As the developers of VRChat, we tend to keep a little quiet about new features or additions we’re planning on bringing to the platform. There’s a few reasons for this, but primarily we don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver — if we give our Community a release date or a feature set, we don’t want to provide something that falls short.
However, this does cause a problem with communication. If we aren’t telling our Community what we’re up to, it can be very difficult to see where we’re pointing VRChat in the long-term, or even in the shorter term of the next few months. As a start to addressing this problem, we’d like to show you our plans for for the rest of the year.
We like to call these our “blueprints.” We often have goals we set internally that get pushed to a later date, change during development, or delayed indefinitely. Keep in mind that our plans may not reflect future reality — but we’re trying our hardest to hit our targets.
You’ll see that there are two main areas for Q3 2019 (July, August, September). Primary Focus consists of big-name items and themes, or large sets of smaller tasks that all aim for a similar goal. We’ve come to call these three big points the “Three S’s” — Stability, Security, and SDK.
Stability is an important point for us. It is no secret that VRChat has its fair share of bugs. We’ve got many small bugs that can change an experience from an enjoyable one to a frustrating one. Our Community has done their due diligence in reporting these issues to us, and we’ve got a nicely-sized backlog. We’re going to focus on addressing these, one at a time.
In addition, reducing regressions will help prevent future bugs from popping up where we don’t expect them to. Approaching this problem requires some refactoring and changing of internal systems — changes that won’t affect functionality, but will make VRChat more durable going forward.
Security is also exceedingly important. You should feel safe when you’re in VRChat, no matter what instance you’re in. There are several vectors malicious actors can exploit to harass or attack our users, and we plan on hunting those down and squashing them firmly.
Improving account security will be moved forward by the implementation of Two-Factor Authentication. This feature is very close to release, and we plan on implementing it as an option for all users in the very near future.
Finally, SDK and Udon covers a pretty big range of VRChat territory. When we talk about the SDK, we’re talking about a few things: the suite of tools available to creators (both world and avatar), the UI/UX of the SDK itself, and Udon. Our SDK requires quite a few changes, and has been sitting idle without major features or additions. We plan on addressing many aspects of the SDK, which we sum up in our blueprint above.
Udon is a huge focus for VRChat, and we are determined to get it to the state we desire before release. This means a high-performance, cross-platform programming language that is both powerful and easy to use. That’s a challenging target to hit, so we’re taking the necessary time to get each stage right. That being said, we’re aiming to get Udon to internal and closed testing this quarter. We’re aiming for an Open Beta and release of Udon in Q4 2019.
So, why is the SDK and Udon so important? The ingenuity and creativity of the VRChat Community is something special. We want to empower our creators to make even more incredible experiences. We also want you to feel more secure that what you create won’t break with each update. So, a lot of effort is going into enabling our creators (that’s you!), but also in creating more stable tools going forward. We know it will be worth the effort.
So, how about that Secondary Focus section? What do we mean when we say “Bringing new tools to creators and users”?
We’ll let the image do most of the talking here. As mentioned before, these are plans, or “blueprints” — it is subject to change, including pushing items farther down the line (to Q4 or beyond) or changing them as we develop.
These areas of VRChat are things we plan on improving, iterating upon, or adding. In particular, our next release will have some significant work on the VRChat Audio section of our blueprints. Watch out for details on that in an upcoming update.
Going Forward
During these next few months, we’ll be addressing various sections of VRChat development with blog posts and Dev Streams that dig down into these particular sections. We have a lot of ideas for improvement, and a very active Community that has excellent insight into what needs improvement.
We’d also like to offer a heartfelt “Thank You!” to our Community. We know that frustration can be easy to find as a fan of VRChat, but we have not forgotten how amazing our Community is. We hope that more frequent and transparent communication (like this blog!) will help clear the air for you going forward. We plan on delivering as much info as we can, as often as we can.
We hope that this clears some things up about the near-future of VRChat for you, and would like to offer further thanks to our Community for providing the input we’ve seen. If you’d like to get your voice heard, check out our Feedback page, or come hang out on our Discord.
We can’t wait to see how VRChat grows with our Community. Keep an eye out for more info coming Soon™!
