world-persistence

[sonic swift]

Nice.

[keen tendon]

Hooray! 🎉

[knotty ether]

Hello

[lone stirrup]

heyyy

[normal arrow]

https://tenor.com/view/meimei-mei-mei-mei-cat-meimei-cat-tole-tole-gif-9937841451382833309

[digital coral]

Boo

[ionic valve]

finally :)

[wary summit]

[visual sapphire]

they said it wouldn't come out....

[unique rune]

woooo it's happening

[hoary current]

is the persistance beta network compatible or no?

[grizzled surge]

exciting update!

[weak siren]

yaaay

[visual sapphire]

https://tenor.com/view/jalen-hurts-jalen-hurts-meek-mill-i-used-to-pray-for-times-like-this-gif-13709870523385828441

[olive tree]

Finalllly

[hardy narwhal]

ah

[ionic valve]

they didn't say it isn't, and the default is that it is, so...

[hoary current]

Better safe than sorry :]

[sonic swift]

What worlds currently have persistence?

[ivory bluff]

What a pleasant surprise out of nowhere.

[foggy mason]

Patience paid off

[abstract narwhal]

Oh my god hi guys 👋

[storm maple]

I'm really excited to see where this goes, save data is a really big component that I feel like VRChat games have been missing for a long time

[echo hemlock]

Whispers.
I'm so excited.

[ionic valve]

will worlds uploaded with persistence sdk work with live clients?

[broken forge]

ta-da!

[elfin wren]

[ripe kindle]

🎉

[lapis pier]

Woke up, see open beta, smile

[wary summit]

Only examples and internal test worlds, really. If people have some that they're willing to share, they're welcome to post them here or on social media!

[novel flower]

@granite river oh look your favorite feature is here

[hoary current]

most likely none for a little while, creators have got to figure out how to use persistence and actually make things with it

[ivory bluff]

Wake up, Samurai. It’s time for Persistence Open Beta.

[unique rune]

time to get back to world-building

[storm maple]

some worlds have had workarounds, I have seen one save system I think and another using a "pass code" save system like the NES but it certainly has been very rare

[elfin wren]

Il push the settings saving for lsm tomorrow

[wary summit]

You should be able to join those worlds but the features won't work and may break

[trim cradle]

[regal ivy]

finally a way to save in idle home easily!!

[dusky kindle]

Less gooo

[radiant wharf]

The worlds mentioned in the Sep 19 dev update, do those work with the persistence beta right now?

[wraith bolt]

a

[nova lichen]

gues i tried to switch too early, still not showing

[idle jackal]

You know how painful it was to manually record stats and re apply it via code and scripts. now we can save space without all that BS.

[wary summit]

Yes, but you'll have to wait for people to release them

[echo hemlock]

I'm already predicting stats and leaderboards on every world. Whoever has the most of something, or perhaps a leaderboard for the amount of hours someone's stayed in a world, lol. Things're going to get competitive.

[trim cradle]

Unity why do you take so long to upload

[wary summit]

If you go to installed files and click verify integrity, it'll fetch the latest version

[idle jackal]

me and a friend did mario kart and recording win stats and Time trial stuff was really hard! Thank you for making this possible

[trim cradle]

If anyone want's to try some persistence:
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_65b1db37-cce6-48d8-b57e-58c3f31b2c93

[ionic valve]

does that fetch new branches though?

[ripe kindle]

roblox queue games time

[wary summit]

yes

[idle jackal]

🤓

On my way

[wraith bolt]

whelp now to update the pool table

[ionic valve]

idk about the verify method, but the standard methods: wait longer or just restart steam. i could change to it just fine a moment ago

[nova lichen]

Btw is the persistence build network compatible like the open beta?

[olive tree]

https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_ab2961d9-7f3d-436b-9d85-6bb4264a6b87 for another world that has persistance

[wary summit]

yes it is. You can safely use the persistence beta in live environments. However if people from live try to follow you back to a world that uses persistence, the persistence features won't work for them

[idle jackal]

Is persistance just a toggle you can assign to any world statistic now without hassle?

