Avatar Bugs & Feature Requests

For some avatars, the audio range being forcibly clamped at 40m is rather limiting. On some avatars that are used for specific purposes, audio involving music, effects, and interaction are relied upon for making the avatar what it is. The only solution if the audio is something like a music track, or a long-range sound effect (like on firearms, a common example) is being set to 2D, and thus, global. Setting the audio to global has the opposite intended effect most of the time, switching it from being a neat addition to "ok who is playing that audio, I am disabling their avatar immediately." Now the stated reason to the clamped range of 40 meters is "limitations are in place to prevent abuse and malicious sounds." (copied from here https://creators.vrchat.com/worlds/components/vrc_spatialaudiosource/#avatar-limitations ) However, 2D audio sources are still present, making a contradiction to this. Now whether or not this idea could be used I will include it anyway; raise the limitation to a max range of say, 500 meters, with an audio setting to either stay with the clamped 40, or have a much higher max range, with intervals for those who may want something in the middle. This setting could default to the current clamped 40, and only be changed by the user to increase the range of avatar audios they would like to hear.

In many scenarios, we could reduce the number of contacts required for systems by a factor of 8x or more if receivers exposed more information about the current collision. This is very necessary to avoid the undocumented vrchat "hard nearby contact limit." This additional information could be exposed as parameter suffixes, just like _Stretch on physbones. Specifically, these parameters would be very, VERY useful, and allow for an ENORMOUS reduction in contacts: * X, Y, Z offset of the nearest collision in world units but LOCAL rotation (for example, z should be "forward" of the contact) * Whether the nearest collision is self or others (or world?) * Velocity of the proximity (change in collision proximity since last contact update / time delta, this is very difficult to calculate in animator since contacts do not always update every frame) * Velocity of the sender (change in sender position since last contact update / time delta) * Matching tags of the nearest collision. This could possibly be exposed as multiple bools <receiverparam>_Tag_<tagname> = 0,1

(Note: This feature is still in development, so any of the details below might change before the final release.) The Avatar Optimizer runs automatically when you build or upload your avatar. It intelligently generates atlas textures and combines meshes and materials to reduce the number of draw calls, improving performance. You can configure the optimization settings to preserve certain blend shapes, skip generating atlas textures, or disable the optimizer entirely. You can preview optimized Avatars before uploading to check if the optimizations worked correctly. At first, only the Standard Lite and Toon Standard shaders will support material merging and texture atlasing. If you're a shader developer, our documentation will explain how to make your custom shader compatible with the avatar optimizer. Once we're ready, our goal is to test the avatar optimizer in a closed beta to collect more data on its usefulness and to inform our next steps.

Currently, you can have an avatar rated as “Good” at 70,000 polygons, but adding even a single triangle beyond that will instantly drop the rating to “Very Poor.” Obviously, this doesn’t make much sense and can actually discourage some people from optimizing their avatars. (Why bother optimizing other stats if the polycount alone tanks the rating the moment you go over?) I’d like to suggest increasing the polygon thresholds for Medium and Poor ratings, with a gradual step-up between each level. This would make a lot more sense and give creators more flexibility! I’d really love to see this system improved. The VRC team should ultimately decide on the final values through proper testing, but personally, I think a Poor rating could go up to around 120k, and Medium could sit around 90k. Of course, those numbers are just based on my experience, and I’m sure the team can come up with even better thresholds through data and testing.

I always hate it when i get online to see an avatar i use all the time get deleted because its nsfw, because most of the ones i use are, except for one that i was using a lot, and you guys previously just banned the avatar. The most "NSFW" it could go was panties and pasties, and to me, that isnt even NSFW. There are so many other public avatars that are a hundred times worse than that and thats the one you ban, i find the completely and utterly stupid. The avatar was Mako by "Envy UwU"

Every time I try to change avatars or get new ones or look for the ones I already had, either they’re all gone or all of them are error avatars.

Especially now that stats are calculated server side, the button to view the avatar’s stats should not be greyed out when viewing in impostor. The show avatar details button should show the stats of the main avatar. This way you can decide if you want to show the avatar, rather than having to show it first and subjecting yourself to the russian roulette of performance.

Currently float and int parameters are hard-set as 8 bit parameters... This is fine for people who don't need a lot of parameters... but it uses more bit space than what is needed most of the time (as you will rarely see anyone use even close to 255 seperate values for every interger) and the radial float puppet does not allow going into the negatives despite it being synced. I think that allowing the user to use lower bit-rate floats or ints with the limiting factor being less precision, also for floats not allowing to go below 0, Example situation: Someone makes a radial float puppet that doesn't require a lot of precision, instead of using 8 bits with half of the range being unused due to a negative being involved, use only a 6 bit float that ranges from 0-1, which is still precise enough for most cases, and some cases can use only 4 bits if they need more room. (4 bits = 16 int limit, a single 0-1 float at 4 bits is a 0.0625 increment, this is still enough for most radial puppets)

Since the Reference Cube has AudioLink support, even on Quest, it only seems natural that Quest avatars should be able to have an AudioLink-supported shader whitelisted/added to the SDK next. Quest users are often missing out on AudioLink, since Quest only allows certain shaders to be used, otherwise it gets replaced by the infamous error shader. Could we have an AudioLink shader or add support for it for Quest avatars?

I think it would be very beneficial to have a native VRC parameter "IsAgeVerified" such that I and other creators can lock certain functionality behind the age filter.