Here’s a bunch of info on our latest update, VRChat 2022.2.2p3 (build 1229)! This update is out on all platforms right now.
You can read the patchnotes, or you can dig into some screenshots below.
Chatbox
We’re adding a text chatbox that you can use to type messages to each other!
Find the Chatbox in your Action Menu (some people call it the “radial menu”). Pull it up by long-pressing your “B” button on your controller, or pressing R on Desktop.
You can also customize how these chatboxes look via the Quick Menu, under the Gear tab.
By default, chatboxes are only shown for your friends. This setting can be changed in the Quick Menu:
You can choose to show everyone, or show nobody’s chatbox. If someone’s using the chatbox feature and you have it turned off for them, you’ll see a red “typing” indicator where the chatbox normally would be. If you see someone with that and want to see what they’re chatting about, relax your settings to a more permissive level.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback regarding the “only shown for friends” default setting, as well as some great suggestions. We’ve seen some suggestions stating that Chatboxes should be a Safety category – that’s actually where our development was already heading before we ever posted about the feature! However, we need more time to get this fully designed and integrated in a good way. As such, we’re releasing this current version as an interim, “in-progress” feature to try out.
We’re going to keep working on this feature moving forward, so expect things to change as we iterate and update this feature. To restate: This is not the final version. It will change!
Also, we support OSC input! The OSC endpoints are:
-
/chatbox/input s bInput text into the chatbox. Ifbis True, send the text insimmediately, bypassing the keyboard. Ifbis False, open the keyboard and populate it with the provided text. -
/chatbox/typing bToggle the typing indicator on or off.
Right now the chatbox’s OSC input endpoint only supports ASCII characters. It will support UTF-8 later. The chatbox itself supports UTF right now.
We’ve been keeping RabidCrab and Wizard up to date on our OSC implementation, so they might have updates available pretty soon to support this new feature.
More Favorites
We’re adding more favorite for everyone (and even more for VRC+ users.) Here’s the numbers.
Without VRC+:
Friends: 3 lists * 150 favorites = 450 favorites (2.3x increase)
Worlds: 4 lists * 100 favorites = 400 favorites (1.56x increase)
Avatars: 1 list * 50 favorites = 50 favorites (2x increase)
With VRC+:
Friends and Worlds unchanged.
Avatars: 6 lists * 50 favorites = 300 favorites (3x increase)
We’ve seen that many people have requested that we instead add more lists instead of increase favorites.
We hear you, and agree! There are technical reasons (mainly UI) we expanded favorites in this way, we’ll circle back around later and address those issues when we have the new Main Menu in.
Earmuff Mode
This feature lets you turn down the voice and avatar sounds from other people around you based on their distance from you.
Find the Earmuffs in the Audio Tab of your Quick Menu.
When your Earmuffs are on, a circle appears around you (representing a sphere) that can be adjusted through the Quick Menu. Anyone outside that range will have their voice turned down to the Reduced Volume level you define, allowing you to “focus in” on the conversation near to you. You can adjust that range as you see fit, and you can adjust how quickly people’s voices fall to that Reduced Volume level with the falloff slider.
Try turning the Reduced Volume down to 20-50%, and adjusting your range and falloff a bit. It helps a LOT with party environments where there’s tons of voices going!
When this is on, a bar appears on your Quick Menu so you don’t forget about it. If you click the bar, you’ll be able to turn it off.
Avatar Distance Hider
This feature lets you turn off avatars that are X meters away from you, or only allow the X closest avatars to show. It’s super useful for both performance and reducing the visual overload that might come with crowded instances. Optionally, you can tell the system to let Friends and “Shown” avatars through.
Find the Avatar Distance Hider in the Gear Tab of your Quick Menu.
A bit of tech insight: Avatars are turned off by disabling their avatar renderers, which means animators still run. This isn’t a perfect solution, but turning off animators breaks avatars using Write Defaults or other non-deterministic Animator behaviors or designs.
Desktop Camera
You can now use the VRChat Camera on Desktop! You can also control the lens with your mouse and keyboard, flying it around like a drone.
Find the Desktop Camera in the Camera Tab. Click on the Camera button while playing VRChat in Desktop.
This “drone mode” will be implemented for VR in a later release, but we wanted our Desktop users to be able to take screenshots easily.
The “drone” has a distance limit of 15 meters, and is able to “no-clip” through walls. We’re not really OK with the no-clipping, so a later version will add in collision.
More Camera Updates
The VRChat camera got a ton of updates, and there’s even more on the way.
