Avatar Loading Time Reduced Significantly

Loading in 2019.2.5 vs. the “chad” version 2019.3.1 in up to 4 seconds.

Recently, on August 14th, at 12 AM (GMT), VRChat provided us with another informative developer update on Twitch in a form of a new stream with Tupper, Ron, and Hackspanner to mention latest issues and certain improvements.

One of the first and biggest topics for discussion was the new audio system that, even though it got rid of voice prioritization, will let you hear nearby users better than people on a specific distance determined either by default settings, or by custom configurations provided by the world creator, in which case, if you don’t like the audio quality, you should probably blame the world’s creator and not the developers of VRChat, for once in a long while.

But the most impressive change mentioned during the stream was most certainly the avatar loading time which got reduced to under one second for most avatars. According to Tupper, “In the latest Open Beta, avatar loading time has gone from tens of seconds — or worse, for more complex avatars, — to under a second in almost all cases.”

Besides the implementation of basic improvements, the developers also commented on the current state of VRChat by saying that they’re not working on a finished product and finally acknowledged the importance of networking issues.

VRChat team also shared some details about their experiments with Oculus Quest in order to let Quest users see PC avatars to some extent, which, in a way, justifies the reasons behind this year’s development progress, since the general cross-platform “gameplay” on Oculus Quest is considered way worse compared to the PC experience due to the lack of users’ motivation to produce and upload Quest-ready content.

And lastly, VRChat Inc. is hiring people (again), mostly engineers but not moderators, because, apparently, they don’t consider VRChat moderation a high-priority task since VRChat lost its massive popularity, which actually happened over a year ago for various reasons.

In conclusion, we can say the latest stream was meant to prove VRChat devs are actually working on something and they do share the community’s critical opinions regarding some features, which they don’t admit very often.