Public Hub Boot Option
MuffinOfGood
I miss the public hub greatly, and i do believe that we should be given the option in the menu to spawn in the hub like it used to except allow people to opt in or out since im aware people don't want to because either they are afraid of avatar stealers or script kiddies, or they are just that antisocial.
i do believe the hub was a great place to spawn given its issue in the past of avatar stealing n such because of being able to start the game with others in the same spot, it gave a feeling that i will never have again. i miss it dearly and i think other would love that option to come back like i do. i would kill for the option to spawn in a public instance of the old old hub, new old hub or the newest hub as a actual game feature and not a id code i put into steam launcher as this is way more accessible. thank you whatever dev takes there time to read this, i appreciate it!
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Ron
Hi. You can set any world to be your home and you will start up in that world. You can also run forward in the current home into that portal and you'll go to a public hub. Maybe we can look into launching directly into a public instance and skip home for those that want to.
GotoFinal
Ron: but home worlds are always private, so it has nothing to do with this request :<
You can run forward, but that was kinda that magic of public hub, you could met some new interesting people by accident while deciding where to go.
MuffinOfGood
Ron: i would love the function to spawn in the public hub on boot, that would be lovely. Also that audio update recently is great, i love it, you and the team keep up the great work!
OhBaNoBa
Ron: Please look into the option. I understand not everybody is on board with that one, some are still very uneasy in public. But a checkbox would be a nice change of pace and homage to the old days.
Ricki'
Ron: I miss spawning into public hubs. I would love to see this option return :)
Kush Meyer
Ron: Considering we can still use the steam startup command to override the home world spawn, perhaps adding the option to make your home non-private would be a natural step forward? A checkbox that would let a user spawn into a populated instance instead of a private one, or creating a public one if no instances are currently open.
Pan Diman
Ron: If I were a celebrity, I'd prefer being in private worlds at all times, but just like 99% of VRChat, I don't feel like I can call myself one, and I want to be in worlds where I could find other people like myself.
Demirramon
Maybe they could add actual protection against avatar ripping and then spawning in a big hub with a lot of people would scare no one. I really miss that, too.
GotoFinal
Demirramon: how? it's not really possible to protect against this.
Demirramon
GotoFinal: Of course it is. There's one thing called encryption which makes it significantly harder to read a file, any coder should know about it and it's not too hard to do. Do you know what VRChat does? They randomly rename the files. With enough time, you can get every avatar you've come across because all of it is saved in your cache folder. At least the models, which is bad enough.
GotoFinal
Demirramon: but to display that avatar game need to decrypt avatar anyway - so it is just useless.
Encryption is only useful to prevent people who should not be able to display something from seeing it, but avatar must be send to all other players and all that players need to be able to understand it.
Demirramon
GotoFinal: Not really. The cache folder's purpose is to not have to download avatars you already downloaded, but to actually use them they have to be loaded into memory. If the cache was encrypted, it could get decrypted on the fly and the unprotected files would never be anywhere in the disk. Would it be impossible yo rip them? No, not impossible. Significantly harder and easier to patch? Yep.
GotoFinal
Demirramon: it's not harder at all... Simple injector in loading code and it would work again. Fighting with this would only waste vrchat team time where there are more important bugs and features that are actually possible to implement
Demirramon
GotoFinal: A waste of time? Security is not a waste of time. VRChat is only alive because of the content the community creates. The logic thing would be making protecting this content a priority, instead of limiting it to hell and back and doing nothing to prevent theft.
GotoFinal
Demirramon: security by obscurity is a anti-pattern, and this is what you are proposing, to make loading of avatar much more complicated yet not protecting anything at all, as at the end model is decrypted and loaded to the memory and everyone can get it.
Better reporting tools would help more than useless complications like that.
Tenshinen
Demirramon: So lets just say they implement perfect encryption. Ok. What stops someone just creating software that interfaces with the graphics driver to directly rip the models from the VRAM during rendering? Nothing. Unless they implement anticheat so invasive that it prevents you from running programs that even interface with your graphics card, they can't completely stop it. Slow it down? Definitely. Stop it? Impossible.
xxx_red_xxx
Demirramon: Still you have things like Ninja Ripper which just directly rip things from the currently loaded GPU frame when the rip was triggered. No, it can't get animations or shaders but the model's mesh itself is still enough to consider it stealing.
Demirramon
I get what you mean, but that's like not locking your front door because someone could pick the lock. I know it's impossible to make it 100% safe, but it could be made safer.
Tenshinen
Demirramon: People can take the models just as easily no matter what they implement, really. It's like having two doors but only locking your front door. People can just go in the back. There is zero way to stop model stealing entirely. People will steal them regardless of what you implement. I've heard people literally going to the levels of running games in a virtual machine in order to rip the models and get around anticheat.
The most VRC can do is add anticheat and encrypt their files better. Models will still get stolen it'll just need a lot more effort for people to do it.
rabbitything
would love to see this brought back, it is fun having your own little home, but id like to spawn in with new people again.
OhBaNoBa
I really do miss meeting people that way and truly I love this idea. For someone like me, that likes teaching and inspiring, It was a great way to meet new talent that just needed a push to become outstanding members of the community. With most of the issues that lead to the current private spawn under "control", maybe it's time to bring it back.. or at least the option too <3
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