Welcome to the Developer Update for July 31.
Today’s featured world is Paradisa by Fins. It’s PC only – but really detailed! That guy’s really good, someone should hire him…
Announcements
The VRChat Film Jam is Ongoing!
It’s still going! You can find all the details in our blog post, found here.
As a note, we recently added an FAQ. Go check it out!
Summer Festival Jam Updates
Summer is here! It’s been here. Trust me, I know. I’m sweating so much. Help.
The Summer Festival Jam winners will be announced on August 1 at 1PM PST! Keep an eye on our socials and #vrchat-jams section of Discord. We’ll also be announcing a new avatar row for the Avatar Marketplace that will run from Aug 18 - 29.
But wait, you thought we were done?
In collaboration with some of our amazing Groups on VRChat, we’ll be featuring avatars from the jam and celebrating summer festival vibes. You might even catch a developer at one of these events!
(No, not Tupper. There’s more than just Tupper on the team you know.)
This will be happening from Aug 1 to the 15th. Keep an eye out! We’ll be RT’ing events on our Twitter account, so be on the lookout for cool events you’d like to join!
2025.3.1 is in Open Beta!
Yeah – it is! Go check it out. We’ve got an Event Calendar in there and everything. You can find the full notes here.
The Creators Roadmap Has Been Updated!
Woo! We did it! The Creators Roadmap for July 2025 can be found here!
You should read the whole thing, but here are some top-level items:
- Since the last update, we’ve shipped a bunch of features:
- Build & Publish on multiple platforms, automatically
- Build & Test on Quest and mobile
- Toon Standard, for mobile!
- Per-platform overrides!
- VRCCameraSettings!
- Network events!
That wasn’t all, though. We also made a bunch of other changes since the last update, which you can find in the full roadmap post.
So, what’s new? A lot!
Things you’ll see added include Steam Audio, PhysBones for Worlds, VRC Constraints for Worlds, and VRC Contacts for Worlds. More on some of those later!
You’ll also find an update on Soba. And there’s some other stuff in there, too. We aren’t listing everything here! So yeah, check it out!
PhysBones, Contacts, and Constraints in the WHAT NOW?
Worlds. C’mon, keep up.
Anyway! Let’s get into it.
We’re working towards adding support for PhysBones, Contacts and VRChat Constraints to the Worlds SDK! This would allow worlds in VRChat to use these components.
Traditionally, they’ve only been usable in avatar projects.
If you’re not familiar with what these components are, here’s a quick summary of each one and how they could be used in a world:
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PhysBones are chains of objects that physically respond to motion and collisions.
- They can hit against colliders in the world and on users, and users in VR are able to grab them and lock them to a certain pose when the PhysBone allows it.
- In worlds, PhysBones could be useful for anything that needs secondary motion, and would offer another way of interacting with a world to improve its immersion.
-
Contacts are invisible triggers that can signal when a particular object enters and leaves them, similar in concept to Unity’s trigger collision system.
- In worlds, the main use case we’re expecting for these is that you’ll be able to create Contact receivers that can react to Contact senders attached to the avatars of users in your world, allowing them to interact with objects in an immersive way
- For example, by reaching out and touching a Contact receiver set up to detect the avatar’s hand.
- In worlds, the main use case we’re expecting for these is that you’ll be able to create Contact receivers that can react to Contact senders attached to the avatars of users in your world, allowing them to interact with objects in an immersive way
-
VRChat Constraints are components that can automatically move, rotate and scale objects in relation to one or more other objects, designed to be largely the same as Unity’s own constraints system.
- The original purpose of this system was to improve performance and enable cross-platform compatibility for constraints on avatars.
- When used in worlds, they’ll offer some additional functionality not available to Unity constraints such as freezing an object in place, and they should also provide some performance benefit compared to manually moving transforms around every frame via Udon.
Have some clips of prototypes!
In the context of a world, we’re also planning to integrate these components with Udon.
This would allow Udon scripts to both modify the properties of an existing component (for example, changing a PhysBone’s properties like its pull or stiffness) and receive events from them in response to things happening (for example, a Contact sender entering or leaving a Contact receiver).
