Tupper - VRChat Head of Community: For me It's not about taking it away from Lyuma/BlackStartX. I'm seeing this more like a creation by the community because the community needed it. It's support ends in my head when the user from the community stop supporting it. The fear of loosing any of the tools we have is huge.

I would also like to see an offical version or a commitment from VRChat to take it over if it's not support anymore by the original creator.

I also think AV3 Emulator could become better and more featured with the internal knowledge in the hand of VRChat. Just having it as a 3th button in the SDK pannel above uploading would make this tool better in a way we might not even be allowed to in the first place.

Hackebein: If it comes to the point where an important project is abandoned like that, we'll deal with it at that point. But we're not there yet, so no dealing required.

I'd rather spend that energy used by worrying on making it easier and more enjoyable for people like Lyuma or BlackStartX to make tools. Better ROI.

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I think your second half is interesting, and I'm glad to support those creators as I noted in my OP: "what if VRChat were to 'bless' one or both, adopt it as the 'official emulator', and provide the support that might be expected with such a blessing? Would that suffice?"

Tupper - VRChat Head of Community: One of the issues that crops up is behavior differences between these emulators. Just today I had to fix a subtle bug that was only occurring on GestureManager, in fact. Historically, I've been recommending av3emu, while Senky has been recommending GestureManager, causing a bit of a divide, so having some blessing to help users know which is generally preferred might be a good idea.

Of course, these are already in community packages, which is _sort of_ a blessing? I guess? But it's not to the level of "auto-installed as part of a new avatar 3.0 project" like ClientSim is.

bd_: The ClientSim difference is because we created that product as a fork of a community project, and it was quite a challenge to do so. It's less "blessed" and more "yoinked and re-implemented".

Doing so also reduced the agility of that project -- despite the fact that it works pretty well, it has a lot of open issues today that we simply don't have the resources to address right now. It's a trade-off -- it's first party so everyone uses it, but it's first party so it gets updates and improvements more slowly. Kinda like rolling release vs LTS, I suppose...

I'm much more of a fan of the "create API, let people build tools" approach that we've been flirting with. However, I'm not the one at the wheel, so my fandom is only so influential. :D

For AV3Emu vs Gesture Manager, it'd be interesting to know where the divides are.

Tupper - VRChat Head of Community: I do not disagree at all with what you're saying, especially since I use the AV3 emulator for a lot of what I do. But there are at least 3 issues that I can feasibly give you for why it may help to have a built in avatar emulation system, if not add better support to the following:

1) Particle Simulation - the magic you guys have done to keep old particle behavior is good, but particle behavior in the editor can vary from particle behavior in game which is harder to keep consistent.

2) Graphics Backend - we know that VRC has a backend that keeps SPS support for older shaders/avatars, but previewing the shaders might be a bit of a trouble but it's hard to say at the moment.

3) Fallback shader previewing - As I'm typing this there is no way to properly preview fallback shader behavior on avatars besides relying on other users who may not have your shaders shown to tell you how messed up your model looks in fallback mode. This is a bit of a headache as it is the most underutilized feature in the game, but some of us want to have our models look as close as if it were shown as we can, though this might be worth another canny feature request post.

Smash-ter: speed mode:

1) Huh? We do something special for old particle systems?

2) Huh? We do?

3) This sounds like a seperate feature request.