Dex 🔞

just for documenting the process on this, since it took a bit more time than it should have done

all of the "player 2" skins as i call them were already set up, besides one that needs checking for why it's broken - that missing one is why the smash logo is a bit offcentre since i ended up cropping out the extra space before adding the text

desktop mode made a lot more sense for lining stuff up (given i could play a canned animation for the hands in this case), but it does create some limitations that got a bit annoying

initially, wanted to see what would happen trying VRCLens with VRC's multi-layer feature
to save you some time if you want to try this, it doesn't work; if you want to use vrclens then use one of vrclens's bluescreen/greenscreen options instead.
the background layer had the view from VRC's camera, and the player layer had the full VRCLens layer including the background, so i guess vrclens just renders to a texture in front of the main camera

and also because you still take photos through vrc's camera, this meant a lot of menu hopping since on desktop you can't have a radial menu and the camera open at the same time, so i'd have to set the player 2 skin, start the clap animation¹, open quick menu, open multi-layer camera, take shot, move, back out of all menus, set the player 2 skin, start the clap animation again, etc.

so take 2, with vrchat's default camera, and i figured out a ridiculously simpler way of doing it
i've created dashboards for controlling my avatar in TouchOSC before - and conveniently, TouchOSC on my laptop was still connected to the steam deck, which is how i pretty much always run desktop mode VRC. made a very simple dashboard of unlabelled buttons that just send an OSC message to /avatar/parameters/Player2 with different values.

start clap animation, open multi-layer camera, take shot
hit next button on dashboard on laptop, move with camera open and still clapping, take shot

done very quickly, reminding myself about some of touchosc's quirks was probably the longest part

1. i forget how it is with the default clap, but with gogoloco's clap it only works while its option is selected in the radial menu (persisting if the radial is dismissed by opening the quick menu)

i love problems of my own creation

i need to update a specific component on my vrchat avatar (details)

which also means updating the plugin used to manage that component since it includes a prefab for it

update that plugin and whoops, the vrchat sdk no longer loads, because that plugin updates the JSON library that the SDK uses, and the SDK specifically says it wants version 12 rather than 13

i assume there's probably a newer version of the SDK that does use 13 but i still haven't quite figured out how to do updates with the CLI package manager because the GUI is only for windows even though i thought they updated it to be an electron app

and honestly this is significantly better than the scaler I tried before albeit still subject to platform limitations

the previous one would only change player viewpoint on resetting the avatar's state, which created some situations where i'd swap scales, people would interact with the new one while i was still fiddling trying to perform the reset

this one correctly adjusts player viewpoint in terms of height without a reset, but not inter-pupillary distance (so if growing, your paws end up looking a lot bappier than they should be until you reset - pictured here, badly)
it also has a lot of features for faking full body tracking (including significantly better crouch options than VRC provides by default... and flying options that seem to send me through the floor consistently)

vrcfury also alleviates my biggest worry from breaking a different avatar - it uninstalls cleanly rather than completely breaking the t-pose and so breaking avatar scaling through @pinball's tool (although the previous scaler also has a vrcfury prefab which I suspect would also cleanly uninstall, and I suspect gogoloco would be a nightmare to uninstall if installed manually)