SDK Annoucement

Greeting, Agent

We are excited to share that our Avatar SDK is scheduled to begin rolling out very soon, starting next month in May. Our original goal was to release in April... but other things had come up, so we had to postpone the Avatar SDK release. Thank you all for your patience and understanding while we made sure the SDK was ready for testing. Current SDK Status At the moment, the SDK can port any avatar as long as it contains valid VRC files. In simple terms, if you have successfully uploaded your avatar and can use it in VRChat, it should be compatible with our porting process. Before porting, please make sure you do the following: - Upgrade your shaders to Poiyomi 10 - Unlock all materials before porting - Create a backup of your avatar project - (Seriously, create a backup) The SDK is powerful, but there is still a rare chance it may mutate or alter parts of your project in a way that could affect VRChat use later. Please protect your work before testing.... Why Did This Take Nearly 4 Years? We know many of you have wondered why it has taken nearly four years to bring the SDK and game to this point. The simple answer is: we had just one developer. Most of our team members are artists, and was only one programmer in which is no longer the situation at the time we can only do so much at once. Over these years, the game has grown into something far more advanced than a basic avatar loader. Since the core idea is bringing your avatar into our game, we had to account for many different player styles, body types, rigs, and use cases. The game now includes a fully working dynamic IK system supporting: - Digitigrade avatars - Plantigrade avatars - Human avatars That foundation matters a lot, because every avatar is different, and we want the experience to feel good no matter what kind of character you bring in. Funny enough, you could technically bring in something as simple as a cube, or even an animated 2D character. The 2D use case has not been fully tested yet, but in theory, it should work. This also gives us future parity for avatar development outside of a VRC project environment. That said, we do suspect VRChat may eventually make this harder or prevent this kind of workflow in the future, so get your avatars ready while you can. We also recommend keeping older SDK versions stored safely, since future SDK updates may break compatibility with our porting process. How the Porting Process Works Once you have ported your assets, you will need to install our second SDK. This SDK runs only on Unity 6000.6.X, and it is used to finish migrating your shaders to URP + Poiyomi 10. We will also provide a patched version of Poiyomi, since Unity 6.6 Alpha 3 changed some APIs. The general flow will be: - Port your avatar assets - Install the second SDK in Unity 6000.6.X, - Finish migrating your shaders to URP + Poiyomi 10 - Build and compile the asset bundle - Launch the game, Point the game to your asset bundle Watch the magic happen as your avatar loads in-game! Game Launch Status The game will launch alongside the SDK, but this will not be the full game with story content or major gameplay systems yet. Instead, this first release will be a basic playable version that allows you to: - Load your character in-game - Move around - Interact with your avatar - Use animated lip-sync - Control basic parameters - Toggle avatar assets Once your avatar is imported into the game, we encourage you to give us feedback. When this goes live, our main focus will be squashing SDK and game bugs so we can continue building toward the larger content releases. Future systems include things like: - A semi-realistic energy system based on real-life infrastructure - ONNX-based AI systems for NPCs and enemies - Expanded avatar interaction systems - More advanced in-game content and world systems Future SDK Plans We also have major plans for the second SDK. Long term, we want it to allow creators to do more than what the current VRCSDK is capable of. For example, we are exploring support for KTX textures to help reduce VRAM usage on modern GPUs. Because NVIDIA still makes VRAM limits painful, the minimum VRAM requirement will be 8GB, with 16GB or more recommended. We also plan to eventually let you build your avatar directly in-game without needing Unity installed, similar in spirit to how Resonite handles things, but without the heavy complexity. We know not everyone is comfortable working inside Unity, and when this plan moves forward, we want to make the process as friendly and accessible as possible for the community. Scale and Asset Standards Later on, we will begin enforcing proper Unity scale standards using meters for future asset bundles. This is important for our physics engine and other systems that require unified scaling. This means assets must be exported using meters, including: - FBX files - glTF files - OpenUSD files Keeping scale consistent will help the game’s physics, animation, and technical systems behave correctly as the project grows. Looking Further Ahead As the game continues to grow and mature, we are planning upgrades to the player system to support ongoing research and advanced technology, including: - ONNX-based cloth deformation - CUDA and RocM accelerated compute for in-game systems - Advanced resolvers -Unity VFX systems - Houdini-driven effects Our goal is to bring cinematic-quality visuals into the engine while targeting a minimum of 144 FPS, with 60 FPS as the absolute lowest acceptable target. If performance drops below that, optimization will matter, including making sure background processes are not stealing system resources. There is much more planned on our roadmap, and you can view it all through: [c][portal.alphazear.com] (https://portal.alphazear.com/tabs/3-snf)[/c] Thank you all again for your patience, excitement, and support. We are getting very close now, and we cannot wait to see your avatars come to life inside the game!