Developer Update - 9 April 2026

This is an official meetup that is co-hosted by us at TwitchCon.
We’ll have a few developers at the con.

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That’s fair, yeah. I’m just saying I hear both sides of the argument and they’re both valid.

It’s items/stickers in worlds all over again…

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What rock have you been living under? Event hosts have been begging for a feature to limit Avatar performance on a per-instance basis since before Groups were added. If anything we should be upset at VRC for taking so long to add this feature. This addition is a net positive for the platform.

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If their impostor doesn’t adequately match their real avatar state, then yes. Especially if they use a fallback since it isn’t consistent at all.

The overall theme of this feature is to encourage users to make avatars that not only perform better, but allow more people to see the expected version of their avatar. This improves the overall experience by being more cohesive and immersive.

This is one of the few features I will heavily advocate for because it is critical to the overall immersion and enjoyment of the platform. It also puts even more emphasis on UGC to be optimized.

SO MANY people complain about VRChat not being optimized, meanwhile, I’ve been in an 80 person instance before running at 50+ FPS. It’s because most of the people had optimized avatars and the venue was optimized. VRChat can’t do much of anything besides introduce incentives for people to optimize their own content.

I think given the context of where this platform could have gone, simply having an optional restriction for only group events is a good step that is necessary. Otherwise, we could instead just be Rec Room or the Metaverse if you guys want. :slight_smile:

I hate to say it, but: Be thankful that VRChat is putting in the effort to still gives us some level of choice and to make our own avatars however we want. There are so many worse ways this could’ve gone and I’d argue this is one of the most important and fair features for them to release.

You’re using a free platform where your choices influence the actions of others. Complaining about free expression being limited (when I’ve made my own avatar with plenty of expression be medium without much effort), especially when this is just for group events, is really, really in poor taste and reeks of entitlement.

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I know, and I was hoping it would be the stepping stone for adding more hard limits, but there has been nothing else. Avatars should not have 2 million polygons. There should be a hard limit of, for example, 250,000 polygons and if you exceed that the SDK spits it back out and says “Try again, this crap is making our platform lag like crazy”

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Nobody is denying them that, but being able to override what can be rendered locally should always take precedence since every device has wildly different hardware constraints and what runs well for you may run like garbage for me.

I would rather hide most players in an instance by default and fully display performers and friends which are the main people I’d be in an instance engaging with.

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If you re-read the post, they mentioned that your local preferences will override the instance settings. You still have the option to be more restrictive with your avatar moderation settings if you wish, which is what you seem to be explicitly mentioning in this reply.

All this does is raise the floor for acceptable avatar ranking for the entire instance. It by default will restrict more avatars and make the instances inherently run better.

I agree. There should be a hard poly limit and other limits.

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Right, the recent complaints over the last month on bsky had nothing to do with this impeccable timing.

I also never commented on whether or not it was good or bad for the platform.

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It is, because the user doesn’t know that this is happening. And users care a lot about how they are seen by the stream, that is the entire purpose of our events. We tried it already with very visible popups that you had to confirm and people won’t read them. We got the feedback that users didn’t knew that the stream would only show their fallback in that case, so we had to switch tactics. The only thing that works is to put people in a room that they cannot leave before they switch to a compliant avatar. In almost all cases, these people had an identical looking avatar with petter performance rank in their inventory (same avatar, but all toogles removed).

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One could argue that this update, while a fine idea on its own, is beating the long dead horse that is the performance rank system. It’s due for an overhaul, as it’s missing a lot of nuance, doesn’t account for certain slow things, and completely misses the point with some limits. Are there any plans for tweaks of overhauls?