[radiant wharf]

I'm predicting that this will kick off the creator economy and we'll start having microtransactions literally everywhere. The Robloxification of VRChat

[pastel plume]

Quick question as a world creator: is there an easy way to detect if persistence is available on the client in udon? Feature detection/version checking/something like that.

[wary summit]

it's a bit more complicated than that, but not by much! The documentation has the details

[shrewd sphinx]

I actually don't see a way to save "world global" data like leaderboards

[wary summit]

Unfortunately not, sorry

[ripe kindle]

Ngl that is quite impressive

[pastel plume]

balls

[idle jackal]

Also what happens if you wanna reset your data. I hope a delete persistence toggle is added to the Menu for worlds.

[pastel plume]

Oh actually in this case, what happens? Does the script just straight up crash, are components unavailable, etc?

[wary summit]

Yep, there's a button to delete both per-world and all worlds at once, both in the client and the web!

[idle jackal]

WAHOOO

[pastel plume]

I can possibly use a script crashing as a feature flag

[idle jackal]

Legends

[trim cradle]

https://github.com/DrBlackRat/VRC-Picture-Loader/releases/tag/3.0.0

[nova lichen]

Now there will be more sense to add way more complex customisation to worlds, even moving around the world furniture or even worlds that allow building your own world with a preset of objects to create ur own space

[quartz raft]

yippie

[echo hemlock]

I think it's for the best, honestly. Imagine the amount of content and incredible creations we'll be getting in the coming months. Fun VRChat games you can just pick up to where you left off at. I know a few RPG games which will drastically benefit from this. It's gonna be sick. >:]

[cerulean lion]

Finally a year and 3 months after the expected window

[idle jackal]

Um, I want persistance as a CC addon not a picture loader

[crisp grotto]

So the persistence open beta is or isn't live compatible?

[wary summit]

For playerdata, the script will crash. For playerobjects, the objects won't get instantiated. I suppoooose you could detect it through one of those two things

[wraith bolt]

The main one I would say folks should do first will be to get their various cozy home worlds updated so that their settings are persisted.

[pastel plume]

Works for me.

[radiant wharf]

i won't mind saying goodbye to save codes. those were a hassle

[idle obsidian]

I think for now handling things through a separate branch will have to do until you are ready to merge to your mainline build

If there's no way to differentiate between beta and stable (at least as easily)

[wary summit]

yep, good starter project. Just a simple playerdata write/read

[idle jackal]

Anyone?

[wraith bolt]

Sidenote; whilst persistence itself is an important thing here, you lot should not sleep on player objects.

[wary summit]

what do you mean by CC?

[idle jackal]

Creator companion you should know this

[ripe kindle]

If it doesn’t get instantiated I guess that could be a pretty easy check to just see if it exists
Also makes sense that there isn’t any versioning or feature check code as once it properly launches it would be made immediately redundant

[wary summit]

it.... already is?

[trim cradle]

It's in the SDK!

[wraith bolt]

I just grabbed the beta :slugcatnod:

[idle jackal]

Then why is BlackRat giving us Persistance CC addon with a picture loader 💀

[wraith bolt]

I can't believe I can't nodders here. The humanity.

[wary summit]

also the acronym is VCC not just CC. CC could be lots of things, credit card, closed captions, etc

[radiant wharf]

cheese cycler

[ripe kindle]

creative cloud 🤢

[cerulean lion]

People can release prefabs that support persistence

[trim cradle]

Cause I just posted my update for it lol

[wary summit]

Persistence is built into the SDK, people can release their own addons. Not quite sure what you're asking

[wraith bolt]

But yeah uh player objects are there to solve the constant pain point game devs have had with "I need to just have per-person data, why is this so flaky and horrible"

Even if you don't use persistence you should be migrating game code to them.

[idle jackal]

Why can't those just be built into the normal addon as an extension. We certainly need a community Tab in VCC to download these extras for addons without external downloads. Something I should make a canny for but cba...

