Developer Update - 4 January 2024

Official Dev Updates
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Welcome to the first Developer Update for 2024! It’s January 4 2024!

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Today’s thumbnail image features the VRCNYE 2024 world! Although the New Year is here, you can go and enjoy the New Year world any time you like.

If you’d like to catch up, read our previous Developer Update from December 7 2023.

As noted in our previous update, this Developer Update will be relatively light because we’re coming from our winter break and New Year’s Eve celebrations! Hope you all had a good time, both in and outside of VRChat!

Important Info / Announcements

Upgrade Your Projects To 2022

The VRChat Creator Companion should already be recommending to upgrade to Unity 2022.3.6f1. Check out the upgrade guide for more info.

As a reminder, you can always check what version of Unity we’ll recommend from this page.

New Year’s Eve Celebrations

We celebrated our biggest event of the year worldwide on New Years Eve on VRChat!

VRCNYE 2024 was the most successful ever, and we welcomed over 106,000 concurrent users online! WOO!

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The VRChat New Year’s Eve world hosted 70 posters, 18 booths, 152 logos – and the Entertainment Network showed 168 videos. All of these were submitted and created by the VRChat community!

A few fun facts:

  • Hundreds of thousands of people saw the community-submitted posters, booths, logos, and videos!
  • There were more Quest/Android users online than PCVR+Desktop users online at peak, by about 5%.
  • The Entertainment Network loop was 8.5 hours long and ran for about 30 hours! It looped 3.5 times! It only crashed once!

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to the project and explored the world! We couldn’t have done it without you.

By the way, how many of you found the secret cheese shop?

What Was That Outage During NYE?

In addition to being the time of year when we normally establish new CCU peaks, NYE is also when we usually find out really well-hidden “uh oh” spots in our service stability!

We had about 45 minutes of outage during the celebrations. You couldn’t log in or join new worlds in VRChat during this outage. If you were already in a world and didn’t leave, though, you were fine staying there. Hey, where’d the Log Out button go?

It turns out that one of our partners that provides us service had issues under the load, so we’re working on reducing that particular load and other mitigations.

Can I Still See the World/Videos From NYE Now That It’s Over?

Yes!

The world category for NYE2024 will stay up until Friday, January 5, 2024, and the world will remain in VRChat for all prosperity. Hop into VRChat and check the “VRCNYE 2024” category!

If you’re reading this after that date, you can search for “VRC NYE 2024”, or use this link!

If you didn’t see it, we had a version of the New Year’s world with an unlocked video player. Use it to throw your own event!

If you want to watch the VRChat Entertainment Network all over again or just want to keep a copy for yourself, here’s the 1080p and 720p versions of the stream:

1080p (17.9GB): https://assets.vrchat.com/videos/nye2024/NYE2024-All-1080.mp4
720p (9.6GB): https://assets.vrchat.com/videos/nye2024/NYE2024-All-720.mp4

These file links will remain up and online until MONDAY, January 8, 2024.

We won’t be uploading them to YouTube or archive.org, but you can do so yourself if you’d like. It looks like some people have already backed up the video on both YouTube and Archive.org, so thank you to you!

What Else Is On the Horizon?

Sanrio Fest

Sanrio Virtual Festival returns for the third time in February, with multiple live events and community participants!

Keep an eye on our socials for details later this month for more information!

Conclusion

That’s it for this Dev Update!

We’re still returning from break and gearing up for another year of development, so there isn’t much to share regarding development since our December update.

Our next update is scheduled for January 18, 2024. We’ll announce more news about the Creator Economy in that update and have more to share on our development now that we’re up and running again.

buh byyyyeeeee

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Here’s to 2024! Hope there’s a lot of stuff planned for the avatar SDK and UDON2 finally comes out

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Will there be anything for the 10th anniversary of VRChat on the 16th?

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(okie dokie I hope in that day is really brand new stuff SDK amazing or other stuff :3)

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Can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2024!
The 200 player instance for East Coast New Years was fun and framerates weren’t bad at all after a majority of folks switched to better avatars. Fingers crossed we see larger caps as a feature this year.

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So do those providers, like, owe you guys money when outages like that happen, or do they just buy you a Slurpee and call it a day?

Also did I see that correctly? Close to or over 100k players at peak?

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Around 106k from what I saw on the stats.

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What was the actual CCU peak?

I’m really excited about the Head Chop component. Can we expect more details on this soon?
Along with that, a vague question: will more constraint replacement components come for the SDK? Replacing world constrain tricks could be really useful.

Another odd question: to continue what ZenithVal said, while avatars are the most significant performance hits to any large instance, can we expect larger caps for worlds soon? 80 people are relatively low when we saw it work pretty well at 120+(?) people at Furality (this was a bug, but it did work overall), and 200 for NYE, or maybe for larger meetups such as the Community Meetup from Squid?

