Don't get rid of Fallback Avatars in favor of Imposters
ThePiedRat
Please don't do that. Imposters are nice, but a lot of us enjoy having the novelty of creating nicer, more professional looking avatars. A lot of us have already spent hours of time making them.
If anything, make it a VRC+ feature, to allow users to upload their own custom "imposter" avatars, aka fallbacks, within performance limitations.
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Zaxtylol_mk
nah
Ravioli_
yea i dont wanna see this gone too
AWBO
I would genuinely prefer to be a grey robot instead of an imposter. I spent so long making my avatars fallback compatible and have always disabled imposters for everyone. I personally have entirely turned off imposters as I don’t like how they look, and specifically prefer custom fallbacks.
橘花【きつか】
Make imposters work correctly first, deprecate fallbacks later.
maleus
I've personally not had very good experience with imposters, with poor animation quality, missing expressions etc. I would much rather a more traditional LOD system (maybe add the option to auto generate a decimated mesh with low texture resolution etc during the upload process?)
Salty Tangerine
Not even touching on the subject of non-humanoid body plans, humanoids with wings, etc...
Even the best impostors look aesthetically
awful
by any measure, rarely reflect the avatar they're mimicking accurately (if they're recognizable at all), and update their motions/angles at a completely different framerate than anything else around them. They look completely out of place in any context, and if preserving immersion is a goal of any priority to the VRChat team, Impostors will only take you further away from this goal.Fallbacks have none of these problems.
People using a VRChat default avatar as a fallback are at least using something that has been curated by actual humans who looked at those avatars and said "yes, this fits the VRChat aesthetic", and people who put forth the effort to upload their own custom fallback are (presumably) also actual humans who at least have a sense of "well at least this doesn't look too bad I guess".
In terms of immersion, fallbacks, regardless of the context in which they are viewed, are still rendered, appear, and move like any other game object in VRChat. The janky appearance and motion of impostors makes them immediately stand out as not-belonging because how they appear and move are completely at odds with everything else around them.
Fallback avatars don't fail at reflecting the user's current avatar because they aren't obligated to; they are, at the very least, intentionally-chosen, separate representations of the user that they have looked at and said "yes, I am okay with this being how people see me". At most, they're a carefully-crafted alternate representation of the user that is just as important to them as their main avatar(s).
But if you need to justify development hours to the bean-counters, consider instead giving them an entire category on the Marketplace and not just potentially increase revenue, but also increase adoption of the fallback feature itself by making it more accessible to the users of VRChat.
The over-arching reason that Fallback Avatars are something to continue to develop and support going forward is simple. They are a user-experience-focused feature that reinforces one of VRChat's central pillars: the user's ability to choose their own appearance. Avatar Impostors, as a feature, only focus on the avatars they are trying to mimic and
not
the user they should be trying to represent... and this is why it just isn't suited to replace Fallback Avatars at this time.Butterball Moo
Leaving a comment to agree! For the sake of avatars that don't have humanoid body plans, whether they're whimsical or just straight up realistic animals, please don't get rid of fallback avatars! don't subject others to broken impostors of those avatars!
Pythania
I and many of my friends use avatars that don't follow humanoid body plans. The impostor system does not play nicely with this.
ChrisBondie
The Fallback avatar was something I've wanted to make for years for my avi. Then someone helped make one for me now I can feel confident that my avis are viewable for everyone.
Please don't make those weeks of figuring it out Fallback avis to waste.
The Imposters look awful and messy, Fallback avis still have quality while fulfilling their purpose.
Burrely
Imposters are ugly and why remove a great alternative that doesn't clutter the view? - 'nuff said.
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