[cerulean lion]

Persistence isn't a community made thing, it's from VRChat

[idle jackal]

Read above

[wary summit]

because if we did that then we'd have dozens of different addons for all the different features in the SDK, which would make everything complicated and annoying for everyone involved

[idle jackal]

Filters, tags exist. Make good use of it

[wary summit]

Persistence is not an external download, it already is part of the VCC. It's just a beta SDK

[cerulean lion]

how would you prevent people uploading malware to this "community tab"

text files are extremely small

[gritty roost]

It's time.

[cerulean lion]

there's a 100kb limit per person

[wraith bolt]

100kb compressed.

[crisp grotto]

so could you use that to keep track of individual users' scores in a game?

[wraith bolt]

You can fit many Bee Movies into that

[echo hemlock]

https://tenor.com/view/you-like-jazz-bee-movie-meme-cartoons-pick-up-lines-gif-10421511

[trim cradle]

:p

[ripe kindle]

Well… one bee movie script, at least uncompressed (it’s 80k characters, so around 80kb)
You could definitely save a bit with compression

[echo hemlock]

Really cool world to showcase it! I think having more personalized home worlds would be amazing, lol. Like a room editor to shape stuff just how you like it. It'd be neat to have like a picture book area or something with uploaded screenshots of friends, etc. Custom posters to decorate a room, idk. There's genuinely a lot you could do.

Hope someone gets on that, honestly.

[trim cradle]

That's the idea behind it :p

[wraith bolt]

You can use it for that, yes, but at a basic level: suppose a player joins your world. You want to, say, give them a trigger collider so your spoopy monster can hit and KO the. You need one trigger collider per person only, and you need that collider to be able to talk to other Udon code and do stuff over the network so they can play your game.

[crisp grotto]

can't wait for worlds that already have string-based saving to implement regular saving via just saving that string themselves. A cool use case I can think of would be going to VRBricks and making a home world for yourself, and having that home world creation load in every time you hop in game.

[wraith bolt]

The old way was using player object pools and either hoping the prefab you got is stable over the network, or you rolled your own.

The new system just goes "nah it's natively supported, and you never have to worry about network ownership or any of that nonsense"

[marble timber]

for anyone who saw the openflight features and wants to test them, the world is now in labs https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_cda718e6-35f8-4049-8ea6-ec1065ac9e1e

[wraith bolt]

Basically this update isn't just persistence, it's the biggest Udon networking update since manual sync

hence why Phase and co have summoned me back from the void

[marble timber]

(bare in mind there is known bugs both in the VRC client and some of my implementation. Feedback is still appreciated 🙂 )

[crisp grotto]

Interesting. Well I've been working on a game world (translation: visuals are done but I'm just banging rocks together when it comes to udon coding), so player objects should be a huge help for me.

[wraith bolt]

yes, it will make things far easier for you and far more stable.

[radiant wharf]

i hope that a button for saving the current position as a persistent spawn point becomes as ubiquitous as the mirror toggle

[wraith bolt]

We just don't need network ownership for player-scoped objects.

[abstract narwhal]

Where would these be located at in the client? Not seeing it on the worlds page.

[marble timber]

allows for better udon security level prefabs too since ownership literally cant be taken if its a playerobject, its literally enforced server side

[wraith bolt]

yuppers

[marble timber]

so no way to sneakily steal udon objects anymore during ownership transfers

[wary summit]

You're on the right page but you aren't able to delete user data while you're in the same world (for now)

[trim cradle]

They only show up if you aren't in the world

[marble timber]

should really have the button and have it greyed out and give a popup explaining this

[quartz stump]

the buttons should probably be greyed out and indicate that

yeh

[wraith bolt]

This also should hopefully allow for things like targetted RPCs eithout faff

[marble timber]

yeah the routing becomes player based instead of all the additional overhead of cyanplayerpool

[wraith bolt]

because everyone has a guaranteed player object, it's not going to need anywhere near the level of cruft

[abstract narwhal]

Ooooh fair okay!

