v4.0.0

Today I'm releasing VRD 4.0! This is a huge overhaul to the VRD world that I've been working on for the past months addressing everything I've been wanting to improve ever since its original release. Every UI has been overhauled, improved or changed and the entire back-end has been reworked and made more future-proof.

The most notable features for this update are:

A very advanced queue system, exporting/importing of playlists, more intuitive database menu with more sorting options, overhauled settings menu with many new settings that are better categorised, a live in-game scoreboard for our XP system, an upgraded avatar menu and much more.

This is some of my best work to date I hope you all love the update, I truly cannot wait for you all to be able to use the new systems!

New Database Menu

The entire UI has been reworked to be more intuitive, cohesive, responsive and functional.

- Reworked videolist for improved readability, the information displayed changes based on what you are looking for.

- You can now drag-click to scroll on the entire videolist.

- You can now click the entire video entry to select, no need to aim for a small play/info button on the side anymore.

- Added options to sort by: song, artist, upload date, number of views, duration, VRD Code.

- The alphabet sidebuttons adapt based on what you are sorting on, they also show years instead of letters when sorting by upload date.

- Added a button to reverse the sorting.

- Added a button to select a random background mix.

- Removed the scrollbar.

- Added a small scrollbar representation that shows how far you are in the list.

- Added a scroll sound effect that changes pitch based on how fast you are scrolling.

- Reworked scroll optimisation, scrolling through a list is now smoother and doesn't come to an immediate halt.

- Fixed the bug where sometimes entries would be missing when scrolling all the way to the top or bottom.

The tag menu was also reworked.

- Reworked the tag menu to be more readable and more intuitive when including/excluding tags.

- You can now drag-click to scroll on the entire taglist. No need to aim for a small scrollbar anymore.

- Optimised the tag menu, tags that are not in view are automatically unloaded.

- Added button to open/close all tag groups.

The video info display on the right was also redone.

- Redesigned the video info display. It now also shows video publish date and video duration.

- Improved thumbnail and statistics loading, now less prone to error.

The top bar was a bit chaotic so all info is displayed nicely now, including some QoL buttons.

- Reworked the entire top bar of the database to show useful statistics.

- Added a switch server button to the top bar, so you no longer need to go the options panel to switch between our different servers.

- Added a reload video button to the top bar.

- Added Discord and public database info to the top bar.

And moreeeee

- Code entry menu and history menu now both feel more responsive.

- Fixed a bug where if more than a 100 videos were played the video history would be out of order.

Video Queue

The most requested feature I've ever had! I wanted to do this properly though, so it took some time. But I think its really fancy.

- Videos are now played by adding them to the queue.

- You can re-order and delete items in the queue.

- You can prioritise the item that was last added to the queue, this pins it to the top (useful for playing break videos).

- You can select videos in the queue to see their details.

- The queue is completely synced at all times.

- The master can determine who is allowed to add to the queue and who is allowed to edit the queue.

By default only VR users can add and only the master can edit. You can always delete the videos you added to the queue yourself (even if you rejoin).

- The queue autoplays the next video, but this can be toggled off by the master.

- The queue can hold up to 80 videos, by default it is limited to 10, this can be edited by the master.

- There is a limit to how many videos each individual can add, the default is 3, this can also be edited by the master.

Rejoining the instance doesn't allow you to circumvent this limit.

- During the last 30 seconds of a video a "Next" button becomes available for anyone to press. When pressed the next video in the queue is played so you can skip outros.

- While a video is in progress you can see a countdown to when the "Next" button becomes available.

- If no video is queued or playing, the "Add" button turns into a "Play" button to just instantly play a video like usual.

- While the "Next" button is not available yet, there is an option to start a voteskip.

- If you voteskip you can see how many people still need to hit the skip button for it to go through.

- If more than 50% of the people in the instance voteskip, the next video is played. This percentage can be adjusted by the master.

- Master and staff can force an instant skip after having started a voteskip.

- When a URL is not working the queue automatically continues to the next video automatically after 15 seconds.

- You can hover over the next video info widget to see a preview of the next 30 videos in the queue.

- Videos that you queued are highlighted in pink.

Playlist Exporting & Importing

The contents of the queue can be exported into a playlist string that you can save for later use. Similarly, a playlist of videos can instantly be added to the queue by pasting the playlist string into the import menu.

- Added an export menu that gives you a playlist string of the current contents of the queue. You can copy this out of VRChat to save somewhere.

- Added an import menu where you can paste in a playlist string, it will check whether the playlist is valid and then continue to load (this can take a few seconds).

- If your playlist contains URLs you need to manually paste them into VRChat one-by-one, this is due the VRChat safety restrictions. The import menu automatically prompts to you to copy each individual URL from one field and paste them into another. I made the process the least painful possible.

- Importing playlists ignores any queue limitations like restrictions on how many videos an individual can add or the overall queue size limit. The hard cap is 80 videos.

- By default anyone is allowed to export the queue but only the master is allowed to import a playlist to prevent griefing the queue. The master can change these permissions.

New Options Menu

Over the past years we've added many specific options to VRD. However, it was becoming quite messy and difficult to find the option you're looking for. Everything is now categorised.

- You can now drag-click to scroll on the entire options menu. No need to aim for a small scrollbar anymore.

- Added a playerlist.

- Reworked the updates panel. Long patchnotes (LIKE THESE LOL) are now more readable since you can scroll through the text.

- Completely overhauled the staff menus.

The Options menu got tons of new settings:

- Added a "follow threshold" option, this determines how far you need to be away from the video screen for it to start following you.

