ChilloutVR Developer Update #6

8 min readFeb 18, 2021

Hello and welcome to the sixth ChilloutVR Developer Update.

First we would like to thank you all for the great feedback we got from the early access launch — even if you gave negative reviews, you helped us to improve our product, which we are very thankful for.

Unlocked Account Sale

To celebrate our Steam Early Access start, we have added a 50% discount for the unlocked account on Steam starting on February 18th, 19:00 UTC.

We have also added a discount code for unlock purchases on the ABI Store. You can get your unlocked account for half of the price at https://hub.abinteractive.net/store by using the code “earlyaccess”.

Both sales will last two weeks.

Regional Servers for US and AS regions

We have prepared changes to allow re-enabling of the US and AS regions as well as greatly improve the connectivity to our network. We expect those changes to be production ready early in march.

ABI Community Hub 5.0

The Avatar Manager

We have re-designed the avatar editor to match the upcoming features for avatars and gave it a more modern look. We have also added an option to unshare all active shares with just one click.

You are now able to delete avatars again, and the transfer option is now available.

Avatars can now be assigned to custom categories.

Avatar publication is now available.

You can see the new refreshed look below:

The currently disabled features are
Transfer Avatar: Transfer your avatar to another user, useful for commissions without the hassle of logging in to another users account.
User Metrics Storage: Detailed statistics for creators.
Custom Mission Parameters: Game-Mode / World specific forced avatar settings or save data.
Workshop settings: Allow users to find your public avatars via the search without having to go to your avatar world.

The transfer feature is coming very soon.

The World Manager

We have re-designed the world editor to match the upcoming features for worlds and gave it a more modern look.

You are now able to delete worlds again.

You can see the new refreshed look below:

The currently disabled features are
Share World: Share a world with a group or other users to give others access without publishing the world. Useful for special events.
Transfer World: Transfer your world to another user, useful for commissions without the hassle of logging in to another users account.
Custom Mission Parameters: Game-Mode / World specific forced world settings or save data.
Workshop settings: Define which game modes your world can be used for, define if mission maps are allowed for your world.

The transfer feature is coming very soon.

The ChilloutVR Workshop

We have done all necessary preparation for the workshop, making it even easier to share and explore content on our platform. We will make another dedicated announcement for this feature once it is production ready.

The Platform-wide workshop will be available in march 2021 and allow sharing of custom UI designs, avatars, props and “mission maps” — a feature to save a variation of a world utilizing the props system.

The Category System

In Developer Update 5 we have announced the Category System as a part of Hub 4. This was moved to Hub 5 and things have slightly changed.

You are now able to create 8 custom categories with up to 5,000 entries each as a free user and up to 32 custom categories with up to 5,000 entries each as a user with an unlocked account.

This system is available NOW and can be accessed on the Hub in your profile settings.

To add entries to the lists, you can refer to their details pages or seach them up. You will soon also be able to add and manage category entries from within the game.

You can re-order the categories with a simple drag and drop.

Reserved Instances

Reserved instances is a planned feature that is currently in development.
It is mainly for event hosts and creators of games that want to have more control over what’s going on in their instances.

Reserved Instances support a wide-spread set of features to manipulate the flow of the game and are highly customizable. You can see a preview of the management view below:

Below you can find a rough and simple explanation of the features of reserved instances once they are released later this year:

General Instance Settings

You can set name, used world, description and uptime for your instance, define if it should restart automatically if it crashes and further simple settings.

Instance Briefing

You can set a message displayed to everyone who joins the instance, this can be used for telling users how to play your game mode or what to expect in your instance.

Combat System Override

This option lets you configure a combat system for your instance, even if the used world does not have it implemented. You can also manipulate objects energy, damage and further settings.

Hive Memberships

Hives are the brains of custom reserved instances. They are used for persistent data and syncing information across multiple instances. Using this menu, you can configure settings for your hive, and join hives.

Hive Collaborations

Hive collabs are an extension for the hive system and allow creators to sync data cross-hive (this can be used for items and trading as well as progress and stats)

API & Integrations

Using the API and Integrations submenu you can configure API actions for your reserved instance, this can include adding / removing users from the allow- or blocklist.

Guardian Extended Controls

GEC gives you options to control the Anti-Cheat settings for your instance in a reasonable manner. This way you can adjust our systems to get rid of cheaters for you. (The system will never be able to catch them all, but drastically reduce their annoyance)

Guardian RCon Console

The Guardian RCon gives you access to some of the guardian commands, you can find further documentation once this feature is released to the public.