[wraith bolt]

I for one welcome being able to show off games at Community Meetup without the lobby system guaranteed crashing.

Speaking of: is the lobby system official demo prefab gonna be updated

[abstract narwhal]

Would someone like to make a canny on this? I'm literally about to go to sleep. :v

[marble timber]

ill do it rq

inb4 the canny gets flooded because of the very obvious known issues

LOL

[trim cradle]

Anyway here is a video I made showcasing the persistence stuff for my prefab (as well as some other changes that got into that update)
https://youtu.be/2j-NbM8QwFM

[errant token]

this is a vrcprefabs demo, not a vrc one, right?

[marble timber]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/current-instance-world-should-have-the-delete-data-button-greyed-out

[abstract narwhal]

smh, the mirror quality setting in the VRC Home World doesn't have persistence. :v

[wraith bolt]

Didn't you lot ship a lobby system example for Spookality?

in the examples?

[olive tree]

we did

[wraith bolt]

JoinZoneWithDisplay etc

yeah

Just checked the code. I was wondering if that was going to get updated/replaced by a more robust player objects thing

[errant token]

ah yes - I wanted so badly to make all the Spookality demos with Persistence but it wasn't ready yet

[little echo]

am i the only one with no sticker emoji submenu icon in the beta

[errant token]

Yes, we'll revisit those demos for possible updates once Persistence gets a full release

[wraith bolt]

Nice. Good to hear.

[merry widget]

It's finally here!!

[olive tree]

this is a known isue

[merry widget]

Persisting for you!!

[little echo]

there is no showcase world like with physbones also?

[trim cradle]

not really now

You can just visit worlds others have made already

we should probably make a list

[merry widget]

a list or a playtest group might be fun!

[wraith bolt]

A row? 👁️ 👄 👁️

[graceful compass]

row is old nomenclature fsp, they're ~categories~ now

[echo hemlock]

[manic dock]

oh my god finally persistence im so happy

[trim cradle]

If anyone has a world with persistence in it feel free to drop a link in here, I'll try my best to pin them!

[marble timber]

heres some. No promises lol

https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_b0317ed4-a270-47cf-9f8f-3e02183b1b98
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_98cdf0cb-73ee-4c7f-b8ee-4349c8d51190
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_cda718e6-35f8-4049-8ea6-ec1065ac9e1e

[radiant wharf]

500 vrchatillion years before this releases to live

[marble timber]

you have no idea chief

[shut jolt]

👀

it's here

[marble timber]

if anyone is curious how any of my stuff works under the hood just ask, im willing to provide as much source code as you need lol

[wraith bolt]

I can't believe the zoomers did this

[hardy narwhal]

huhh...how about thread, as....number of worlds maybe going to double soon.

(I mean thread only with world links)

[little echo]

thxxx

[trim cradle]

Also good idea!

[hardy narwhal]

World Link

[marble timber]

my database code for OF may be like 1500 lines long...... 💀

actually rn 1135 lines

got trimmed with some recent SDK updates

[crisp grotto]

Is there any available documentation on player objects and how to use those?

[merry widget]

Yes! https://vrc-beta-docs.netlify.app/worlds/udon/persistence/

[little echo]

@loud jungle im gonna be a jump pro

[hardy narwhal]

If you looking for worlds to test persistence,
Check here

For documentation, here

[gritty roost]

Ouhhh a list of worlds with persistence, I like it

[kindred swan]

Honestly this system will be god send for game worlds like terrors of nowhere

Being able to load in ur items/achievements/etc- instantly without using codes

[unique rune]

yep

[marsh cairn]

I can't wait for persistence to land in release

Let's gooo

[wraith bolt]

Is OnPlayerDataRestored fired if you or a joinee has no data?

[wary summit]

Yep!

[marble timber]

Yes, you can use the struct to tell if you actually reatored anything IIRC

[wary summit]

It's onplayerrestored though, no data. Did the docs still have the wrong word somewhere?

