Addressing your Feedback
Yesterday afternoon, we announced that we would be reprioritizing, reorganizing, and changing our internal development roadmap to focus on the feedback you've given us.
As we promised, we’re sharing a small roadmap of what the next few weeks are going to look like, and when you can expect more updates from us.
Over the last 72 hours, we’ve been gathering up all of your feedback across every channel.
In addition to the information we already had on hand, we've been talking to VRChat communities and community leaders about the changes and additions that they want most, including speaking to communities focused on accessibility in VRChat. We've also been watching and documenting constructive feedback via our typical channels like our Feedback boards, social media, and this Discord.
We’ve taken this feedback and organized it, with a special priority placed on accessibility. We’re also working towards features and changes many of you categorize as Quality of Life or “QoL”. These are, in most cases, smaller changes to improve VRChat overall.
Here’s some of the changes and improvements we’re working on. First off, some that we’re aiming to get into VRChat by the end of next week:
Horizon Adjust is a feature that we developed during a recent internal feature jam that was already on the way. It allows a user to change their “horizon” however they want to orient it, which allows controller movement and menu usage as if the user was standing even if they are lying down.
Visual Adjustments are a set of features that includes a set of color-blindedness filters that can be set, as well as a slider that adjusts the intensity of these filters. Additionally, there is an option to affect only the VRChat UI, or the VRChat UI and the world you’re in.
Notably, the method we’re using to adjust colors for filtering in the prototype does not work on Quest due to graphical limitations. We will be addressing this with further iterative updates and adjustments.
This feature will also include the ability to turn off Bloom, as well as gamma/brightness and contrast sliders.
Custom Mic Sensitivity will allow users to adjust the “trigger point” at which the user’s microphone sends audio to others, helping users with noisy IRL environments.
We’ve also identified a number of other features and improvements that are high priority and relatively straightforward to implement – and we’re aiming for these as soon as possible. Our internal goal is within the next week or two for these, but that could be sooner or later. It all depends on how our development and testing process goes.
Having a Movable Main Menu is probably one of our most-requested features. The main menu will appear in front of your face no matter how you’re standing (or laying), and you can grab it and move it around with your controller. Our upcoming new Main Menu will have this feature at launch, and we are going to integrate a “quick and dirty” implementation for the current main menu to hold users over. Here’s a quick video preview of both our new Main Menu and the movement feature:
Personal Mirrors are also another extremely popular item in feedback – a local-only mirror that you can move around, adjust the size of, adjust the rendering settings for, and lock to your avatar optionally:
We’re also aiming to add a calibration mirror that appears in front of you when you calibrate your full-body tracking. The current prototype doesn’t show the calibration spheres and resets your Personal Mirror, so we don’t have a preview video for that yet.
Adding More Favorites for avatars, worlds, and friends is also in our plans. No exact numbers yet, but we’ll be boosting everyone’s favorite count.
Haptics on touch is a popular feature request where your controller haptics activate when you come in contact with someone’s Avatar Dynamics, increasing immersion when patting someone on the head or touching a tail. We’re integrating this as a base Avatar Dynamics feature that you can enable or disable via the Action Menu.
The Particle Limiter is actually already implemented into VRChat, but it’s been a “beta” feature hidden in the configuration for a very long time. We’re adding an option to turn it on or off into our UI so you don’t have to restart to change this setting. Its settings will still be only adjustable via the configuration file for now, as we lack the room in the current menu system to add detailed configuration fields.
We’re investigating the best way to implement Local Voice Falloff Adjustment. This is a feature where users can adjust how fast other people’s voices fall off with distance. However, this feature has some complications with existing Udon-powered voice adjustment systems that must be resolved. Additionally, Steam Audio is a high-priority existing roadmap item, and our switch to that system may further complicate a falloff adjustment setting. It may be best for us to instead focus efforts on swapping to Steam Audio first. At the moment, we are working with Valve to resolve some integration issues.
These are not all of the changes and features in this near-term roadmap. These are the ones we’ve identified as being both High Priority and Close to Shipping. There are more features on the way that we’re still designing and planning for.
When we are able to free some resources back from development on these rapid iterations, we will move to release Main Menu 2.0, which is currently in the “optimize and polish” stage. The new UI addresses many of the feature requests we’ve had in the last few days, and getting it in front of you is a high priority.
In addition, we will be doing our best to make sure the community is better informed about what is coming down the pipeline in the future. We’re already working on a few things that we believe will dramatically increase the amount of interaction that we have with users.
This is a whole team effort. Every member of the VRChat team is mobilizing to make this happen.
Thank you for your patience while we work as quickly as we can to address your concerns and your feedback. We'll be back soon with the first set of these updates, changes, and features.
For press or media inquiries, please contact press@vrchat.com
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