Hello! Welcome to the latest VRChat developer update for 9 August, 2022. For context, you might want to check out yesterday’s update.
Schedule Change
As we previously noted, we’re going to change the frequency of these posts.
Starting next week we’ll be posting these twice a week (on Tuesday and Friday) versus the daily schedule we’ve had for the past two weeks.
Eventually we’ll be working our way to doing them just one per week. Once we hit that point, we’ll stay there for the foreseeable future.
Feature Work
Full-Body Tracking Calibration Visualization
We’ve gotten requests to make it easier to calibrate full-body tracking, and to ensure your trackers are as close as possible to their paired bone and intended mount point. Here’s what we’ve come up with:
This is an optional feature you can toggle on to help out with calibrating your full-body tracking!
First off – yes, the spheres are going to have their opacity reduced. That was the first feedback we got internally! It also looks a ton better (and more transparent with both eyes) in VR – the 2D view isn’t really a great representation.
Anyways, let’s talk about what these different things represent.
The axis indicators represent trackers, and are set so you can see which axis the tracker is lined up for. We made them “spikey” so they stick out from under clothes or avatar geometry. Here’s a closer look at Kung wearing 11-point tracking.
Notice that the ends of the tracker indicators are colored to indicate which axis is which. Lighter is +XYZ, darker is -XYZ.
The red spheres are the tracked bone’s “calibration zone”. These spheres define where the tracking system looks for trackers for the bone they’ll attach to. Note that they’re not paired to avatar bones! They’re paired to a real human body’s proportions given the User Real Height you set.
The green spheres indicate the distance that the tracker is from the center of the calibration zone.
The blue lines are drawn between the tracker and the avatar bone it will control (two in the case of elbow and shoulder). These blue lines might be very long or short, depending on avatar proportions. They’re more of a pointer to what controls what.
Here’s an easy way to think about this: try to make the green spheres as small as possible! Then check that the blue lines are pointed at the bones you expect that tracker should control.
This task is in iteration.
Gesture Icons
A few more changes queued up for this! We’ve changed the icons, and the icons now fade and become transparent after about 3 seconds. The faded gesture icons remain on screen until you change the gesture, or return to neutral gesture.
The icons shown here aren’t final, we have a new version on the way with a dark outline so its more visible in bright white worlds.
This feature just needs some updated art, a final QA pass, and then it’ll get updated in the next Live Beta.
Personal Mirror
Two smaller adjustments as we’re focusing on polish for this feature:
We’ve added an “aiming laser” to the immersive movement mode:
We’ve made it so the VRChat logo on the back (btw, there’s a VRChat logo on the back) doesn’t get warped when you scale the mirror around:
There’s a few more items we’re looking into addressing, including the “black sphere” bug (that has to do with camera clear flags and masking settings). Despite that, we think we’re pretty close to calling Personal Mirror v1 complete.
More Favorites
This feature is simple – get you more favorites for Avatars, Worlds, and Friends!
Thankfully, it’s on its way out. This task finished its server-side implementation and just needs the VRChat application to be updated to handle it.
We expect to have this ready to go in the next Live Beta.
VRChat Home Website
The VRChat Home website got some upgrades! A lot of them are under the hood changes and improvements that will make future development WAY easier.
The “friend location” view was updated to be far more compact and cleaner, and now has an “Invite Me” button on the page.
Also, we’ve unified the fonts across the site. I sure hope you like Noto Sans! (because we do)
There will be some more tweaking as time goes on!
How Do Earmuffs On A Cat Even Work
We got some small feedback that VRCat without a box was a little unnerving, so we put the box back on their head. And then put the earmuffs on the box.
This probably completely negates the usefulness of the earmuffs for VRCat, but they look pretty happy about it.
Other Updates
You might’ve noticed that sometimes we mention features in a Dev Update, but then they don’t get mentioned for a bit. This is normal!
In development, things other than creating features and writing code happen. Sometimes tasks get paused for a little while other tasks get attention, prerequisites get completed, bugs get worked around, etc etc.
Something not being in the Dev Update doesn’t mean the feature is forgotten, it just means that it hasn’t gotten to the point where we can show something new that can be summarized in a short video clip or a paragraph.
In short, these cool new features can take some time to get right. We know you want to learn everything possible about them as we move forward (and provide input, of course), so we’ll share as much as we can when we’re able.
More Feedback!
A lot of what we’re doing is gathering and categorizing your feedback. There’s a lot of feedback that users are providing on both new and existing features, and this feedback needs to be gathered, cleaned up, merged where necessary, and then put into the production process.
This is a big task. A lot of the time we spend is on gathering your feedback and organizing it so we have that data when we need it.
Conclusion
That’s it for today! No established plans quite yet for timing on the next Live Beta or Release timing but we’re hoping for something later this week.
See you tomorrow!
(osc vrchat face tracking and osc haptics i have try to use à router to make it work in same time but its not work actually…)