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Good question! We’re planning a video, but the timing makes doing anything major challenging. We usually spend January doing a lot of planning for the year. We’ll see what we can do.

Just over 106,300.

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I think vrc made a new trailer when it launched to the Pico store.

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New trailer would be neat!

What I saw on the log site seems to close to be accurate, then. Thanks!
Insane barrier to break

Right, I kinda forgot since I’m so used to the Steam one

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Can we get the OG 50 GB copy you mentioned on Twitter? I would like to have the highest quality version rather than the AV1 transcode.

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Reguarding Unity 2022, will you ever make an official blog or video going over all the new features and changes(perhaps comparing 2019 and 2022)? I’ve looked everywhere, and it’s extremely hard to see what is even different, and so far from what I’ve seen, there just seems to not be any point converting over at the moment.

Adding to this, most of my avatar community has been warning and telling people not to upgrade yet, as some features that used to work just don’t at all in 2022. I get some plugins may not work and may need updating, however, most people’s MAIN BIG problem is being unable to make emissions work on the “Standard Light” shader; this is VERY important as this makes emissions quest compatible! The only workaround we’ve found to work is just using poiyomi, but as you know, that is PC ONLY, and we want to keep our things as quest friendly as possible!!!
Because of this one shader / emission issue, no one is moving over, or is downgraiding back to 2019, as it is just too big of a problem to put up with. (There’s at least 20 separate from scratch creators from 3 different communities that I’ve asked around about this emission issue, and no one has found a solution other than poiyomi).
Is there any unknown work around in 2022 that people just don’t know to make quest emissions work again? Because until then, I don’t think many creators on my side of the community I’m in are gonna be moving over until it’s mandatory.

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For 1080p30fps at 4 921 kb/s, it isn’t bad for AV1 encodes, tbh. I would love source quality, too, but that transcode isn’t far from being really good for quality.
Obviously, VMAF would be the judge here, but seeing the versions of quality vs. the Furality ones, they don’t fall behind an absolutely noticeable amount.

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For me the quality difference is noticeable. Lots of stuff looks blurry, blocky, and has the AV1 trait of being oily. 50 GB is not that crazy, and I preferably just want source quality, even if it’s not that much better. Every transcode step will reduce quality no matter what.

If they don’t, that’s fine I guess. But it just seems silly to not offer the OG source quality version, especially when AV1 is still not widely supported in hardware decoding.

Also, PSNR and VMAF are good for general quality. VMAF was made so Netflix could automate their quality checks to maintain a general quality. But anyone that cares about data hoarding or quality doesn’t care about that. Those tests only go so far for general quality.

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It took 4 tries but I did find all the cheese! I got to see the chicken dance. The reward was a little underwhelming but the hunt was fun!

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i was there! what was pretty funny was that vrchat itself went down at (almost) the same time. watching the graphs on a fanmade status site was also pretty funny; dropped straight from 106,000+ concurrent players online to around 9,000.

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This was my first time participating in a VRCNYE celebration, and the live stream even worked on Linux when using Glorious Eggroll’s Proton build! :tada: GE-Proton8-25, specifically.

(Valve’s official Proton Experimental wouldn’t start the live stream, but it works fine for non-live media players. Thanks again to MehStrongBadMeh for their time spent looking into Valve’s VRChat issue back when dealing with AVPro crashes - ever since yshui’s fix to dxvk, no AVPro crashes. :+1:)

Upgrading on Linux to Unity 2022 was a manual process, but once I cleared out an old compiled .dll in the avatar project and fiddled with VPM upgrade instructions and added a missing null check to VRCTools.cs (patch included in feedback), I successfully uploaded my avatar!

Hugs for everyone involved in troubleshooting the outage. :orange_heart: Though a bummer to have it happen, it became a nice recharge and refresh break.

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For now Unity3D should be updated to the latest version of 2022.3, e.g. 2022.3.16f1.

Right now Unity 2022 has some irritating problems that can be easily triggered.

Hopefully soon, after all not many people want to have to deal with Unity 2022 bugs, can’t imagine what Unity is doing with the current LTS…

A few days ago there was a 2022 LTS branch release in China with Virtual Geometry built in, I don’t know where Unity gets the energy to develop so many things…

Also I hope to see a detailed schedule of VRchat features soon instead of waiting for it.

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Yees, a huge milestone of getting to 100K CCU! Since you sai 106K I’m guessing there is no longer a need to remove 500 from that number for accuracy. But that is amazing and I did not think it would happen yet. So glad to be a part of that actual number as I was still online by that time.

Also glad my video made it in to the broadcast, poster didn’t though. Thank you.