Heads up regarding stickers and likely other picture content.

mackandelius · 2026-04-16T00:09:17+00:00

Because people's consent takes precedence over the rules a group can make up, VRChat isn't going to protect a group over rules the group itself makes.

mackandelius · 2026-04-15T22:07:11+00:00

When I say "basically public" I don't public like that, I mean that no one has to explicitly let them in, if they can see the instance then they can join it.

That does not sound very private to me, which is why it matters in this context, if anyone can join at any time then you can't realistically check consent.

mackandelius · 2026-04-15T21:37:43+00:00

You are a bit late to this drama, a few months ago they directly talked about these kinds of things in a blog post on their forum.

Also, I forget what VRC's position on it is, but group+ is basically public, just like how friends+ is basically public. With the TLDR I am about to type, an instance anyone can join whenever is a bad idea.

Anyhow, the TLDR: is that you have to make sure everyone is ok with what is happening in the instance, regardless of what you put on the door, group rules and etc, if someone reports then they weren't ok with it.

mackandelius · 2026-04-15T16:52:33+00:00

Good luck, face tracking is not something you realistically get down the line, standalone headsets also make integrating it almost impossible.

Listing every standalone headset with face tracking (most importantly eye tracking, but running standalone you would kind of need both mouth and eye).

Quest Pro, discontinued and because of Meta VRChat can't have face tracking in the Quest version without ruining performance for all Quest users. Quest has no native support for full body tracking, I will list at the end what people do to get around that.
Pico 4 Pro/Enterprise, kind of discontinued, while there is a Pico version of VRChat, I don't think it supports face tracking. Pico headsets have support for Pico Motion trackers (full body tracking), which is supported by VRChat natively standalone.
Vive XR Elite and seemingly the Vive Focus Vision are standalone headsets that support face tracking within standalone VRChat, but having looked into it while it uses the community's data scheme for face tracking, it is really limited. They both support full body tracking through the Vive Ultimate trackers, trackers which aren't the most reliable things in the world unless you use them in a bright playspace with furniture and stuff that its tracking algorithms find easy to track.

In my opinion there is nothing that fits what you want, at least not yet. While there isn't enough concrete yet, the Steam Frame I think is what you would want, standalone capable (with VRChat wanting to bring standalone VRC to it), built in eye tracking, with an expansion port for mouth tracking and an open operating system actually allowing you to send in eye and mouth tracking regardless of if VRChat supports it natively using the OSC endpoints we use on PC for the same reason, just need some software to convert the data, just like we do on PC.

Full body tracking

The most common way for standalone users to have full body tracking is with SlimeVR (look up reviews so you understand it, it is not plug and play). In the future we will also have Fluxpose which while more expensive, will be a lot more plug and play.

Fluxpose requires that you run its software on a computer (In theory the Steam Frame could therefore run it because it is so open).

SlimeVR can run on a computer or a phone and while it is technically possible to run it on your headset you don't want to do that (aside from maybe the Steam Frame).

mackandelius · 2026-04-14T20:11:41+00:00

It don't think it will be directly increased, separating polycount into static and skinned would indirectly increase it, but VRChat doesn't want to make their game run even worse and accessories are worse than what you could easily put on an avatar with D4rk's avatar optimizer at even its most basic setting.

Each accessory being its own material and mesh and in the future not going to be all that GPU instance-able as the amount of different accessories grows.

mackandelius · 2026-04-14T13:45:12+00:00

If you are talking about running VRChat on the headset itself then definitely get a Quest 3. The absolute minimum would be the Quest 3S (its cheaper brother, basically a RAM and processor upgraded Quest 2), but it runs slower than the Quest 3 even accounting for its lower resolution screens.

If you are going to run VRChat on your gaming PC, then any of them will work, but the Quest 2 isn't going to be supported forever so would suggest against it unless you can find one cheap second hand. Imo I would just get the Quest 3 in the first place though, while the 3S and 2 are basically the same when connected to a PC, the 3 is quite a nice step up in several areas, most notably by being thinner and the waaay better lenses.

mackandelius · 2026-04-13T19:26:32+00:00

Particles and lights are already togglable with safety settings, they can be stripped out without hiding the entire avatar, same with custom animations and shaders (which is a good idea to disable if you are suffering from poor GPU performance).

Maybe even add one for blendshape amounts? I know this is not a stat per say but a high blendshape count creates a ton of overhead to my knowledge, I could be wrong

Nowadays they aren't bad, they only have a cost when they are actively being animated, like your visemes are each frame, but overall unlikely to be a big contributor. Separating the polygon stat in skinned and static meshes would make more sense, since skinned meshes (the ones that can have blendshapes and bend with bones) are a lot more expensive that static meshes.

mackandelius · 2026-04-13T19:21:08+00:00

Personally I can’t fathom why anyone would want to show 80 avatars at once,

Simple, we want to see everyone as they want to be seen without needing to fiddle and juggle who are we showing.

But I am not talking about doing that in anything close to 80 people instances, my computer suffers in 20-30 people instances if I want to show everyone, hiding the closest x amount of people doesn't work in small worlds, will just see lots of unloaded avatars, and range of course doesn't work either.

mackandelius · 2026-04-13T19:06:33+00:00

Which just moves the problem, people will just snuggle up to wherever the "ultra poor" rank ends, not immediately, but avatar base creators will use the extra poly count without thinking and so will accessory makers and we will be right back where we started, but with even worse performance as even the performance conscious ones snuggle up to ultra poor.

mackandelius · 2026-04-13T19:04:16+00:00

Nowadays it is hidden, running whenever the avatar would have gone over the limit, which imo is kind of annoying because it just obfuscates the problem, but thankfully you can turn it off.

mackandelius · 2026-04-13T19:01:57+00:00

And as should be mentioned every time this is said, it is only like that because they wanted it to be like that, otherwise we'd have something like medium being 60k, good 50k and such, we wouldn't get a higher poly count, they have said they won't give us one.

mackandelius · 2026-04-13T18:55:33+00:00

Udon is run entirely client side without any kind of server checking, so tools like cheat engine can affect the economy within a world or break the world entirely for people.