Automatic Portrait Mode
Holding your camera in “portrait” mode saves the photo in the appropriate orientation, just like a smartphone.
Camera Resolution Selector
You can increase the resolution of the photos you take with the VRChat Camera. It has a max of 8K on PC, and 4K on Quest.
Find the options in your Camera UI on the far right.
Microphone Sensitivity / Denoiser
This feature allows you to adjust the sensitivity of your microphone, as well as enable background noise cancellation.
You can find this under the Quick Menu’s Audio Tab.
Both features will help prevent things like heavy breathing, sniffling or other background noises from being broadcast to all your friends. Noise cancellation is especially useful for those with air conditioners or fans in the room with them.
For the sensitivity selector, the default value (5%) should be good enough for most users, but if you play VRChat in a noisy environment, it might be worth cranking it up a bit. If your friends start to say you’re cutting in and out while talking, that’s a pretty good sign you need to bring the slider back closer to default. Try playing around with it!
Camera Nearclip Override
This feature allows you to reduce the “near clip” plane of your view, allowing objects to get SUPER CLOSE to your view without “clipping out”!
Find this option in your Quick Menu, on the Gear Tab. There are three modes, defaulting to Off. To try this out, we recommend using Dynamic mode, which tries to pull in the Near-Clip as close as possible without breaking too many things.
There’s also Forced mode, which ignores the world completely. There’s a warning when you enable Forced mode, because it will override the world no matter what – and the world might have a good reason to have its settings the way it is.
Let’s start with the summary: this feature allows really small avatars to see their own arms, instead of looking like you start at your wrists.
In game engines, a “camera” represents a viewpoint, and that camera has many properties that define how its view looks. Two of these properties are the “near clip” and “far clip” planes. “Near clip” is the distance at which things start to render. “Far clip” is the distance at which things stop rendering. You can only see things that are in between these distances.
Usually, “near clip” is short, on the order of centimeters. “Far clip” is long, on the order of hundreds of meters.
When you want to look at something especially closely or when you are especially small, having a small “near clip” can be adventageous, as it lets you see things properly. However, dropping it too low will cause problems in worlds where the “far clip” is set very far, because you’re reducing the precision of depth available to the camera. This is why we warn users when they adjust these settings, and why the settings don’t save.
More Personal Mirror Features
In 2022.2.2p2, we introduced the Personal Mirror! It’s your own, local-only mirror that you spawn from the Action Menu.
In this latest release, we’ve added a bunch of new updates, improvements, and features.
Immersive Grab
We’ve added in an additional method of moving the mirror around! Grab the mirror, and then shift it around with your joystick. This mode also works in desktop mode, too – try using your mousewheel to move and scale the mirror.
You can enable “Immersive Grab” under the Personal Mirror settings in the Action Menu
Face Mirror
Ever wanted to see your avatar’s face, constantly floating at the bottom of your face… staring at you? Or, you know (less creepily), letting you see what your VR face is doing.
Well, now you can!
You can enable the “Face Mirror” under the Personal Mirror settings in the Action Menu.
Mirror Resolution Changer
Some people have really nice, high resolution headsets! Because of how VRChat mirrors work, they don’t look good in them, like they’re pixelated. This feature allows you to set mirrors to “Unlimited” resolution, which fixes this problem!
Find this setting in the Quick Menu’s Gear Tab.
Be careful turning this on! It can eat up TONS of system resources and could even crash you. We don’t suggest turning it on unless you know you need it.
Global Avatar Hiding
Ever see an avatar that you want to never ever see again, no matter who wears it? Now you can! Click on someone wearing an avatar, then click “Hide Avatar Globally”.
The only way this is overridden is if you click “Show Avatar” on someone.
We’ve gotten feedback that the “Show Avatar” override could be problematic for some users. We’re going to look at this feature again to see how to best address these concerns-- but we wanted to release the feature for now in its in-progress state to let you try it out.
Slider Snapping
We’ve heard a lot that the sliders are kind of hard to get to the precise value you like. So, we’ve added an option to turn on “slider snapping”. With this on, sliders throughout the VRChat UI will snap to small increments (usually 5%) so its easier to set those values.
Find this option in your Quick Menu’s Gear Tab.
Quick Menu Audio Percentage Sliders
We’ve added numerical values to the Quick Menu audio sliders.
This Whole Update Notes Thing
This is a new thing we’re trying, kind of an abbreviated blog post. The big advantage here is that we can include media like screenshots and video a lot easier.
Do you like it? Let us know what we should change.