(i.e. see the latest canny post on the polycount topic)

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My initial concern with the avatar perf gating is that “like 90%” of avatars on Mobile are VeryPoor because the limits are so strict with the current performance system*, but it seems like this limit is also bypassable with force Show Avatar (see Edit), as is the rest of the Safety System which is functionally non-existent on Mobile because everybody Force-Shows everybody’s avatars already just to make the game remotely enjoyable. You ever seen a Quest user walk into a crowd then select every single user? They’re bypassing the safety system manually. It’s unbearable for them.

So I presume this will be addressed when the performance system is rebuilt, as you all have been hinting at for some time now.

Anyways, instance and group info when (isModerator, GetInstanceType, etc) I want to make my locked rooms NOT static whitelists anymore T-T I want other people to be able to use my things, I want to be able to hide rules signs in Invite/Invite+ instances b/c they’re not needed there, etc.

EDIT: Wait you can’t force-show to override it? Ew. Disgusting. I guess I’ll be religiously avoiding any scenarios in which I have no say over what I can or cannot see. Do not take away MY autonomy, I’d literally rather lag and crash than lose control over what loads on MY PC. No thank you. Cut it out.

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Then let that be the incentive

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any possibility that we could maybe get the ability to customize the color of the default loading screen? thought that might be neat, maybe even for the non-plus subscribers since it doesn’t permit more in-depth customization aside from color.

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Yes please add it to the tos that this is explicitly not allowed before this feature goes live! Imo the penalty should be having your entire group deleted lmao.

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Here is a Canny post from 2021 asking for this feature
And another from 2017, from before the current performance ranking system was even a thing

I wasn’t aware of any recent complaints on bsky about avatar performance. There have always been complaints about avatar performance on bsky, twitter, reddit, whatever. It’s one of the biggest discourses about the game. I’m not sure why you’re upset that they’re finally adding this long-requested feature.

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Don’t we already have pay-to-enter worlds? and VRC+ detection to withhold world features. That ship has sailed

Just wanna voice that I appreciate that the performance thing is not overridable locally. Yes control over your personal experience is nice, but “show my avi“ fallbacks would be rampant (I already see too many of those tbh).

One thing that would be good is more details on how this works with the rating on different platforms. Still early days of course, and I’ll be testing this soon, just noting that the post isn’t clear about it. Different minimum ratings per platform would be ok, or just a selection of what platform to care about (in our group we enforce only PC performance because avis optimised on Android are few and far between).

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Tupper has mentioned ad-nauseam that if they did adjust the ranking system as related to poly count, they would not increase it from 70,000. It would go the other direction and actually be more restrictive.

The reason for this is because 70,000 x 80 is 5,600,000 polygons. If it was increased to poor at 300,000, that number would then be 24,000,000 polygons. Most average GPUs (in the context of the entire rendering budget, not just polygon fill) can only really manage 10-20m polygons. That’s even just targeting 60 FPS on a desktop, not 72–90 FPS in VR.

Polygons are critical because they are the foundation of the rest of the rendering pipeline. Every time there is a task done on a polygon, it is done for all polygons. It’s very easy for it to functionally be a O(n^2)-style problem.

I agree that the ranking system could probably use some adjustments, but I don’t think it is beating a dead horse. This feature is actually pretty critical. I often find myself gaining 10-30+ FPS when I block very poor avatars in dense instances. It already works decently well.

Good thing that this feature is optional! It means I can avoid people that don’t like this feature inherently by visiting events that do actually care about the greater good of the platform and not just themselves. :heart:

I also find the idea of being called a boot licker incredibly funny considering how many times I’ve been banned on this forum and warned by staff for vehemently disagreeing with many of their business decisions. Lmao

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The biggest Canny that I could find (with 281 Upvotes) is:

Based on the current plans, this canny will not be fully implemented, because it states:

Make joining not possible if not meeting the req, and make switching to a non-compliant avatar not possible if in the instance.

I prefer the Canny version compared to the VRChat version. I don’t believe that a small notification from VRChat will have the desired effect, based on my own experience. People cannot read.

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Ooo definitely gonna be interested to see how groups use this feature!

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