Hello! Welcome to the latest VRChat Developer Update for August 5, 2022.
If you’d like, you can check out yesterday’s Dev Update here.
The features described below may not be released yet unless otherwise noted, and may change before they become available to users.
2022.2.2p2 Release
We’ve made some fixes to the 2022.2.2p2 verison of VRChat and released it! It’s out NOW! You can check out the patch notes here.
That means Horizon Adjust, Personal Mirror, Movable Main Menu, and more are all available in VRChat, on all platforms, right now.
Let’s go back and talk about what these features are. If you’ve been keeping up with these posts, this will all look pretty familiar!
All of the features in this update are on Quest and PC. All of the features in this update are free, and none of them require VRChat Plus.
Movable Main Menu
This feature allows you to move around the Main Menu!
After opening the Main menu, hover around beneath the menu to find the handle. Grab on with the Grip button, and you can move it around.
Also, you can find an option in the Quick Menu to change where the Main Menu opens up – either directly in front of you, or in the old orientation.
Horizon Adjust
This feature lets you change your “horizon” such that you can use VRChat completely while in bed or lying down.
It works in both standing/sitting 3-point tracking modes, as well as with full body tracking. It’s worth noting that behavior while calibrating in full body tracking can be a little strange, and it’s possible that some setups might experience some strangeness.
If you’re having difficulty calibrating while your horizon is adjusted, try to make sure that you’re lying down completely flat.
As a warning, this mode can be disorienting – use it with care!
Dedicated Copy/Paste Buttons
This feature adds copy and paste buttons to the VRChat keyboard – and makes the keyboard appear when you click inside a VRCInput field! This makes it very easy to paste video URLs into video players.
Personal Mirror
This feature allows you to spawn a local-only mirror that you can grab, move around, resize, adjust transparency, and more! Find it in your Action Menu.
We’ve got more improvements to the personal mirror on the way – in fact, some of the improvements are available in the Live Beta we’re also putting out!
Custom Home Instance Type
Some users want to load into a different instance type other than Invite.
So, now you can set your Home world to be any instance type – Invite, Invite+, Friends, Friends+ and even Public.
You can adjust this in your Quick Menu.
Additionally, we decided to add an option when you click “Go Home” that allows you to return to the default VRChat home world. Likewise, if your home world fails to load, you’ll also be sent to the default VRChat home world.
Portal Prompt
With this option on, walking into a portal isn’t enough to go through it – you have to confirm it with a trigger pull or a click.
Camera Lag Fix
Pretty simple – we moved camera saving off-thread, so it should hitch less when you take a screenshot.
This is somewhat hardware and scenario dependent, though. In very busy scenarios with high resolution set in the config file (rez buttons coming soon!), it may still hitch a bit, but far less than it used to.
Disable Cloning on Instance Change
Enabling this option will turn off Cloning any time you enter a new instance, in case you forgot to turn it off in the previous instance.
Particle Limiter Toggle
This feature simply allows you to turn on and off the Particle Limits System.
Toggling this limiter will reload everyone’s avatars to enforce the limits.
Gesture Indicators on HUD
This is a feature where you can turn on a HUD element that shows the current Gesture in use on your controllers.
You can turn it on in your Quick Menu.
This currently only works in VR mode, but we’ll add in desktop functionality in a later patch.
Improved Movement When Looking Up
Previously, when you looked directly up, your locomotion (movement with the joystick) would get weird and hard to control. This happened a lot with people lying down.
We made some changes to how we calculate your forward vector, so movement should feel a lot better in those situations!
Bugfixes
We fixed a few bugs in this release – namely one that affected people trying to join full instances.
2022.2.2p3 now in Live Beta
We’ve ALSO got an updated Beta out that you can try out with a bunch of new features. This Beta build contains everything from the last one, plus the features described below.
VRChat 2022.2.2p3 is now in Live Beta, and is built on top of 2022.2.2p2. It has even more features that are in development!
You can check out what’s in it by going here. Just like last time, join our Discord and check out the #open-beta-info and #open-beta-announcements channels to learn how to access the Beta.
This beta works with Live. You’ll be able to hang out during the weekend with your friends and try out these new features.
As was the case last Friday, we’ve prioritized speed over everything else. That means that some features may be in need of further polish (or might be buggy). Make sure you provide feedback via our Feedback forum.
You can access the vast majority of the new features via the Quick Menu’s “gear” tab on the far right.
Earmuffs
This feature lets you turn down other people around you based on their distance from you.
When your Earmuffs are on, a circle appears around you (representing a sphere) that can be adjusted through the Quick Menu. Anyone outside that range will have their voice turned down to the Reduced Volume level you define, allowing you to “focus in” on the conversation near to you. You can adjust that range as you see fit, and you can adjust how quickly people’s voices fall to that Reduced Volume level with the falloff slider.
We tried this feature out in a few crowded instances last night and it was pretty amazing. Try turning the Reduced Volume down to 20-50%, and adjusting your range and falloff a bit. It helps a LOT with party environments where there’s tons of voices going!