[wraith bolt]

Nah I mistyped, it's 2am

Looks like my Udonsharp isn't picking up the override.

ah

I am stupid.

[marsh cairn]

how long does it take for a feature like this to eventually land in stable release?

[wary summit]

Hard to say since we don't do features like this very often. But it's closest to networking betas and those usually take a month or two

[wraith bolt]

checks types supported by persistence

wow, no byte[]

I can't believe you don't just want people to be uploading arbitrary data blobs 😛

[marsh cairn]

alr then, I'll be waiting

[olive tree]

they are supported in player objects tho

[wraith bolt]

my blobs!

Eh just means I'll probably just have to encode arbitrary data as JSON or something

[hardy narwhal]

for note, if you don't report bugs while in beta, it means bug not exist. fyi

[crisp grotto]

best part is the codes can be repurposed as the information persistence is saving

[flat wasp]

I already have a really stupid idea for a world

[wary summit]

Huh no, they're supported both by playerdata and playerobjects

Playerdata.setbytes

[wraith bolt]

Oh!

Bytes

I was expecting "SetByteArray"

[wary summit]

Fair

[agile geyser]

it should be setbytearray

[wraith bolt]

Bit late to be suggesting api changes

😄

Yeah "trygetbyte", "trygetsbyte", "trygetbytes"

[marble timber]

Use a LSP lol

Btw if your working on a prefab, use player objects

Player data isnt really appropriate for prefabs for a variety of reasons

[wraith bolt]

For most of it, yes, but considering this is VRCBCE I'm working on

I'm going to need to support world-scoped data to an extent.

[marsh cairn]

I'll test the crap out of this api in open beta, because its the kind of thing that cannot break, so it has to basically work perfectly, and I'll report bugs if I find any

[marble timber]

? Why ? Player objects are world scoped too

[cerulean lion]

This shouldn't be greyed out, just literally give a popup saying it'll be cleared then rejoin the instance.

[marble timber]

I suggest against player data as its less explicit since its global and not object tied

[wraith bolt]

Yes but I don't know how many pool tables someone is gonna have in their world

[marble timber]

(also any changes to any player data cause the whole thing to restync, while changes to individual player ovjects only sync that object

[wraith bolt]

But I'll need to properly design the real system

[marble timber]

^ then this is even more relevant

[wraith bolt]

I'm anticipating world-scoped pool player data being in a separate pile of data to specific table data.

That may well end up turning out unwise

[quaint night]

the main problem is that the easiest API to use is most easy to shoot yourself in the foot with

[marble timber]

Right but you dont know how large the world users playersata is

[wraith bolt]

True.

[marble timber]

You might be synching a massive ammount of data by just changing a int

[wary summit]

There's lots of places it's still appropriate, a good example might be a simple mirror toggle.

[marble timber]

If your making individual world scripts i agree

I just disagree for any prefab creators since the world use case is unkown and you may cause massive network loads unintentionally

[flat wasp]

Maybe a small warning from the SDK when a prefab contains save data parameters?

[marble timber]

Wouldnt really be a way to do that

[flat wasp]

If you're dragging in a prefab yeah

[marble timber]

Right but you dont know if thats the users prefab or a packages

[flat wasp]

And I'm sure you can detect when a package gets imported

[marble timber]

This is just moreso something prefab creators need to realize. Either that or player data gets fixed to not sync the whole thing everytime

[wraith bolt]

To be clear; I'm doing a full systematic rewrite of VRCBCE and sandboxing both networking and persistence inside of their own code, so I can put off deciding on a pattern firmly until later.

[flat wasp]

You can always just have a "don't show again for this prefab" type thing too

Or just like

Have it be a onetime thing

[marble timber]

Yeah, just thought id make you aware of the pitfalls since you havent engaged with the beta yet and its useful to know before you have to re architect it all due to network loads of certain worlds 🙂

[wraith bolt]

The entire point of the VRCBCE refactor is to avoid tying hard-to-change code into infra.