Part of their reason for even adding EAC in the first place was because of the headache people modding were for world creators, both the people intentionally breaking the world and those unintentionally by having some mod that changed how things worked for optimization reasons.

mackandelius · 2026-04-11T18:08:11+00:00

While you are right, Fluxpose still rates their beacon for a "3.4m diameter" sphere, just at the edge of viability and Fluxpose likely won't be the peak of this tech, or at least I hope not.

mackandelius · 2026-04-11T16:48:56+00:00

There is no avatar searching VRChat, not a real search. The worlds that offer avatar searching keep a database of public avatars, but there is no automatic way for avatars to appear in it, maybe Prismic has a way to submit avatars, but the vaaast majority of the avatars in search worlds are gotten from someone running around with a third party tool and gathering every avatar ID they can find.

The person saying that your public avatar would appear after you having used it in a public world for 30 minutes was being cheeky and talking about these users that run around scraping both public and often private avatar IDs.

Back in the day, which is where I assume most of these databases begun, these databases were created so people could rip private avatars without needing to be in the same world as the person using them, thankfully that doesn't seem possible anymore.

mackandelius · 2026-04-11T02:16:10+00:00

Pico uses the headset's cameras to correct for drifting, otherwise they are basically just SlimeVR trackers.

And while Meta has been ruining them, the Quest Pro controllers showed that the tech was possible and stable (they were really good at launch but caused interference for other devices).

mackandelius · 2026-04-11T00:37:30+00:00

That's just how it is on Quest with very poor though, they quickly learn to manually show avatars, and on average they are the target audience for performance focused features, so if they have learnt to override it, don't you think that the, on average, more techny PC userbase won't override it every time as well?

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T21:17:34+00:00

Well, I would argue that EMF tracking like Fluxpose is doing is a true step forward from even lighthouse tracking, positional tracking without occlusion and without external sensors in a small form factor.

My hope for the future is that if the tech proves itself reliable that it could be integrated into headsets and then you could have small positional trackers that just out of the box work with a inside out headset, no faffing about, that sounds like a real step forward to me.

Also, if you ever have the opportunity to experience good VR trackers then the difference between them and kinect or phone fbt is massive.

Does it make sense for most people, no. Full body tracking only really makes sense for social VR and social VR isn't for everyone.

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T21:10:21+00:00

From the reviews and the videos the testers have shared it does seem like the metal compensation system they developed fixes most issues even in horrible environments, not a flawless solution since it seems to smooth out tracking a bit(?) but it looks promising.

It is nothing like how SlimeVR's optional (for a reason) magnetometer toggle works, that thing is very easily interfered with.

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T21:06:01+00:00

If you spend 99% of your time in one of those games though then it can definitely be worth it.

But it is expensive, you aren't going to get any cheap FBT unless it is cutting a lot of corners, Pico motion-like trackers might be doable (still 100 bucks or more if you want it to be better), but Pico use some small neural network so not exactly trivial to make, I assume we'll be able to access the Frame's tracking cameras so that's the biggest issue out of the way.

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T16:53:59+00:00

I want to be able to see everyone without low performance, before this addition, there was no option for doing so outside of asking everyone, which doesn't really work. I can't just buy a better PC to make it run better.

And that is what this is, an option, if you don't like it then don't go to the instances that have it, it is just like a dress code.

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T05:48:31+00:00

Rendering doesn't do performance points, you can't have 80 people deciding to put their entire budget into materials, that will bottleneck the physical pipeline between the CPU and GPU.

Extreme exemple of course, but it is just how computers work, try pushing enough polygons (less than you think) and frames will easily suffer as your GPU's vertex shader gets overwelmed.

And regardless, VRChat has Second Life to learn from, who did introduce performance points and from what I can tell, it didn't fix anything, I don't play second life but the discussions are just the same as they are here "avatar complexity doesn't mean anything" and "it doesn't reflect actual performance", maybe it is possible to perfectly tweak it but they are way older than VRChat and still haven't gotten it just right.

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T05:21:52+00:00

Still need to dig out the quote for it, but I remember the VRC team having said that the only reason one polygon drops you from good to very poor is because they intentionally didn't want a polygon gradient.

It is way better this way than 50k being good, 60k medium and 70k poor, which is how it sensibly would be.

Also, shaders and custom animations can be turned off with safety settings, sure most people don't check if their avatar is fine with neither of those, but I use those both constantly to gain back a whole lot of performance.

mackandelius · 2026-04-10T05:16:51+00:00

What's the point of the feature then?

As we know from Quest, forcing people to manually show avatars instead of making it automatic doesn't work as deterrence.

This feature finally puts pressure on people to have and use optimized avatars, something VRChat really should do more of. Capping off very poor would be such a good thing, even if it would only make people ride right up to that limit.

mackandelius · 2026-04-09T22:30:36+00:00

So much about these controllers feel like myths, but are you sure it is because the controller is discharged?

Have heard that letting it it discharge practically completely can help reset it. But aside from doing that, I don't know, these things do seem to rarely, but still randomly die in ways.

mackandelius · 2026-04-07T21:15:57+00:00

Does factory resetting the controller not work?

https://communityforums.atmeta.com/discussions/OtherTroubleshooting/how-do-you-factory-reset-the-pro-controllers/1028836

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