Let Us Turn Off The (Upcoming) Audio Limiter | Voters

Let Us Turn Off The (Upcoming) Audio Limiter

complete

error.mdl

Dear VRChat Team,
Do you care at all about the avatar creators in your game? Because your actions say you only see us as and our creations only as problems. Maybe you don't realize, but avatars are literally the life-blood of VRChat. A huge number of people literally came here to see creative avatars and take part in making them. And what makes avatars in this game special is what we (used to) be able to do with them. But each update you either break something (and never bother fixing it), or purposely take away functionality we use in them without making any attempt to replace it. Since I started this game two years ago, you guys have done nothing but continuously strip away little by little the things that made avatars special. You should have learned from the particle limiter debacle. Forcing limits on people whether they want them or not is a horrible idea. Your latest stunt with forced audio limits we can't sidestep is going to drive a lot of creators away.
Nobody is asking for forced audio limits. You already gave us two methods to get rid of annoying audio, through the avatar audio slider and the saftey settings. Why do you feel like you need to now force really restrictive limits? People were only ok with the original limits cause we could just side-step them so easily. Most people don't want audio limits. I understand wanting to prevent people from ear-raping people with global audio, but you literally already solved that issue. You don't need anything more than the avatar audio slider and saftey settings. If people don't want loud audio, they can already block it.
What I really don't understand is why you feel like you have to force logarithmic roll-off and no 2d/volumetric audio. Yes, logarithmic is technically realistic but the way you implemented it is distinctly unrealistic. Audio falls off noticeably way too fast. The real max range before audio becomes too faint to hear is something like 2.5 meters at the max allowed range. Your current implementation is not realistic in any sense of the word. Yet, every time I've approached a team member about why you guys insist on forcing log falloff and no 2d, you tell me that its because its realistic. You should not be forcing me to make stuff "realistic"! The appeal of this game is fundamentally about defying the laws of reality, not conforming to them. Let us, the avatar creators, make decisions about how we want to make our avatars sound. If we want to use linear rolloff, let us! If we want to make weird custom falloff curves, let us! Who cares if it's unrealistic? Are you going to force the standard lighting model on all shaders because anything else is unrealistic? Two dimensional audio isn't just used for ear-rape, it has a very legitimate use for background music. Let us use it. Don't tell us what we should and shouldn't do. Let us do the audio design for our own stuff. Don't make decisions for us.
Since you're hellbent on forcing these new limits, and I doubt anything will change your mind, please consider doing what you did with the dynamic bone limiter and the particle limiter. Please add an option to the menu (or maybe the config) to disable forcing the audio limits. Make it both stop forcing the old audio limits and curves and make it disable auto adding the new spatialization script to every avatar sound source. That way you can keep your limits, and those of us who don't want them can not have them. I know you guys hate options (to quote one of your server guys "People ask for options, I scream NO at them"), but if you force this on everyone, its going to make A LOT of good people, not just idiot spammers, leave the game.
Please don't just leave the audio limits permanently forced on as they are now. Let us disable them. I've spent over 4000 hours just playing on this platform. I've probably spent nearly as much time making stuff in unity. I love this game. But you guys keep breaking my stuff little by little, and it has completely killed my enthusiasm and creative drive. And I'm not the only one. Many really productive creators I know left the game after you guys broke or removed an avatar feature. I'm on my last legs with this. If you don't give us an option to turn it off, I'm done making anything for vrchat ever again. If you don't have the slightest bit of respect for the people who make your platform special, then I won't do you the favor of making content for free. Please, stop doing this to us. If you continue to drive your creators out of the game, its going to stagnate and die.
Thanks,
Error.mdl

July 13, 2019

xxx_red_xxx

After playing the new update, I noticed that many of my own avatars audio sources are NOT behaving even like they would in unity. An example, the engine on a tank I made can be heard across the ENTIRE map with minimum set to 1 and maximum set to 14, it's even louder than the gun firing sound effect! And I've made/ported from other games over 500 of these! I don't have time to fix all of these. It took me my entire VRC career just to get these all into the game. We at least need an option in the menu to revert to the old sound system or you need to at least make the range on audio sources behave like they should.

Aev

marked this post as

complete

A lot of progress has been made on the upcoming audio systems since this post. Custom curves for avatar audio are enabled in worlds by default, meaning avatars can continue to behave as they are currently. Logarithmic rolloff is not forced, and 2D audio/volumetric audio is available as well.

