Palmer joined our developer meetup in VRChat this past Wednesday, June 25. Many laughs were shared as well as great questions asked and we recorded it all for you!
Palmer Visits VRChat
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DarkAkuma’s Custom Cupcake Room
We’ve talked a lot about the VRChat SDK but haven’t shown anything created with it. We’ve been working closely with DarkAkuma and he’s created some really cool stuff with the SDK. The custom content that blew me away was his Cupcake Room. Take a look!
The entire room was created by DarkAkuma in Unity3D without access to the VRChat source code (only the SDK).
VRChat v0.5.0 Released – Must download from website
Hey all! VRChat v0.5.0 is finally ready and up on the site. Due to the nature of the update, it cannot be downloaded via our patcher (and in an attempt to make it work, I broke the patcher) so please download it from www.vrchat.net.
There are two big features that v0.5.0 brings
- SDK support for avatars and environments (with actions such as music, triggers, etc)
- Chatroom Links
We’ve slowly been releasing pieces of the SDK to the public, as many of y’all have already imported your custom avatars into VRChat. The newest (and official) version of our SDK now allows anybody to create and import their own custom environments in VRChat as well. Now just being able to use an environment is kind of boring, what about adding sounds and working doors and elevators and animations and all that good stuff? Well that’s included too! Of course, we are adding new features every day, but at the moment we have a good number of options for making your custom room as cool as possible. We will be releasing the actual SDK to the public very shortly. If you can’t wait until then to get your hands on it, send me an email at graham.gaylor@gmail.com
The second big feature is the ability to launch the VRChat application from a website link. Thus, instead of having to launch VRChat and find the room you want to go to, you simply click on the link in your web browser and the app automatically launches and puts you directly into the linked room! For instance, http://vrchat.net/vrc.php?name=Test&lvl=CoffeeShop&cap=16 will launch the VRChat app and immediately place you in the room called Test with the level called CoffeeShop with a cap of 16 players. If this room already exists, you’ll join it, other it will be created for you.
If you’re interested in getting your feet wet with the SDK before it’s public release, send an email to graham.gaylor@gmail.com or jesse@jespionage.com and we’ll hook you up!
Hope y’all enjoy the new stuff. Customization is very important to us!
VRChat v0.4.0 Released – Main Menu and Server Stability Fixes
Happy Easter everybody! Hope everybody is enjoying their Sunday. I’ve just pushed out a new build of VRChat, mainly to fix some server issues we had last week. In this update we have
+ Server Stability Additions
+ Meeting Room Environment
+ New Main Menu
Nothing too exciting, but the new main menu and server changes will hopefully fix the few network related issues we have left! If anybody can’t connect in this version, leave a comment and I’ll get in contact.
Here’s the new environment. It’s a bit smaller and meant for meetings!
VRChat v0.3.6 Released – Menu System
One of the biggest features VRChat was lacking was a proper menu system, but as of v0.3.6, that is no longer the case! After putting it off for a long time, I finally decided to suck it up and dive into the world of GUI creation. My life was made considerably easier when I decided to cough up the cash and invest in a copy of NGUI from the Unity Asset Store. It took a few days to figure out the NGUI library, but after some hands on practice, I managed to spit out a “usable” menu system for VRChat.
The main decision that I had to make was how the user was going to interact with said menu system. In a non-VR game, the standard for a menu system is to simply take up the entire screen with options where the user can use the mouse and keyboard to navigate and input data. A similar concept could be used in VR, but it wouldn’t work very well for a variety of reasons. Instead, what VR developers have figured out is that creating menu systems that mimic those in reality (eg. a computer monitor on a desk or a button on a wall) seem to work well. I took a similar approach and basically used trial and error until I found something I liked.
VRChat v0.3.6 is up and ready to download!
VRChat v0.3.5 Released
Hey everybody!
Sorry for the delay in updates, I’ve been extra busy with real life :/
So the big things in this release are
- Auto-saving player names and avatars
- Optimized networking
- Custom avatars
I think the 3rd point in the most exciting. Jespionage from http://jespionage.com/ wrote this feature and has a write up on his blog on exactly how you can import your custom avatar in VRChat.
As always, there are two ways to get the latest version of VRChat. Either open your old version of VRChat and it should update itself, or you can download from the VRChat website.
Catch you in the metaverse!
Dev Diary (2/21/2014) – v0.3.3, Updated Networking, Persistent Worlds and a New Level
The last two weeks have been pretty busy. Last week I was bunkered down rewriting VRChat’s networking code, in an attempt to make the interpolation smoother and more accurate between clients. Once I was happy with the result, I moved onto something I was really excited about, the World Hub aka a persistent world that started looking more and more MMOesque. I put a good deal of time into building this world but had to take a break this passed week because of school work (midterms week). While I was studying for tests, one of my collaborators, Calen, finished up his first 3D environment for VRChat!
I’ve added the new environment and made a few small fixes to v0.3.3 which is available now.
Updated Networking
Initially, I was using a very basic form of interpolation. I was sending everybody’s player state to everybody else 10 times a second over TCP and interpolating between the last two states I received. The result was satisfactory, but it still opened itself to multiple issues including the “ice skating effect” where the animation and locomotion did not match up, jitter and lag. I started looking into more robust solutions and came across a TNet forum thread with some very helpful concepts and code to work with. It used the concept of synced times across all clients and using that, along with the ping time of the client to calculate the rate at which a networked player is interpolated. After a bit of tweaking, it ended up working really well!
Persistent Worlds
One feature I was really excited about was creating a persistent world consisting of a single instance of each chat room level. Therefore, the world would consist of the CoffeeShop, the Palace and our new Gallery level. Players could move from one to another by just walking across the street. The main problem to tackle here was that I wanted each building to be a different channel, so people inside of the CoffeeShop wouldn’t know about people in the Gallery. I spent a few days tinkering around with different solutions to the problem and got about half way done before I was interrupted by school work. During my break from VRChat, I started to realize that this persistent world starting looking more and more like an MMO, something I would not be able to build on my own. Therefore, I’m deciding to put this on the back burner for now.
New Level
Probably the most exciting news I’ve had this week has been that one of my collaborators, Calen, has finished his first VRChat 3D environment…the Gallery. The Gallery is an art gallery consisting of two floors, a balcony and lots of art! Here are some screen shots.
