(Not relating original theme about tutorials)
As a request for VRChat team members in this forum, please avoid using slang words, especially in abbreviation form, if it is in a meaningful discussion, even in a friendly mood like this.
It isn’t easy to understand for non-English people. Also, today’s machine translators can not handle them well.
(In this case, Deepl, Google, and Bing translators failed to translate “OG” into Japanese. They put “OG” as is in the result.)
Looking forward to having you as a contributor!!
That’s a two-way problem – we have a lot of information, and we don’t know who cares about what – and also, we need to find a place where everyone is looking for those changes!
We’ll try our best to catch these cases, but the bigger problem (for now) is centralizing where this info is sent out. From there, we can start digging down deeper.
I’m hoping that the wiki helps these problems become less commonplace.
We try our best to keep our language readable!
I knew about the parameters thing, but that’s just from lurking here, learning from what other people are having trouble with. If anything I’m in the top 1% of who should be kept away from blender 
I guess getting off topic, but I’m curious what the best alternative would be. Veteran players?
“OG” → “original gangster” → something that gets across the fact that people have been here awhile, since early days
Time for my general reminder… the way to disseminate information is well known and has been a science for hundreds of years. The medium changes but not the basic principals.
While a newsletter would be another way for people to subscribe it cannot not be the source of the information. A news channel (for example) will mention the weather but it is not the “source” of the weather prediction.
So one “updates the wiki” to serve as the source of documented behavior and then daily, weekly, monthly or never a newsletter can mention something. The information does not depend upon a newsletter but a newsletter format may be useful to some.
That said, adding “one more channel” puts a burden on the entire operation. If the company is having a hard time keeping up with the docs, development, testing and distribution tossing a newsletter into the mix only makes things harder. Anyone who thinks there should be a newsletter can actually start one. Gather information and post it.
There is a Tutorials section here right? Is anyone planning to create “20 things you probably did not know about avatar creation in VRChat”? In short do the work rather than explain how others should do it.
The source of information is the docs and a newsletter is one of the ways to effectively communicate the information to the people who care about it.
I will not say anymore about that, because I’d be repeating myself. Overcomplicating and overanalysis is not neccessary.
I do not care if a newsletter “places a burden on the entire operation”. The last time I checked VRChat is hiring people all the time.
If a company is not capable of doing something so simple like a newsletter, they’re doomed. But I think VRChat is capable of doing that just fine.
But if I would start a newsletter myself, can you tell me precisely where I can find all the new info ideally immeadately after it is added or changed ?
The whole problem is that there is no such thing. That’s why I am proposing the newsletter.
And yeah, I’ve been making tutorials for a bit and I have a bit over 100k views
No I cannot tell you “precisely” where you can find all the new info but you knew that.
You wrote The newsletter should be about “We added X, Y, Z, we changed A, B, C” Exact information that creators want to know In theory you can recap the release notes and/or glean the changes made on the Wiki.
Nobody has suggested “nobody needs a newsletter” but until a source of information exists there is no place to get “additional information”. Everything cannot be covered in a newsletter and “we changed x” will never include detailed examples or feedback from developers. A wiki can easily point readers to more information and can support user contributed materials.
A wiki can even have product/library, “available for hire”, “looking for a tutor/business partner” pages, etc. A newsletter is an isolated captured in time event that decreases in value as time passes.
And yeah, I’ve been making tutorials for a bit and I have a bit over 100k views
Excellent keep up the good work.
It does not have to be only newsletter. But I belive it is a good solution to one of the problems, the problem being people not knowing when and what exactly gets updated in the docs and in the future possibly the wiki and other sources.
A newsletter is a channel that lot of companies use all the time, some of them function on a newsletter being the main channel for them.
For VRChat it would be a good channel too. If you are looking for a 100% solution, you will never do anything.
It’s a solution to "How do we let people know we are doing X,Y,Z. If there is a better solution, OK, but so far I did not hear anything that would make sense.
We are, but priority sits with engineering, ops, that kind of thing. Community, communications, and documentation is typically done with “whatever you can get” levels of resourcing. So, no, we do not have infinite resources or people-hours, and we have to choose carefully. Tom is correct here.
I think we could solve the “newsletter problem” by using the “weekly digest” feature available in most wikis and forums. That’d cover 80% of the problem.
The reason why I am arguing about this so much is the way his “placing a burden on the entire operation” argument was formulated made me feel like it being an excuse for low standards and “Let’s just not do it” even thought it’s something that should be taken care off.
I am also aware you do not have infinite amount of resources. But VRChat said they want to focus much more on communication, so I would suspect it could include something like this.
Your argument is better, but, if you do not have enough resources and time allocated for something, you have to be fine with the fact it will not be done as good as it could be. Its a matter of priorities, I get it, but like I said VRChat wanted to focus on communication.
The “Weekly Digest” feature you talk about might be a good solution.
I don’t think newsletter is the 100% must have solution, my point is mainly about communication of changes and additions being done better and reachable by people.
What’s the primary difference between the Dev Updates and your desired info? The depth of info, or the frequency of it?
You should let people know of everything that is relevant to creators, that is changed, added or newly described - in the docs, wiki, any knowledge base.
For example:
1/29/204
basically short notes with brief descriptions and links to the relevant pages, topics, etc.
You can also make a separate page for non-creators about all the non-creation changes, additions, etc.
I think it should be separate from the creator information, because lot of people do not understand or do not care about creation stuff, they just want to know about new features and additions to the game.
For example this Canny. I did not know that parameters are synced by order and not by name, and I’ve been making avatars for over 3 years.
I asked other people if they knew about this, even proffessional avatar creators (who do only that as their only source of income) did not know about this.
The only person that said they knew about this was JustSleightly.
Now the information has been in the docs, but how would I know it was put there if I did not scan the docs page by page everyday ?
I think that’s a great goal to aim for!
We have a good bit of disparate docs and info and they’re across a few platforms (docs.vrchat, creators.vrchat, soon our wiki) so we’d have to find a way to automate change monitoring for each platform for publication if we want it perfect.
That’s good enough for me
Very much a fan of both the forum and the wiki idea. I often scour vrchat documentation, unity documentation, discord servers, and random internet forums for solutions to problems I encounter in creating for VRChat. Sometimes I dont find the solution for days or weeks only for it to have been something simple. Once I made a canny post because I missed the memo about unsynced parameters and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to hold onto a parameter that didnt need to be synced across the network (I was making avatar presets.) After that I started paying a lot closer attention to dev updates and patch notes. I had skimmed over the one talking about the parameters, but I must admit I didnt really read enough to understand the implications of it. I asked in the VRLabs discord and later in a Canny about saving “local” parameters and nobody understood what I was asking for at first because I didnt have the correct terminology to explain it.
I think expanding the current vrchat documentation would help a great deal, so a wiki would be wonderful. Having been over the existing avatar documentation more times than I can count, I would certainly use the wiki as a resouce, both for myself and to refer others to.
Thank you for looking to extend more support to creators, the learning curve can be rather steep and its not easy to find the answers youre looking for when you dont know where to go.