To my knowledge, the new limits coming with the audio update are as follows:

World authors have access to audio region overrides, which can be used to modify user voice or avatar audio in many different ways. While they can do a lot of things, a world author could choose to use these tools to create audio limits in their world. That's their choice, and the audio limits will only apply to their world in the way the author has designed.
There is a limit on extreme volume to protect against malicious audio. Please note that audio can still be loud, this specifically affects audio that is designed to be malicious.

I've talked with error.mdl after these changes, and they agree that their concerns in this post have been addressed. The feedback is much appreciated, as well as the time spent testing these new systems. We're looking forward to seeing what people can do with these new audio tools, both for avatars as well as worlds!

xxx_red_xxx

You can already use animators to bypass range limits but there is still no way to set a custom curve which I wanted to do to create a gunshot effect with a separate distant shot sound that can only be heard far away.

Shanie

xxx_red_xxx: I believe you can do this with the new, current patch (with limitations based on the world author).

Legoman99573

Shanie: It is still an issue for older worlds that haven't been updated since moving to 2017.4.15f1 as some of the authors don't play this game anymore. I still believe we should still have the option not to limit the audio on our ends if we don't want it limited for ourselves and would only affect yourself and not others. Not all of us asked for the limits or at least a way to turn them off locally and still stand by it.

Legoman99573

I have tried the latest build and I can say for avatars that require the bounds to go out a bit, like for animation showcases, is pretty disappointing as I feel like it was taken away from us creators. I get the limiter is a good thing for some people, and I wouldn't discourage it, but I feel the limiter is forced onto people who don't want it.

I have been on vrchat for a year and a half and dont want to see audio suffer because of earraping kiddies who think its funny as i can usually hide their avatar just fine. All of my avatars that did work for showcases no longer work as people would have to find the fixed joint and where the audio source is located at and its really sad.

rollthered

There is so much passion in this community, I am glad that people are advocating so strongly for things like this. I want to see more Canny posts like these from now on where people are really pouring their heart and soul into what they are passionate about. In the end posts like these are what really help people take notice of what is wrong and change things for the better. Thank you for taking the time to write all of this error.mdl.

Ron

I/we hear you. I am glad you wrote this. It was clear and well put. You'll notice the release wasn't shoved out with things as they are in beta. I would like our creators to not get nerfed. I personally really enjoy the all in one avatar performances with visuals where you have to stand back. It would (and maybe has been) not great to move away from an avatar and have that sound falloff way too fast. That removes the fun of that creation and all that hard work. Even without you writing this as the CCO of this company I was already concerned that we were going to far with some of the audio changes. Like to strike a better balance. Should be a new beta out soon that I'd like you and others to take a listen to. thanks.

Mimi

Ron: I think all everyone wants is an option to turn on or off the local enforcement of audio limitations on avatars.
I feel like the voice audio is really good so far, I really love how realistically it sounds and works. Avatar Audio is a bit odd though and you can tell it has things happening to it because of the limitations.
While I know some people will want to keep it on, and, it should probably be on by default, the ability to toggle off these limits, on avatar audio, would be really great. I want to hear someones loud, realistic gun, or magic effects. if I don't like what's going on I can turn avatar audio down, disable the avatar that is trolling, turn my system sound down, turn on the "avatar safe audio" setting, or, many many options to make things comfortable
from what I can tell, this isn't a complaint about the new spacializer upgrade at all, but, a complaint about more forced artificial safety limits on avatar audio. Everyone I've talked to loves the spacializer update quite a bit otherwise (for voice and such)

Cristian del Real

Ron: giving us the option to turn off the limiter is fair. We dont need all these limitations now that we have the safety system. The dev team should focus on other things, like people who threaten to ddos others in public worlds.

error.mdl

Mimi:

Yes, exactly. The changes to voice are good, but if you're going to create uncircumventable limits to avatar audio then you need to let us turn them off if we want.

Ron

Mimi: Yes. To be clear I already understood that. Thanks for clarifying anyway though Mimi. Rather you did than didn't.

Ron

error.mdl: The plan is to give back the ability to have a custom curve (which was removed a while back) and continue to let the parameters be animated. I also really love avatar audio and all that it brings.

Legoman99573

Ron: I have tried the latest open beta and still don't see an option to turn the limiter off. As someone who has put in alot of hours into this game to make fun avatars for others, i feel like the latest open beta has been the final straw as earlier open betas weren't as strict with going out a little bit over the limits, but now it is terrible when you leave the areas limits as audio sources max radius is forced breaking avatars audio sources. GG to the devs, I don't see myself making anymore avatars for this game or make showcases for friends as it feels like its been nerfed and is going to remain that way. This canny has over 300 upvotes and i don't see that its going to change anything since the next release is close by. I feel like the communication between devs and creators has been too distant to the point of no alternatives to things that break or change, like take for flying avatars, that was a bug that everyone enjoyed as it opened more avatar ideas, no longer fly properly or launch you backwards and no alternative or official supported method to get them to work again, defeating the purpose of the avatar in the 1st place.