This would be a slightly different approach to how these components work on avatars, where they set parameters on the avatar’s animator instead to signal when things happen.
Supporting all of these tools for use in worlds has been a community request for quite a while (especially PhysBones!), so if you’re a world creator, please feel free to let us know how you’d want to use these components in your worlds to help keep us informed as we work on integrating them.
You’ll Never Leave…
In 2025.3.1, we’ll be adding a “Days in VRChat” option to the clock.
You wouldn’t abandon VRCat, would you?
More Camera Updates!
We’re adding a few things to the VRChat Camera!
For one, we’ll be adding a bunch of tooltips – hopefully adding context to most buttons, toggles, and sliders.
We’re also adding a new slider that lets you adjust the camera brightness. Additionally, exposure can be animated with the Camera Dolly.
More Quality of Life Changes!
We’re always looking for little ways to improve your experience, and today we’re happy to bring you 3 at once!
These all came out of our recently concluded internal “Summer Jam”, where everyone working at VRChat can take a week to work on whatever they feel like.
Clickable Camera UI Text
A very simple change that will make a specific set of people happy: You can now click or tap the status indicators on the built-in camera’s screen to cycle between available options.
Better Launch Link Handling
Have you ever tried to click the “Launch World” button on the website? If you have, then probably only once. The current behavior of always launching a new instance of the VRChat client is less than ideal, especially if you are already in VR.
No more! Instead, if you already have VRChat running, the button will now simply direct you to that instance’s menu page.
Microphone Test Button
Are you a narcissist? Love hearing yourself talk? Or maybe you are just acutely aware that microphone problems are the number one thing leading to smashed keyboards for anyone who ever had to sit through a Zoom call.
Well, good news! You will soon be able to click a dedicated button to test your microphone, by playing back a short recording to you. This way, you can make sure all of your incessant meowing “important talking points” are heard properly.
Comes with a neat UI!
Wanna Go Fast?
For those of you who prefer a cleaner, less animated UI experience, we’re adding a new option to reduce menu animations. You can see what that looks like here:
This should be a nice accessibility feature – as well as a way to make things a little faster for those that prefer a more streamlined experience.
Avatar Pedestals Compatible with Marketplace Avatars in 2025.3.1!
In 2025.3.1 (which is currently in Open Beta!) world creators can add avatars from the Marketplace to pedestals. You don’t have to be the original uploader of the content to be able to put it on a pedestal in your world.
When the pedestals are interacted with by users, one of two different things will happen:
- If they own the avatar, they’ll switch into it!
- If they don’t own it, the Marketplace page for that particular avatar will pop up.
This should provide an additional way for creators to advertise their wares in their own worlds – or have their friends do it for them!
Server Processing… for Worlds!
You might’ve noticed that when you first load an avatar, you sometimes see a “Server Processing…” step. This process helps us categorize an avatar in numerous ways. It also helps us catch avatars that are particularly, uh, rough from a performance standpoint.
We’re bringing that to worlds – although it will behave a little differently.
Unlike avatars, you shouldn’t notice any increase in load times for worlds.
With that said, there could be some strange edge cases where worlds will fail checks when they shouldn’t. We’ve fixed most of these cases during the ongoing beta, but if you notice strange behavior, you should let us know.
When you are booted from a world that’s having an issue, it will be clear in your logs that this happened. If this is happening in your world, send the world ID to our User Support team!
Web Updates!
A small roundup from the web team for this update!
- Improved our image uploader to avoid increasing image sizes.
- You should see unexpected errors about images being too large much less often!
- Launched the Events Calendar feature and various bits of user interface for it!
- You can read more about it in the previous Dev Update!
- Also some late-breaking bug fixes
- This is still in beta – but it’s there!
- Fixed an issue where certain linked tags wouldn’t go to the search UI correctly.
- Fixed an issue where the Age Verification status card suggested that a user whose age was verified to be under 18 could choose to display it on their profile.
Conclusion
…and that’s it! We’ll see you again in two weeks, on August 14!