TL;DR: I’d like for the developers to work with the community and attempt to find a more performant alternative to the popular dynamic bones asset.

Okay, at this point I think everyone at least somewhat understands dynamic bone eats performance like an unsupervised child does chocolate. It’s arguably the most performance intensive thing VRChat allows, not counting intentionally laggy shaders, and the new avatar performance meter punishes accordingly.

So, what now? Are we supposed to just have tails, ears, long hair, open coats, capes, etc all just be as stiff as boards and disallow free moving objects on avatars? I’ve heard more than once someone respond to a question regarding long hair with “switch to short hair” or a response to loose clothing being “wear different clothes” but this poses a problem: we, as avatar creators, are being made to limit our creativity for optimization. I know there are people who can get away with no dynamic bones on their avatars, but that’s a very small portion of the community. So how about instead of indirectly punishing users for making things that require dynamic bones to function well, a better performing alternative to dynamic bones is whitelisted.

The main argument I hear against this is “everyone has dynamic bone,” but this argument is barely an argument in itself. Let’s be real, I’d wager that 90% of VRChat hasn’t even purchased Dynamic Bones, instead getting the asset through other means. So there probably won’t be thousands of people saying “but I paid money for this!” And, let’s say on the off chance there is a large backlash, to help mitigate this if an alternative is implemented there could be a grace period where both, dynamic bone and an alternative, are whitelisted. Maybe even older avatars keep the component active, similarly to legacy animations.

The only real question is: what do we replace it with? That’s partially why I’m making this canny. I’ll be honest in that I don’t know of any good alternatives by name, but I’ve heard other, more experienced creators, mention there are alternatives that can achieve the same effect with lower performance cost. Hopefully if this canny post gets traction other users can respond in the comments with suggestions they think the developers should look into testing. I’d like to see VRChat perform better, but I’d also like to retain as much artistic freedom as possible. So it’d be wonderful if we, the developers of the game and the community members, could come to a conclusion on what to do about the dynamic bone situation.