When this is on, a big red bar appears on your Quick Menu so you don’t forget about it. If you click the red bar, you’ll be able to turn it off.
Microphone Noise Gate + Noise Supression
This feature allows you to adjust the sensitivity of your microphone, as well as enable background noise cancellation!
Both features will help prevent things like heavy breathing, sniffling or other background noises from being broadcast to all your friends. Noise cancellation is especially useful for those with air conditioners or fans in the room with them.
For the sensitivity selector, the default value (5%) should be good enough for most users, but if you play VRChat in a noisy environment, it might be worth cranking it up a bit. If your friends start to say you’re cutting in and out while talking, that’s a pretty good sign you need to bring the slider back closer to default. Try playing around with it!
Open up the Audio tab in your Quick Menu, and scroll down to your Microphone. You can adjust your sensitivity with the slider, and turn on and off the noise cancellation with the waveform symbol.
Camera Near-Clip Adjustment
This feature allows you to reduce the “near clip” plane of your view!
If you don’t know, a camera has many properties that define how its view looks. One of its properties is the “near clip” and “far clip” plane. To put it simply, these are the distances at which things start rendering (near clip) and when they stop (far clip). You can only see objects that are in between these two distances.
When you want to look at something especially closely or when you are especially small, having a small “near clip” can be adventageous, as it lets you see things properly. However, dropping it too low will cause problems in worlds where the “far clip” is set very far, because you’re reducing the precision of depth available to the camera.
If this sounds complicated, here’s a super short version: this feature allows really small avatars to see their own arms, instead of looking like you start at your wrists.
Check out the new options in the Quick Menu for Near-Clip adjustment. We recommend using Dynamic mode, which tries to pull in the Near-Clip as close as possible without breaking too many things.
There’s also Forced mode, which ignores the world completely. There’s a warning when you enable Forced mode, because it will override the world no matter what – and the world might have a good reason to have its settings the way it is.
Hide Avatar by Distance
This feature lets you turn off avatars that are X meters away from you, or only allow the X closest avatars to show. You can tell the system to let Friends and “Shown” avatars through anyway.
We got a lot of feedback yesterday that people don’t want to have to worry about write defaults and avatars breaking with this system.
We’re doing a lot of research to look into impact and workarounds. The issue is that we don’t want to sacrifice performance, which is primarily what this feature is for.
As for some examples: fully unloading and reloading/reinitializing the avatar is really heavy. We can’t do that. Stopping the animator isn’t good either, as we could run into issues. Can’t hide renderers easily, as we’d have to fight with animators for control – setting something every frame, which could be bad for performance.
As you can see, this could get pretty in-depth quickly. We’re looking into it.
Regardless, we want you to test the feature out! If you see weird behavior with avatar animations, let us know.
Personal Mirror Updates
We’ve been playing around with a lot of different methods for moving the personal mirror around. We’ve provided both movement modes, where “Grab” mode is a bit like XSOverlay. There’s no visual feedback yet though, that’s missing.
We’re also coming up with a new system for scale using puppet menus, rather than radials. These work on Desktop, too! If you’ve got one of those fancy mice with the scroll clutch, grab the mirror and spin your mousewheel to send it into space. 
We’re going to continue to polish this feature until we’re happy with it, but the way it works in the Beta is pretty good. Try it out.
Copy and Paste on Keyboard
Easy! Copy button and paste button on keyboard. Also, when you click on text fields in VRChat, you’ll get a keyboard pop up.
Other Features We’re Workin’ On
Of course, there’s other stuff that hasn’t made it into a Beta yet that we’re going to move onto next, or are in progress.
Personal Mirror Updates… Updates
The face mirror has a few issues and needs a bit more polish.
It needs to get flipped around so it isn’t inverted. Likewise, as we mention above, there are a few more tweaks that need to be done to give the mirror a bit more feedback when you interact with it.
Text-to-Text Chatbox
Unfortunately, due to a pretty significant bug we ran into with this feature, we weren’t able to get this into the new Live Beta.
Development continues! Most of the time today was spent on figuring out said bug.
Onscreen Gesture Indicators
It was noted to us that these aren’t available on Desktop. Whoops!
If it’s easy we’ll loop around and add them for next time, but if we have to do some rewiring this might have to wait.
Earmuffs
One thing we’re seeing that might be an issue is that others don’t know you’ve got earmuffs on. We’re considering adding an indicator of some kind so other people know your settings are different from the world’s.
Bugs
There’s a bunch of known issues and bugs we’re carrying forward with us. This is the cost of moving fast! We’re keeping track, triaging the really bad ones, and noting others for us toi handle later.
Conclusion
As you can probably tell, today was busy!
We pushed 2022.2.2p2 live, released a new Live Beta, and started work on a new round of features for next week. We’ll hopefully be able to talk about some of those incoming features on Monday.
Make sure you check out the Live Beta this weekend, and don’t forget to leave us feedback!
