Welcome to the Developer Update for November 20, 2025.
Today’s featured world is Emerald Valley by Mankey.
Announcements
WIZARDS, STILL
STRASZ THE PURPLE would like to remind you that you have until December 4th at 1PM PST to BECOME A REAL WIZARD.
So yeah, do that.
New Years 2026 is Coming! Submit Something!
New Year’s Eve is almost upon us, which means it’s time to start creating. POSTERS! MUSIC VENUE LOGOS! ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK VIDEOS! You name it! As usual, the booths will be invite-only this year. Everything else is open to public submissions!
We hope you look forward to this year’s world, we started working on it right now!
Submit a poster: https://forms.gle/JQKpvbtFBBv1xxTH7
Submit a music venue logo: https://forms.gle/2dX8SLmWGnyPrkmbA
Submit an Entertainment Network video: https://forms.gle/D1JUigG7xwoW3SWW8
November 2025 Creator’s Roadmap Update
We’ve updated the Creator’s Roadmap! You can see that here.
Some major points include discussion about the Avatar Optimizer we’re working on behind the scenes, as well as the removal of Recurring Payments for Group Stores from the roadmap.
Go read the full Update for details!
2025.4.2 is in Open Beta!
That’s right – we’ve got another release cookin’ for you. You can read about it here.
The short version: Group Discovery! Group and Event Sharing! Mutuals! Debug UI changes! Steam Audio… maybe soon? 
Bug Updates for Creators
We have a bunch of small fixes we’d like to talk a little about! Read about 'em below:
Easier Way of Getting Players
As a world author, you’d previously get the players in your world by doing something like this:
VRCPlayerApi[] players = new VRCPlayerApi[VRCPlayerApi.GetPlayerCount()];
VRCPlayerApi.GetPlayers(players);
This populates the players array with all of the players currently in your world. While this can be beneficial for avoiding performance spikes caused by garbage collection by reusing the same array over and over, it isn’t particularly accessible to users that are brand new to world creation.
In a future SDK version, you’ll be able to call VRCPlayerApi.GetPlayers() without any parameters, which will handle the process of creating the array for you. This will hopefully be easier for newer creators to understand.
You should still prefer using the original non-allocating version if your world is complex and you need to get the list of players frequently!
Log Parsing in the SDK
We’ve added the Parse Logs utility from Udon Sharp 1.2b. This is a tool you can use to import and scan log files created by the VRChat client.
You’ll be able to access it via the menu option: VRChat SDK->Udon Sharp->Parse Logs from File.
Performance Improvements for Multi-Avatar Scenes
If your workflow involves having multiple avatars in the same scene all sharing the same parent game object, you may have noticed performance issues when opening the Builder tab of the SDK control panel. Unity could hang for a while waiting for Scheduler.Tick to finish.
An upcoming SDK release fixes this issue. In short, this was due to the system mistakenly scanning across all avatar instances sharing the same game object root instead of just the selected avatar when performing certain validation checks.
Third-Person View… in VRChat
Imagine VRChat, but like, from above yourself.
How would that be? Would it be good? Would it be… anything? That’s a great question! Why don’t we figure it out?
We will be – in a special beta! In this beta, you will be able to enable Third-Person View on Desktop. No, it won’t work in VR (and is locked to Steam for now, depending on how this goes.)
This one will be a “sidecar” beta, similar to how we did things with Steam Audio, or with IK 2.0 (way long ago!). Basically, you won’t see this feature unless you specifically download and use this beta on Steam.
(PS: If you’re in the #open-beta-info channel on Discord, you’ll see updates for this particular branch!)
So, how will it work?
So – first off – all of this is subject to change as we figure out what works. With that said…
You can press F5 or scroll out on your mouse to activate Third-Person View. Scrolling will change the distance the camera is from your avatar. Zooming back in will switch you to the normal view.
If you press TAB, you’ll be able to rotate your camera around. This behavior changes a bit when you’re moving – rather than explain every interaction precisely, we’d like you to go try it. Tell us if it feels intuitive or not!
If you want to move something you’re holding in your (virtual) hand, you’ll now have to hold ALT while you scroll.
As a note to world creators, we’ll be providing folks with a special world tag that will disable this feature, if you so choose.
Up until now, we’ve been working with a select group of creators to try to get things to work in most worlds… but it’s likely impossible to get this feature to work smoothly in all worlds, and we’re having to make a few choices so that it works in most of them, at least.
Give it a shot! Let us know what breaks! Let us know if you like it!
Chances are, when this does roll out (outside of this beta), we’ll be shipping it out as a test – but we want to make sure that it mostly works before we do that.
Conclusion
That’s it for this Dev Update! See you again December 4!