Event Viewer

The event viewer are simple instance logs, used to debug server side routines and server performance.

Scheduled Jobs

Using the job scheduler you can have timed cleanups based on UTC time.

Automatic Announcements

The automatic announcements can display messages to a users HUD up to 15 minutes after the user has joined the instance.

Communication Settings

The comms settings allow you to manipulate the voice range, used rooms and room memberships independently from the used worlds settings.

Allow- & Blocklists

Using the allow and block lists you can decide who can join your instance, you can also opt out of the ABI public ban hive and take care of the moderation all by yourself.

Auto Destruct Entities

This option is a way to allow or block specific avatars or spawnable objects from being used in your reserved instance.

Custom Routines

The custom routines system allows creators to execute server-side code to allow working with persistent user data and a fast and secure environment.

LiveInsight View

A live map, that can be used for role play purposes, for example to display players locations on a website. (Requested by the RP community)

Ongoing changes to the Community Hub

Your sessions on the hub will not last a 7 days instead of 60 minutes. You can log out manually to get logged out ealier.
All images of spawnables, avatars, worlds and users should now show properly as our CDN and storage migration is complete.
Underscore and minus have been added to the username character whitelist.
Optimizations for page load times have been made. The page should now load slightly faster.
You are now able to upload profile pictures again.
User account suspensions are now shown on the users public profile.

ChilloutVR Content Creation Kit v2.3

The content creation kit 2.3 brings optimizations for usability on Linux as well as preparation for localization.

The following features have been added:

[World] Spawnpoints are now marked with a white Arrow
[World] The Point from which the Portal Image is taken is now marked
[World] Newly Taken Portal Images should have less culling artifacts
[Pickup] The Pickup now shows a hand gizmo for positioning and rotation of the grip origin
[General] Added CVR_CCK_EXISTS to the Scripting Define Symbols
[General] Preparation for Translation
[Avatars] Generic Avatars can now be uploaded
[Linux/macOS Support] Fix for file load on linux, CCK is now compatible with linux and macOS
[Auth] Fixed null reference error when authenticating after recompiling
[AvatarPickup] Added the CVRAvatarPickupMarker Component for use in Avatar Worlds
[AvatarPickup] Added a Prefab for Avatar Pickups

You can get the latest content creation kit necessary to use above mentioned changes at https://cck.cvr.gg

Cross-Instance Voice- & Video-Calls

We have recently announced, that we are working on a system that allows you to call your friends in other instances and see them in 3D space even tho they are in a completely different world. We are glad to announce, that this system will come along with the UI 2.0 rework update.

Community Localization

We aim to provide the best possible service for people around the world, and know that many of you would like to enjoy our products in languages other than english.

We have started working on providing tools to localize our website, cck and game. You can now help localizing our services, by contributing on github. You can do so here:

Game: https://github.com/NicoKuroKusagi/localization-abi-chilloutvr-game

CCK: https://github.com/NicoKuroKusagi/localization-abi-chilloutvr-cck

Website: https://github.com/NicoKuroKusagi/localization-abi-hub

Please note that the above mentioned links are not complete. Many language vars are missing or not yet added to the new system, so please check back every now and then if you want to contribute.

Active contributors can earn three different levels of badges: Communiy Translator Bronze, Community Translator Silver, Community Translator Gold.

ChilloutVR 2021r159p1

The game update contains the following changes:

[Input] Movement Axis can now be bound to the right controller in steam VR
[Input] Look Axis can now be bound to the left controller in steam VR
[Input] Jump Action can now be bound to the left controller in steam VR
[Input] Gesture animations can now be enabled while finger tracking is active in the input settings
[Audio] Push to talk can now be enabled in the Audio settings
[Audio] Microphone default state on game start can now be set in the Audio settings
[Audio] Microphone can be muted on world join in the Audio settings
[Audio] You can now set the Audio input Device in game
[Avatar] Avatar Pickups are now supported in game
[Avatar] Avatars can now be blocked based on friend status
[Props] Props can now be blocked based on friend status
[Menu] If you are missing the mature content access dlc, a hint is now shown in the content filter settings
[Menu] Avatar Details Page is now accessible in the Menu
[Menu] Avatar categories are now accessible in game
[Camera] You can now change the target folder of the ingame camera to the windows pictures folder
[General] Portals now decay while being blocked by the portal minimum safe distance
[General] Self dropped Portals ignore the portal minimum safe distance
[General] Made improvement to the pickup grip system. This should make it easier to manipulate object that are close by