Hey everyone!
We’re starting October with another MEs update! This time, we’ve been working on more natural avatar movement and smoother world loading, along with fixes for voice chat and the in-world browser.
There’s also some progress on the large-object visibility issue: once an object has been loaded by you or another player in the current world session, it now stays visible while you’re near any part of it. We’re still working on keeping this behavior across sessions.
Read on for the full update notes!
Avatars
Avatar feet rest more naturally on flat ground, slopes and steps, including avatars whose shoes are attached to the lower-leg bones. Foot placement also takes less work each frame.
Parts of VRM 1.0 avatars set up with rotation, aim or roll constraints now follow the joints they're linked to.
Avatar animation uses less memory.
Avatars that reuse the same texture in several places take less work to load.
Other players now stay visible up to 500 meters away, up from 300 meters.
Fixed other players' avatars slowly drifting out of place while standing still.
Looping emotes now resume as soon as a custom avatar finishes loading.
The Speaking Indicator Colors setting has moved to Settings > MEs > Preference. Its options are Vivid Colors and Soft Colors, and your current choice carries over.
World loading
Large objects now stay visible while you're near any part of them, not only near where they were placed. This works for objects that you or another player have loaded within the current world session. We're still working on keeping this across sessions.
World objects ahead of your avatar or camera start loading sooner as you move, which helps reduce objects popping into view.
Worlds should load slightly faster.
Unloading world content is less likely to cause hitches.
Voice chat
Voice chat is less likely to freeze the game while it starts up or recovers from a problem. Quitting no longer waits on voice chat when it stops responding.
When voice playback falls behind, it now catches up by skipping tiny pieces of audio with a short fade, which helps reduce delay.
Voice chat restarts less often when the game's audio output stalls.
Voice chat is less likely to wrongly report a missing microphone after a brief glitch in the device list. On Windows, slow microphone permission checks also interrupt voice chat less often.
If MEs can't set up microphone muting safely, you can still hear others, but you can't unmute until muting works.
In-world browser
Websites in the in-world browser can now open a file picker on Windows and Mac.
Fixed in-world browsers going blank or getting stuck after resizing or display-scale changes.
Fixed a Mac crash on some websites.
On Windows, if the browser's graphics process fails, the browser may stop working, but the game no longer crashes.
Fixes
Reduced the risk of freezes and crashes during the automatic graphics benchmark.
On Windows, audio recovers more reliably when an output device disconnects or changes format.
Fixed long chat messages drawing over the message entry box.
Fixed a newly created world sometimes disappearing from the world list.
Fixed settings showing an invalid choice when a saved value is no longer available.
Fixed sign-in and service-unavailable messages not appearing if they came up before the main screen finished loading.
Failed screenshots and file exports now show an error instead of appearing to succeed.
Transparent areas in loading-screen thumbnails now show white, matching world tiles.
If MEs can't use a folder it needs at startup, it now tells you which folder and why before closing.
Thanks for sharing your reports and feedback with us. If something still isn’t working as expected, please let us know. See you in MEs! 🥰 https://linktr.ee/o_me_io