Infra and domain live in two boxes and I define communication between them. I'm extremely done with omega classes

[marble timber]

I mean yeah im using the same architechture for my setup. 1113 line database manager system lol

[wraith bolt]

Wish I had interfaces but eh, I'll cope with abstract classes

Skimming the logic for playerdata: it looks like it's entirely possible to clock how calamitious a data sync push would be

[marble timber]

Ig you could if you really wanted to

[wraith bolt]

So to code defensively, it would be best to do a scan of how much data is synced

[valid kestrel]

Perfect timing to lose power for a few weeks
Gonna have a lot of fun with this when it returns

[marble timber]

Still waiting on the part of the api that lets us know when synching will be finished and how much world space is left :flop:

[wraith bolt]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I'll need cross-prefab persistence, though, that's a hard requirement.

[marble timber]

Kind of vital for prefabs imo since without it you cant inform the user if a save even worked or has finished and is safe to leave sadly

[wraith bolt]

Fun fact: we survived without clog checks for I think two years

:v

[marble timber]

It wasnt as critical as it is now

If i save a certain ammount of bytes, it can take up to a minute to save and theres no way to tell the player how long to wait reliably

[wraith bolt]

I somehow survived before the networking rewrite, too :v

[maiden wharf]

video players do seem broken between stable and persistence beta
no one on stable sees the videos i put in, nor are they able to add urls

[cerulean solstice]

Could persistence allow a global world leaderboard eg. Points scored in a game?
(All players that ever played the game across instances)

Local leaderboards would be pretty easy. I know that

[marble timber]

Sadly not at the moment

You only get data for users in your instance

[cerulean solstice]

I think it would be neat to have a way to access all the data of every player that ever joined the world. But I can see this causing security and trust concerns

[marble timber]

I mean not even that, that could just be alot of data

[cerulean solstice]

True that

[wraith bolt]

one second, backend engineer hat on

[marble timber]

Remember a world can store about like 10000 bytes IIRC compressed (dont trust the number i have here it may be higher, in bed rn lol)

[wraith bolt]

world-scoped dynamic data is probably actually easier than player-scoped data.

[marble timber]

Well yeah if its world scoped

But a leaderboard wouldnt work with that since it then becomes player scoped again essentially in size

[wraith bolt]

You're just saving a blob next to the manifest and assetbundle for the world and allowing read-write through some API.

[marble timber]

Its the potential size thats moreso the concern. All player data is stored on server, not locally

[lusty moat]

so wait I don't understand the difference between player data and player objects. Whats an example of what you would use one over the other?

[wraith bolt]

Yep, and potentially a very high read volume that would hurt if the blobs were on something like DDB.

[marble timber]

Player data is non-object specific, all scripts see it without a direct reference

[wraith bolt]

Your main problem would be accepting legal ingest.

[marble timber]

Player objects are the way to go 90% of the time imo for reasons ive listed here already

[wraith bolt]

You can't really allow a scrote to hack the client and replace your world's persistent data with a dickbutt ascii.

[marble timber]

Player objects are duplicated for each player, and are owner locked aerver side to always be owned by their respective player. Any network synched variable is atuomatically saved on individual serialization of that player object, compared to player data that serailizes everything in it at once when anything in it changes

Player data is essentially the lazy quick way to do persistence TLDR (atleast in my opinion for most cases)

[wraith bolt]

I don't actually agree there from a architectural standard

I can agree on the technical debt/limitations side, that's a good point

But player data is agnostic of world setup

[marble timber]

Yeah the idea is good its just limited by its execution of player data

If it was diff based it would be way nicer

[wraith bolt]

Suppose I'm refactoring a world I'm working on and I want to maintain all the data my players have.

If it's stored on a player object, that object has to remain rigid.