Steviation

Forced limitations like these are what turn away genuinely clever and respectful avatar creators. When I first started playing VRChat, I was always inspired by the creative applications that avatar makers were able to utilize. When these forced limitations started getting implemented, a lot of them left because of their hard work only being met with push back. With limit after limit, most of the avatar creators remaining are the ones who were either already creating within the new limits, or the ones who push their animations too far to spite the dev team and show that they're not willing to back down. VRChat used to be brimming with creators who diluted the amount of cancerous avatars, but now so many have left that the cancerous ones are a bigger problem than ever.

Anything that gives users the option to choose, rather than be forced into a single way of experiencing the game, is always something I support.

Raccoonteur

I don't know what the devs have planned as far as limiting audio volume, so I can't really comment on that, but as others have mentioned, as currently implemented audio from avatars seems to fall off too quickly. 
Now, I don't know if I'm using the best settings, but with the volume set to 0.9, the falloff set to linear (so I can adjust the min radius), min radius set to the max of 2, and the max radius set to 30, well, the results I get don't sound anything like what I expect. For one, the audio is definitely not always at max volume in a 2 meter radius surrounding the player. It sounds like the falloff is logarithmic at all distances even though the SDK adjusts the min radius when you upload and the curve displayed afterward indicates it should be full volume 2 meters out. Basically, when people are practically inside me, the audio is deafening, while when they are standing 1 meter away the volume is reasonable, and when they are standing 3 meters away the sounds are barely audible.
This is not ideal, and doing things like increasing the max radius to 100 or 1000 only makes things worse with even sharper falloff, which makes no sense both because it's the opposite of what one might expect when increasing the max radius for a sound, and because if the falloff is logarithmic, the curve should be the same regardless of the cutoff distance you set where the volume should be clamped to 0.
Basically, so far, I've found no way to make it so that my audio plays at a reasonable volume for those near me, while still having it fall off smoothly so it's quiet but still audible for those 5 meters away. I've got my AC going in the other room right now. It's about 10 meters away. I'd say it sounds about 50% as loud right now as it sounds when I'm right next to it. And it certainly isn't deafening when I'm standing right next to it. Now perhaps if I were outside, the volume falloff would be more dramatic. I am indoors after all, so the walls reflect the sound and prevent it from falling off so quickly. But half of VRChat is in indoor spaces, where I expect the audio to behave a certain way, and it sounds more wrong to have the audio behave always as if it were being emitted outdoors, than it would be to make it have a falloff more like its indoors. And nobody wants to be deafened when they walk up to interact with someone playing music because that's the only way to make it heard over even small distances.
Now, everything I've just said could be wrong as I have not done rigorous testing in the game, but if it is, then we need some better guidance on how to set this stuff up. The reason I say this is because I did encounter something weird with the audio on a friend's avatar the other day which makes me want to do more testing. Basically, from what I understand, he had a song, which was normalized to 0db (which means basically the waveform is basically half the max volume in the audio editing program) and he had his min radius set to 0, and his max set to 15... And his problem was that his audio in the game was supper quiet. Which makes sense right? Except here's the thing. Even though the song was like 10-25% of how loud would be ideal even when standing next to him... It didn't get that much quieter when I walked all the way to the other side of the room. In other words, the falloff did not seem so harshly logarithmic. So on hearing this I decided more testing was needed to see if there was a happy medium between the ear rape up close which my setup is getting and the gentle falloff but super quiet audio his setup had. I already told him that boosting the volume in his audio application would help some, but I'm wondering how adjusting the min and max radii will affect things. I'd like to see what keeping things the same and setting the min radius to 1 does to the sound and what setting the max to 30 but leaving the min at 0 does, and somewhere in there may be they key to getting the audio falloff to be nice.

狐小百合

I agree with this strongly, but I bet they're going to roll out the feature anyways. Because people totally go into VR for realism.

The current features let me deal with annoying avatar audio just fine. This new feature needs to simply not happen, I don't want to have to stand directly next to someone to hear their stuff, if I enabled their audio you can safely assume I want to hear it.

Chdata

Brandon, Boneworks VR Developer, "Cause dude, VR should be BETTER than the real world."

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