like 20, 30, 40+ people?
Since animators are not culled in the avatar hider, I would be interested to see the performance at that scale (plus what processor is being used), and then compare it to the new VRC constraints.
please give me an option to disable this feature completely without having to use an anti social status such as do not disturb, others may like it while I personality do not like its concept and see way more vectors for abuse than actual good, all this feature radiates is the need for a proper messaging service. its more seeming like just a repeat of chatboxes having to mute someone completely to hide their annoying chatboxes which in most cases is not enough when you do want to talk with them but not see a spammy chatbox sharing useless data (spotify current song / hardware info, etc etc)
No mentioned of the high European shipping cost from the merch store. orz
What’s the point of the boop? ._.
(Seems annoying, luckily I don’t think people would send it to me. I’m worried this is the start of bad downgrades for VRC, so far it’s only been upgrades and I love that.)
IMO on-by-default with a blanket option to turn off for everyone would be the best way to handle this… there’s generally two categories of users with regards to why they friend people; one uses the friends list as… well, a friends list (as Tupper said, “why would [someone in this category] even be friends with someone who would send a nefarious boop to begin with”), and the other category uses it to manage publicity and have people join off them when DJing or whatever. A simple “turn off boops” option would allow those who are more sensitive in the second category to not end up seeing things they don’t want to see, while not making the feature less useful for the rest of us.
Going to second that it should ideally be implemented as a rudimentary message system (being able to attach up to 100 characters to the boop, for instance)