fluffy rambles: Lack of VRChat build progress

Lack of VRChat build progress

August 28, 2022 3:12 PM (a year ago)

Recently a couple of folks have asked me if I’ve made any progress on my VRChat avatar, and no, I haven’t. There’s a bunch of reasons for that, but a big one is that I just don’t really feel like the amount of time/energy it’d take is worth it in the end.

In particular, VRChat’s avatar system requires a lot of fiddly work to go into it, and a lot of very hyper-domain-specific knowledge, because a lot of things in VRC are very shoddy hacks on top of the “expression” system which was clearly built for entirely different purposes than what it’s being used for.

The more I work on modifying the Winterpaw mouse for my needs, the more I learn about just how… weird VRC is, and given that the future of the platform itself is easy to doubt, I’d rather focus on building stuff that’s a bit more transferable between systems. So for now I’m just modifying the mouse.

I’m still interested in commissioning someone else to do a VRC avatar of my critter, or at least doing all of the annoying/tedious parts of setting it up for me, and I’ll probably go back to working on my gallery at some point (more as an exercise in learning Blender than anything else), but I’m feeling kind of meh on VRC in general right now. I mean, it’s still fun to hang out in, but I don’t really feel like building anything for it at this time.

I know someone who’s building a social VR platform as a protocol-first thing (that happens to match up with my ideas in how I’d build one myself, if I were currently capable of that level of focus and willingness to write code) and I’m focusing more on building out my stuff in ways which will be transferable to that. And the intermediate step for that system will be building my avatar as a VTuber avatar, since they’re using VRM as the basis for the avatar system.

I’m also vaguely interested in finally building a Live2D avatar for streaming purposes, except I’m kind of down on streaming right now too. I’ve not been really feeling like doing a whole bunch of things right now, and I’m actually letting myself be in recovery from some things. I’d rather be focusing on music these days anyway, although I don’t seem to have the energy for it either.

Basically, I’m very tired, and overwhelmed by everything that I have to do in order to do anything right now. I wish things were a bit more plug-and-play, or that I weren’t in such excruciating pain all the time that I could have the energy and focus needed to do even basic things right now. But that isn’t the case, and well-meaning reminders about a thing I was into isn’t going to help me get back into them, they’ll just make me feel more despondent about the things I’m not doing right now.

I’m more or less in hibernation/recovery mode and I’m trying to be okay with that.