Comment by accrual
10 hours ago
As someone who had a brief alternate life in VRC and made worlds - just /wow/. I had just enough grasp on Unity to make some basic things, but stuffing Linux into a pixel shader is 1 if not 2 orders of magnitude more impressive.
p.s. Udon Bird Sanctuary! I've been there!
It's a big differentiator with horizon worlds I think. They have an in world builder so you don't have to learn unity.
On the other hand horizon is super restricted in what you can do, is way too heavily moderated and rubber tiled so it's not fun to be in there at all. VRChat is way better at finding the edge of what's possible. I've seen whole worlds from half Life 2 recreated etc.
VRChat has intriguing possibilities, but I always got the impression the underlying architecture and programming is too shoddy to really support the breadth of custom experiences people want to make. I tried various mini games or special worlds, and it was always incredibly jank and barely functional. It seemed more like problems stemming from instability or jankiness of the engine and API they were working with than anything else.
Granted, the last time I touched it was a few years ago. Unless they've done a major rewrite of the game I don't expect it to have improved all that much. Maybe I'm wrong.
The one thing I can add is that the VRC players I've played with don't care about it. They just want to be in a world and do things with their friends, even if it's janky or has bugs. It's already persistently novel, and if ones novel threshold ever dips too low or the bugs are too high, there's another world with different people just a tap away.
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