Hello! Welcome to the latest VRChat Developer Update. Here’s what we were up to today.
Check out our Dev Update from Friday for some context.
The features described below may not be released yet unless otherwise noted, and may change before they become available to users.
Quick Recap
2022.2.2p2 Released
On Friday, we released 2022.2.2p2 on all platforms – this contained Horizon Adjust, Personal Mirror, Movable Main Menu, and a few other additional features.
2022.2.2p2b Released
This was a Steam only build released earlier today. This build is network-compatible, and is only for Steam. We pushed this out quickly to fix a bug with Build and Test.
2022.2.2p3 is in Live Beta!
On Friday, we also pushed our a new Live Beta update. Much like the last Live Beta, there’s a lot of stuff in it! If you’d like to see a full list, you can check out the documentation here.
Features in Progress
Mondays tend to be a lot of organization, catching-up, and planning for us. As such, this Dev update might seem shorter than other days of the week. Once we move to weekly updates this will be less apparent.
Earmuffs
We’ve received a lot of positive feedback over the weekend regarding Earmuffs!
One common piece of feedback we’ve received is that people want to let others know that they’re using Earmuffs. We’re not sure if this is something we’d like to do, but we’re currently considering it. If we followed through with this, it’d likely be via a nameplate icon.
There’s been some community discussion we’re monitoring regarding world interaction with earmuffs. We’re keeping an eye on this discussion. As it stands, we’re happy with the core Earmuff functionality and implementation, but are still observing creator feedback.
Outside of that, a few bugs were squashed today, mostly around Earmuffs activating when it shouldn’t and the “dome” appearing on loading screens.
This feature is still being polished.
Gesture Indicator Icons
We got some feedback that the Gesture HUD Indicator icons were too opaque, needed to fade out, and needed some art updates. We’ve addressed the first two with some changes, and we’ll swap up the art later on.
Here’s how they look in the latest internal build:
More Favorites
We know you’ve been asking about this one!
As we mentioned before, this is a bit more complicated than it seems. However, we’ve gotten most of that out of the way.
More favorites has been merged into our main branch, and we’re doing integration testing. We expect to get more favorites into a Live Beta build soon.
Even More Personal Mirror Tweaks
Pickups are back! Based on feedback, some people prefer the regular pickup system for moving things around. The new system is also still available under a new “Immersive Move” toggle.
We’ve also implemented a new mirror resizing system. Mirror resizing is now done with an axis puppet control, which you are probably familiar with from the expression controls. You can now also scale height and width independently.
Finally, face mirror controls! You are now able to set its opacity, and you can also reposition it on your HUD for more comfortable viewing.
These adjustments are all on their way into the main branch, so they could show up in the next Live Beta update.
Camera Stuff
There’s lots of camera development going on!
Camera Resolution Selector
As a reminder, this will let you choose which resolution you can set your camera to within VRChat. It’ll have a max of 8K resolution on PC, and 4K on Quest.
This task got some testing, but had to head back to dev because QA flagged some issues.
Camera Smart Rotation
Simply put, this outputs portrait images if you hold the camera in portrait mode.
This got merged in, so it should be in the next Live Beta release.
Other Camera Feature Requests
We’ve also gotten a ton of feedback regarding the camera. Many features have been requested, such as building keyframed camera tracks in worlds, better camera scaling and grabbing mechanics, the ability to use the camera in desktop mode, and many more.
We’ve documented these requests. Some of them are larger in scope, and some are easy. The bigger ones may change the camera’s design. As such, we have to carefully assess changes.
In other words: we hear you! It’s just… wow, a lot of camera stuff. Some of these requests may need to be addressed in different ways, or put away for a bigger update later, but we see the reasoning behind these requests.
Text Chatbox
This feature went into QA, and came back from testing with a lot of feedback and issue flags.
There’s significant issues with displaying certain characters. There’s also issues with UI, where you can break the chatbox fairly easily. There was additional feedback on chat display duration, content filtering, text placement, and more. Basically, lots of work to do!
Considering that this is an entirely new way of communicating in VRChat, we want to ensure we get it right. With features this impactful, it is important that we’re picky.
This task is currently in iteration.
Near Clip Bugs
There’s a bug where we use the wrong value for Near Clip when a reference camera isn’t defined. That’s fixed internally.
There’s another larger bug where we’re seeing UI interaction have issues when NearClip is very low, and the user is far from origin. This is a tougher bug, we’re looking into workarounds.
Unmute Sound
This is a fairly small but common accessibility request: we’ve got a sound that plays when you mute your mic, but users ask for a sound that plays when you unmute your microphone.
This task is straightforward! It’s been assigned and we’re iterating on the sound design right now.
Bug Fixes
In 2022.2.2p2, we implemented a fix for instance joining when the target instance was full.
This bug was fixed, but we’ve seen some other bugs appear with instance joins, in particular with failing to join instances you should normally be able to get into.
These types of bugs were expected with the release of Secure Instances. That said, it doesn’t make it any less of a priority!
We’re working on tracking down these issues and will continue to address them.
Conclusion
That’s it for today! As noted before, Mondays tend to be heavier on the organizational side of things. We usually use it for lots of meetings, planning, that kind of thing. As such, this post is a little shorter.
See you tomorrow!