The 2nd Annual Halloween at The Pug!

The Halloween Party this year went great! The Pug hit about 1,500 concurrent guests at peak. This is 3x higher than last year. 

Music

This time around, the music consumed 18TB of bandwidth. Around 14TB was used during the party and the following day. Another 4TB was used when the music was reconnected for Halloween night. This traffic was delivered by my main CDN. Amazon S3 delivered 600GB or so for those who the CDN did not serve.

The music was a custom 2-hour mix delivered as a video. The mix consisted of a video track to power the reactive lights, and 6 tracks of audio. I used 6 tracks to distribute the music around The Pug and give it the immersive effect it had.

• Video Track: All decorations with reactive lights
• Audio Track 1: Left Channel - Main Bar
• Audio Track 2: Right Channel - Main Bar
• Audio Track 3: Lofi Mono - The Roost
• Audio Track 4: LFE - The entire Pug
• Audio Track 5: Left Channel - Night View Hall
• Audio Track 6: Right Channel - Night View Hall

Having these tracks allowed for a great specialized feel, and some kicking bass no matter where you were in The Pug. 

I created the video for the lights in After Effects and Premiere. The video track was UV mapped to models in the world. I commissioned custom shaders from Claw to power the various decorations that activated and deactivated in time with the music. Thanks, Claw!

Playlists of the music are available at thegreatpug.com/music.

Thank You!

A special huge thanks to Poplopo crafting my dinosaur costume for the night, along with creating the base models for the pumpkins and creating the spiderwebs. Your support during the project was invaluable.

Thank you to countless others who have helped me with advice, knowledge, and support throughout the past year.

And thank you to my Patrons! Your support allowed me to host the music in an extravagant multichannel format, and it allowed the commission of the special shaders the were used for the effects.

Performance

General performance was greatly improved since the Saint Patricks Day party. This is both due to optimizations and bug fixes from VRChat, along with ongoing optimization work that I have been doing throughout the year. 

Performance is an on-going project that I continue to work at. Making VRChat more performant is also something the development team is working hard on. Expect more updates from them that target performance in the future. Just after the Halloween party, a patch was released that greatly reduced the CPU load that voice chat imposes. So things are already getting better. But this is something everyone will have to work together on, World Authors, Avatar Creators, and the VRChat Development Team. Be sure to encourage your friends to use avatars that don't hog resources!

Thanks to Euan, Afromana, Garret and ManCheddy for the photos!