busybee fluffy rambles

This year’s theme was “desert planet,” heavily inspired by a wide swath of science fiction. The most obvious influence was Dune but there’s a whole lot of other stuff in it as well: I noticed direct inspirations (or at least distinct similarities) from Total Recall, Borderlands, and Ratchet and Clank, and some folks mentioned Fallout: Vegas influences (although I haven’t played that game).

This year the worlds were quite well-constructed. It all felt like one big cohesive map, even though the different sections were (out of necessity) partitioned into separate areas. You could always tell how the various areas related to one another, and it felt like a real, actual place that you could be. This is in especially stark contrast to Sylva, which just felt like a lot of disconnected things that existed within a theme (which in turn never really got its own identity beyond being a knockoff of heavily inspired by Rito Village from Legend of Zelda).

I especially loved the dealer’s den area for feeling very much like the sort of place that a convention’s dealer’s den would take place, and also the distinct visual connections between the above-ground spaces.

There were many, many huge improvements to the con experience itself, as well. The event portal was a lot more reliable than last year’s (aside from a few hiccups, as always happen especially during a literal thundering herd of people trying to get to a popular event), the friends system worked much more smoothly (especially with the ability to directly import your friends list via the VRChat API rather than needing to do an incredibly tedious and fiddly import via a half-baked browser extension), and the “macrolobby” test was a lot of fun, just seeing what the potential is for a fully-realized VR space where hundreds of people gather simultaneously.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. There were several moments when key systems went down in ways which belie bad scaling behavior and possibly a bad system architecture, and a lot of stuff had to be rushed into production, such as the “solstice tracker” (incidentally, I had a pet peeve throughout the entire con where they kept on referring to an eclipse/conjunction as a “solstice” when those are entirely different astronomical phenomena), and the eclipse event itself seemed a bit underwhelming considering the amount of hype it was given. The decision to make a literal last-minute “meetup” for it didn’t help matters, since that’s what led to a gigantic system outage right when people were the most desperate to see a one-time event, which of course turned out to be some of the most accurate stuff in the whole con. Being an annular eclipse it wasn’t even all that spectacular, and I think I get what they were going for (it being a shared experience that people could hang out and converse through) and that’s exactly what I got out of it, but it still left a lot of people super disappointed, especially given the buildup.

I also do question the utility of having an event space, given that all of the events are also streamed on Twitch and viewable from the main lobby. I don’t see the event space as really adding anything on top of that, aside from having the “holographic” stage which adds a little immersion.

I also didn’t get a whole lot out of meetups. In general I just end up joining the ones with folks I already know and then stick to my usual social circles. This time around I did have a good time on my own at one of the game developer meetups, though, and it’s the one that Qdot happened to join and it was great to finally chat with them in person after years of being vaguely in the same space at times.

Another slight downer was how the Dealer’s Den had a bunch of empty booths, including ones which were front-and-center, which felt especially bad given how many people I knew (including myself) who had applied and were rejected. It would have been nice if they could have at least shuffled the booths around and/or disabled the unoccupied ones so that it wasn’t quite so obvious, but there were also a lot of last-minute issues with even getting the den open to begin with. My understanding is the original plan was to have them all in one big world like they were at Sylva, but due to the massive size of it, that just wouldn’t fit within a single VRChat world, and I mean, that makes sense. Every booth has a bunch of large textures, an avatar pedestal (containing a bunch more textures), and a video file. The video file is at least hosted separately from VRChat, but the textures eat up a lot of space very fast. And I’m guessing that the missing booths were due to last-minute dropouts or other behind-the-scenes issues that couldn’t be resolved in advance. I don’t envy the job they had to do, especially at this massive scale.

Club FYNN was particularly good this year. I didn’t see a lot of sets, but the ones I did see were pretty great, and the production on the video aspects was above and beyond from last year. They’d actually somewhat simplified their setup from last time (where they went a little overboard on doing some projection-mapping stuff), and I also like that they ended up limiting the DJ rotation so that people could have a better chance of seeing the specific performances they wanted to attend (Furality DJ sets are all recorded and produced in advance for what should be obvious technical reasons).

Oh, also, I’m glad that I did end up doing a minor avatar setup at the last minute. The con-specific shader did a great job of giving everyone a nice integrated lighting look, and my usual Poiyomi setup didn’t fit in at all when I did try it out. Unfortunately because of the last-minute setup it turned out that I had some of my texture streaming/compression setups wrong, which put me barely over the 200MB cutoff so a lot of folks couldn’t see my avatar until the very last day when I realized the problem. (I’m back down to 100MB, even with the shader setup still available from my ridiculously large menu.)

Anyway. I have a much better time with Furality when I think of it as a way of hanging out with folks and experiencing something new for a few days, rather than seeing it as The Most Important Thing of the Year like some of my friends do. It isn’t a life-changing experience for me, but it’s still an enjoyable one. I wish they wouldn’t have it in June, though, because that’s a super busy month due to Pride activities, which a lot of furries are super involved in!

Also, one final note: It makes sense that there’s no collision on the dome windows. They aren’t glass, they’re shield generators. Or at least that’s what I decided, and the staff I shared that notion with accepted my headcanon. So there.