Welcome to the Developer Update for April 9, 2026.
Today’s featured world is 中文吧 Chinese Bar 8․0․9 by Circes.
Announcements
花見 !!
Hanami is here! And so is our shop update for April. It’s sakura themed!
You have until June 1 at 1PM PT to buy 'em up.*
*Note, that it is likely that shop updates in the future will run for two months instead of one.
2026.1.3 is out!
Last week, we released 2026.1.3!
It features:
- The Loading Screen can now be customized!
- …if you’re a VRC+ subscriber, you can change it to be the classic, 2017-style loading screen!
- Impostor Updates!
- They look better! Neat!
- A bunch of other changes, which can be found here!
As always, you can watch (listen?) to the notes here:
Wait, Where Are Accessories?
In Beta!
As noted in patch notes, we didn’t quite think they were ready yet, so we kept them in beta. If you’re on the Open Beta branch, you’ll still see them. They’re coming along well and will likely make it into the next release!
Space Jam 3: Judging & Fine Arts Contest
Thank you to everyone who submitted worlds and films to Space Jam 3!
We’ll now be judging the entries alongside the NSS. We hope to be done by April 20!
In the meantime, Space Jam is collaborating with the Strange Pear Gallery of Fine Arts!
Submit your fine art works to the Strange Pear Discord for a chance to be featured in a digital fine arts gallery hosted in VRChat. Submissions are open now until May 1! Join the Strange Pear Discord for more information.
Impostor Updates!
Building on the backwards-compatible improvements that shipped in 2026.1.3, here’s Part 2: Impostor Generator server version 1.4.1 is now live!
Impostors generated from this point forward will get some additional visual improvements, which we shared ahead of time in the 1.3 patch notes:
- We’ve done some magic on the backend to preserve 2.5-4x of the depth precision, as well as more evenly preserving it for a total of 5.5-8.8x the precision!
- We solved a bug where depth captures had ~8cm of wiggle room added to the capture that wasn’t accounted for in the end reproduction. This was why some Impostors can look ‘squished’ relative to the overall mesh.
- We use more conservative downscaling to avoid harsh pixelization.
- We now ensure all tris have their long side facing away from the center of the quad, making pieces smoother and less zig-zaggy.
- We’ve updated our texture compression to be more perceptually-based to improve color quality.
- Finally, we’ve improved edge-extension to be more precise, meaning you should rarely see a piece that appears to stretch backwards a distance.
In addition:
- We improved handling of skinned meshes that were driven by constraints, rather than the main armature.
- We added some new fallback behavior when important bones are not marked.
- And finally, we fixed some capture issues affecting some materials that use depth overlay effects.
Avatar Performance Gated Group Instances
If you’ve ever attended a popular club world or event, you may have noticed that, due to the sheer number of attendees, your performance probably wasn’t all that great!
A lot of this overhead has to do with the nature of user-generated content, namely, avatars. While we love all the creative ways you express yourself with your avatars, let’s be frank: a club stuffed with Very Poor avatars probably doesn’t make for the best experience overall for most players.
(Especially for the poor event runners tirelessly trying to convince others to change to a more performant avatar!)
This is why we’re introducing a new tool for Group Instance types: Avatar Performance Gated Group Instances!
Performance Gated Instances allow you to configure a performance limit for avatars instance-wide. Any user that violates this limit will be shown as an impostor or their fallback avatar. This works in a very similar way to our current safety systems, just applied at an instance level.
All Group instance types now have the option to set minimum avatar performance requirements. By default, this is set to “None,” so if you don’t change anything here, you won’t notice any difference and the instance won’t have any avatar restrictions.
You can also choose Good, Medium or Poor. We decided that ‘Excellent’ was probably a bit too tough to hit for most players. Very Poor is also excluded because.. well.. that would be all-inclusive.
You can also view these new instance options from the web instance creation flow!
After your instance is created, any user that attempts to join your instance with an avatar that violates the performance limit will see a warning pop-up. The user is still free to join the instance in their current avatar, but from other player’s perspectives, they’ll appear as their fallback avatar or an impostor.
Users will also be sent a notification explaining that their current avatar is “hidden” for other users upon joining the instance. We also added a couple of handy buttons to the notification to open your Avatars page or insta-swap to your fallback if you’d like.
If you are already using an acceptable avatar, you’ll simply join the instance like normal!
Same goes for attempting to swap into an avatar that violates the instance limit while in the instance itself. You’ll be warned, and you are allowed to swap, but you’ll render as your fallback or impostor.
In the above image, both remote users are being rendered as impostors because they exceed the instance limit, which is set to “Good.”
The local user is also violating the instance limit, but from your own perspective, you can still use your original high-fidelity avatar, which we think is a good trade-off from a comfort-perspective.
For this feature, we made it a point that the local user’s safety settings come first, so, if you choose safety settings that are more restrictive than the instance’s performance limit, we’ll observe your preferences first.
That said, you are not allowed to override the instance level restrictions to make other’s appear, even if you force-show their avatar or are friends. This is to prevent the slightly awkward dynamic of players asking others to show their avatar, thus defeating the point of the feature.
Simply put, between your local safety settings and the instance performance limit, we pick whichever is more restrictive.
Bypassing the Instance Performance Limit
We are aware that there would be a need to bypass these restrictions for certain group members, like performers! Therefore, we’ve added a new Group Role Permission, Bypass Avatar Performance Requirements.
Before you get TOO excited, no, this does not force-show your avatar to all users automatically or override safety settings.
What this does do is allow users with this permission to not be subject to the instance’s performance limit. Users with this role can freely swap into avatars that would otherwise be hidden at the instance level. This permission will also bypass the warning pop-ups that appear when you attempt to join a performance limited instance or swap avatars within them.
Again, this permission will not override local user safety settings, so be warned that other users may have to “show” your avatar still. Assuming you are shown, you should render as your full fidelity avatar to others despite the instance performance limit.
After I gave my “Fervid” account the bypass permission and rejoined the world, you can see that he’s rendering as his full fidelity Z-Dragon self, despite violating the instance performance limit otherwise! Wow! The RedTestCat account remains as an impostor as it does not have the bypass permission.
This feature is another step in exploring ways we can manage performance in instances with high user counts.
Conclusion
That’s it for this Dev Update! We’ll see you again on April 23!