- Added a brightness option for the video screen.

- Added a toggle for the pixel shader on the video screen.

- Added a volume slider for the videoplayer.

- Added a toggle for UI sounds.

- Added a toggle for UI haptic feedback.

- Added a toggle for the shortcuts we have in-world.

- Added an info panel that shows the shortcuts for either VR or Desktop depending on what platform you're on.

- Added a world brightness slider.

- Added a bloom slider.

- Added various new improved postprocessing filters.

- Added a chromatic abberation toggle.

- Added an ambient occlusion toggle.

- Added a motion blur toggle. (Desktop only)

- Improved the screen size option, you can now also increase its size.

- Improved the sync threshold option, you can now choose for way more lenient sync if you have a bad connection.

The admin menu (master only) got lots of new global settings too:

- Added a floormarker option as suggested by @v.lav! You can now change the lines on the dancefloor. You can have 1 to 5 lines, a full grid or remove all lines.

- Added a new database access option, this makes the database menu completely inaccessible.

- Added a queue access option to determine who can add to the queue.

- Added a queue edit access option to determine who can edit.

- Added a playlist export access option.

- Added a playlist import access option.

- Added a toggle for whether the queue should autoplay the next video.

- Added a slider for the total capacity the queue should have (maxes out at 80).

- Added a slider for the total videos an individual can add to the queue.

- Added an option to set the voteskip threshold (25%, 50% or 75%)

- Added an option to disable the voteskip system.

- Added a statistics panel that shows: number of joins/leaves, playercount peak, instance uptime, instance timezone, history/queue size, number of videos played.

New Avatar Menu

To spotlight the creators that make amazing public avatars for us I developed a nice menu to display their work. (the default VRC Avatar Pedestal is hideous lol)

- Select an avatar to see a preview image, title, description and creator info.

- The link to the creators store is clickable so you can easily copy.

- Click the use avatar button to switch into the avatar.

- We got a few amazing new public avatars coming soon:tm:!

VRDancing API

@silentt., @ahriana and @mintlily have all been absolutely killing it with our infrastructure work, there's already been a lot of changes to our bot for instance.

With this world update we can use many of the new features of our bot too! Our new API provides the data for the live scoreboard! Video thumbnails are now also loaded from our own servers.

Annnd the Message Of The Day and Photo Gallery systems have both been reworked to be more future-proof!

Lots of back-end magic going on here but its all super important for the stability of our world!

They're also all hard at work at overhauling our CDN to make it more futureproof and to improve audio normalisation! That is not being released yet with this update though, so stay tuned!

New Live Scoreboard

- You can now scroll through a list of everyones scores in-game at the staircase!

- If the name you set for yourself in our database matches your VRChat username then you can press a button to instantly jump to your own score.

- Names are highlighted according to the rank colours we have here in Discord and your own name is highlighted in pink.

- The scoreboard also has some info on how to participate in our XP system.

New Database Back-End

The Google Sheet in which we manage our VRDancing Database has been improved significantly.

- Added a tool that scans through our database twice a day to verify that all links are still valid and all data is up-to-date.

- Added fields for video duration, status and upload date.

- Our staff team can now spot and fix dead links much easier.

User Experience

- All buttons now feel much more responsive with my new UI components, taking everything I learnt from various other projects.

- Desktop users now also get effects when they hover over UI elements, this used to only happen for VR users.

- All UI textures now use tiling for "infinite" resolution. Everything looks super crisp up close.

- Reworked all UI sounds, they slightly alter in pitch each time they play to make them not sound repetitive.

- Added controller haptics when you hover and click buttons.

General Maintenance

- Reworked all textures into more optimal file formats to reduce VRAM usage and download size.

- All textures are now properly mipmapped where needed, some textures would look grainy from a distance, this fixes that.

- All icons have been resized and optimised.

- All sprites have been packed into atlases for optimal performance and filesize.

- Reworked options panels upstairs and at the lounge.

- Reworked the Director panel, no redesign, just updated it to use all the new UI elements.

- Fixed changing room mirror collider as suggested by @eas__

- Redid reflectionprobes, since the time/weather update there was a blueish sheen over everything, thats now fixed.

- Lowered volume of custom URLs.

- Added 400 pictures to the picture gallery.

- Added portal to the new VRDA world.

- Added countdown to the marshallthon.

- Added cap and sweatbands made by Chineko!

- Added UI with information on where to get community assets.

- Added UI with link to our photo gallery.

- Moved story panel to the monitors at the desk.

- Updated: credits, staff pictures, posterboard, community info.

- Updated Patreon bench.

- Updated VRCSDK, Udon, AudioLink, Poiyomi and more dependencies.

Database Update

Its been a while since we updated the database because of all the back-end maintenance but we're now up-to-date til this message: https://discord.com/channels/780526017931378730/814609362127159316/1117058115716780182

@djmegu did a ton of work keeping up with all your suggestions and new releases, we are now at 8924 videos!

On top of that, @minzleaf made a huge effort to go through all broken Just Dance links and replace them! So if you use YouTube as a video source, it should work way better now.

There's lots of small undocumented changes too but I tried to document everything to the best of my ability! Respect if you read all the patchnotes looool

I'm very happy I finally got the chance to update this project. VRD still remains the world I'm most passionate about and I'm glad I got to fix all my pet peeves.

Huge shoutout to all the people that helped me test over the past few months.

And a huge shoutout to my Patrons, who make it possible for me to focus on projects like these!

Enjoy the update! <3