Details about an upcoming cross-compatible driving world

After 3 years I'm proud to announce that a new cross-compatible driving world is finally getting released this year!

The new world is located on a small island with a city and a bridge leading to a port with exactly the same foundation as the original Time Trial world.

The most popular request from players in the Time Trial world over the years has been more vehicles, immediately followed by a longer stretch of road that makes drag races possible, both of which are getting fulfilled with this new world release!

I have been bound by technological limitations for several years and haven't been able to provide new content in the original driving worlds, but this world is powered by the brand new VUdon Vehicles SDK that I've been developing over the past 3 years, which is specifically made for more accessible, large-scale driving world implementations. Thanks to the technological advancements over the years we can now easily quadruple the number of vehicles in a world with even less of a performance impact.

However, some sacrifices had to made to the feature set of the vehicles which players have gotten used to over the years. Following features that are available in the original driving worlds from 2021 will not be available in this world at launch (development will continue in the background and these features will be introduced to the new vehicles at a later date):

• Openable doors (the added amount of realism does not justify the severe performance impact before a new more performant framework for doors is developed)

• Start/stop + stalling (ability to leave vehicles running after exiting severely impacts the performance of the world and limits the number of vehicles that can be used in the same world instance simultaneously)

• Physical shifter (players have experienced numerous problems with the existing shifters due to edge cases, new shifter will have to be developed from the ground up)

• Physical pedals (by not making physical pedals available by default I'm able to add significantly larger number of vehicles into the world)

Accessibility has been one of the most important key features of the new vehicles, and you now have a wide variety of options for configuring how you want to drive the vehicles. If you cannot use both hands, you can easily activate a single-handed preset using the new settings menu. Presets make it easy to quickly make the vehicles more accessible, but everything can still be fully configured to your liking, and if you're on PC, you now also have the ability to try out the experimental steering wheel mode for hooking up a physical game controller.

Not only are the vehicles more accessible by input design, getting started with driving the vehicles has been made a lot easier - just get in a car and press throttle, no more having to struggle with opening the door, starting the engine and changing into gear. As observed in many previous cases during development, 99% of players will figure out how to drive without any instructions within 10 seconds, even on accident.

Performance is my highest priority with this project and I want to ensure that every future addition to the world delivers the maximum amount of content while having the most minimal impact on the framerate, especially on mobile platforms. This is why at release the world will have very minimal amount of content in terms of vehicles and locations, just enough for getting started and receiving feedback from the community to better understand what everyone wants to see the most.

"Will the world include paid vehicles?"

Yes!

At release the muscle car that was introduced to Creator Economy supporters earlier this year will be available in the new world alongside several new exciting vehicles!

There are also several expansions already planned which will include even more content over at least the following 6 months after release.

Unfortunately there will not be Patreon exclusive vehicles in the new worlds moving forward due to several complications with offering in-game benefits on Patreon, including but not limited to actively losing profits on the $5 tier due to unacceptably large number of new supporters experiencing problems with the process of claiming in-game benefits, which in a small number of cases escalates to harassment.

If you are an existing Patreon supporter and only care about the vehicles in VRChat, I highly recommend checking out VRChat Creator Economy, which is arguably better way of offering paid content in VRChat, eliminating the need to sign up and support on a 3rd party platform, submit a form manually for claiming in-game benefits as well as having to wait for 5-35 days to even finally get your in-game benefits. Not only do you have the ability to support the development directly on the platform, you receive the in-game content you paid for within seconds after purchase!

This is all I have to share at this time, stay tuned for more detailed information about the release!

-Varneon