New pickup highlighting actually causes unintended artifacts in some old gimmick worlds
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phi16
Starting with Build 1878 (Open Beta) and Build 1885 (Live), there's a change to pickup highlighting which relates to VRC_Pickup with SkinnedMeshRenderer.
It is written that "We feel that the amount of content this affects is extraordinarily small", but I have some worlds which are affected by this change. Some of them are SDK2 worlds and it would be a lot of work for me to fix all of them.
I guess that some world creators (including me) assumed that SkinnedMeshRenderers are completely ignored by pickup highlighting, and I used this property to control pickup highlighting:
- Shader-based gimmicks often change the appearance of the mesh. In SDK2, use of SkinnedMeshRenderer is convenient for hiding its internal mesh shape and expanding mesh bounds.
- To select the highlighting mesh of pickups containing multiple child renderers, sometimes I change some renderers to use SkinnedMeshRenderer.
- Also, I preferred using the (fallback) collider outline for pickup highlighting.
In this SDK3 era, I basically agree with the changes because there's a correct way to fix the issues. But I guess some worlds may still use this old technique.
I want to say:
- Some world creators really care about the shape of pickup highlights. If the highlighting reveals the strange internal shape, players' immersion will be broken.
- Please keep existing behaviour as it is. I feel component versioning (e.g. VRC_Pickup Ver 1.1) is a very good idea, and it should be used more!
I propose increasing the VRC_Pickup version number and keeping the old highlighting algorithm for older versions.
I'm really sorry for not checking or reporting during Open Beta.
I've attached some screenshots of my worlds which show how the new highlighting unintentionally reveals the internal mesh.
(To be honest, I might be the one who uses this bad trick the most, though...)
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Salena
Pretty much what I was explaining in my post here with older worlds being affected.
phi16
- 1. Second screenshot: https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_aa3990ff-7cd7-4ab0-be12-f91e735d7023/info (location: straight ahead after a small left turn from the spawn point)
- 2. Third screenshot: https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_5249c96c-49a2-4a7e-a59a-7ebcdfa45b62/info (location: the brush next to the canvas straight ahead)
(I don't have any screenshot of the correct highlighting because these world projects are still not updated. I guess these used collider shape fallback.)
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Dexvoid
phi16 Thanks very much. It was intended that creators update their worlds to specify which renderers are valid for outlining. We've never defined how skinned mesh renderers behave under pickups in our documentation before, so it's technically undefined behavior. Regardless, we are now working towards ignoring skinned meshes when the array is empty for the sake of compatibility in cases where the creator is no longer around to fix things.
phi16
Dexvoid Really thank you! I understand current situation (but without documents, people tend to exploit unspecified behaviour!), and I really welcome the new outline selection option.
phi16
- 1. Updated (fixed) version of the first screenshot: https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_4e8f3e44-dca9-4ae7-9580-954bb4b2cbc4/info
- 2. Its old version: https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_b7416a34-536c-4e59-85da-ce580b6ab0b2/info
- 3. Location: The bucket near the bottom of the pipe on the wall to your right when you enter the room
- 4. Object Hierarchy (Buckethas a VRC_Pickup.Visual,JointMesh,JointMesh/HandleMeshhas a MeshRenderer, which is intended to show as the highlight of this pickup.Waterhas a SkinnedMeshRenderer and I don't want this to be highlighted)
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Dexvoid
To assist with validation, please provide the ID of any of the worlds from your screenshots demonstrating this issue and steps to reproduce the issue there.
This post was marked as
tracked
Fax
updated the status to
open
Thanks for clarifying! I've reopened the request.
Fax
updated the status to
closed
Thank you for the report.SDK2 was deprecated in 2021, and we no longer actively support it. This may lead to some SDK2 worlds experiencing issues.
We do our best to avoid breaking SDK2 worlds, but unfortunately, VRChat updates may introduce cosmetic issues in SDK2 worlds that we won't be fixing.
phi16
Fax What about SDK3 worlds? The modification is also breaking SDK3 worlds.
Sayamame
Fax In my opinion, this issue concerns worlds in general, with SDK2 worlds being merely a subset of the affected worlds.
The first half of this post explains the issue, while the second half requests a solution.
Based on this, SDK2 worlds appear to be only secondarily affected and are not the primary focus of this request.