[marble timber]

Ehhh thats moreso a issue with the network id stuff being weird but yeah i get your point

[wraith bolt]

Yeah so just in general I think the model they've got is fine

[unique rune]

yeah versioned object persistence is quite hard

[wraith bolt]

Again as a seasoned practicioner of coping with VRChat world code

Important thing is to work flexibly

[marble timber]

Itd be nice if we could just have like string based network ids so i could namespace my objects and have them always be linked :/

Something like a playerdata key

[quaint night]

I mean that's what the global persistence data is, the API is just bad because every time someone wants to use it you need to tell them not to

[lusty moat]

yeah it is amusing they put out persistence when the network id tool is still broken after the last update

[marble timber]

Yeah if it was diffs it was sending my main gripe with it would be solved

[wraith bolt]

Yup, and if you cope/mald/seethe about it, it eventually will be improved

😄

[marble timber]

Its really just the unkownkness of what data cascade you might cause

cant wait for infinite loops based on player data being updated by one script making another script try to update its player data lol

Not sure if thats possible but sounds funny and that it might be

[wraith bolt]

To be fair, I think world creators will need to be the ones to have to worry about player data overload more than prefab authors

I'll need to very clearly outline what the persistence layer does and how it works regardless of what methods I implement

[lusty moat]

I feel like they need a "stupid mode" where you just put [persistent] or something before a variable and it figures out all the stuff in the background for how best to actually accomplish that

[marble timber]

Yeah but given the.... Competency? Ive seen some times in worlds is what worries me is all ❤️

[marble timber]

Yeah we wanted a seperate attribute from networksynced 😦

[wraith bolt]

I'd anticipate editor scripting people to step in and go "hmmmmmm" at this

[marble timber]

(mainly because rn all networked data is also saved, which isnt entirely ideal in certain cases)

[wraith bolt]

There's some aspects of the problem I think can be spotted by automation, but given player data accepts unbounded strings and arrs

will be quite spoopy

[marble timber]

I mean im already doing cursed things, im just storing raw json string in a player object for the settings database

[quaint night]

I suggested that, offered to help integrate it, got talked to for not agreeing

[pastel plume]

Interesting bug.
If you're on the beta using persistence, and someone creates an instance for a world with persistence and you join them, you're unable to join said instance - "world version incompatible with this instance"
I'm going to go report a canny, but oops

[hardy narwhal]

huhh...maybe need to check
https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/instance-breaks-when-persistence-beta-user-joins-persistence-enabled-world-creat

[pastel plume]

Btw it doesn't matter who creates the instance, it's whoever joins first (i.e. master).

Also interestingly, when you have synced objects with non-beta users, they get the object instantiated, but never get OnPlayerRestored() called. Which makes some sense, but feels a little weird.

[wraith bolt]

Sidenote on the player data stuff

They can't just only fire diffs off to people

Diffs are inherently contextful. You have to issue complete sets of data or clients cannot guarantee data correctness

So instead you would need to break up PlayerData into individual items that have independent clocks etc. I can understand why that is hard.

Especially given this has to hook into the underlying world netcode which is already under massive pressure

[pastel plume]

Hm. One iffy thing - there's no way to declare persistent data that's not shared with other players. I want to ask for it but I assume there's a reason this hasn't been made available.

[wraith bolt]

No support for targeted network sync in Udon

[pastel plume]

No, I mean no network sync

Persistence that's uploaded to vrc's servers for the world, but isn't sent to other players at all

[wraith bolt]

You are still using the network, that is why it uses the same throttling code etc

I can only guess tho

[pastel plume]

Even if it is to prevent spamming uploading data to vrc, I feel like we should really be able to have persistent data/settings that aren't network replicated to users other than yourself.

Like if I have my own local playlists for a video player for example, and I wanted that to be private. (contrived example)

[errant token]

We're tracking this somewhere, check if there's a Canny for it!

[pastel plume]

Oh there is? I'll go look!

[errant token]

I'm not 100% sure that it got created, but we discussed this feature quite a bit during Closed Beta and agreed to look into it further.

[wraith bolt]

It will be needed; it woukd actually solve the network dump problem with using PlayerData.

[pastel plume]

Can't find it, so will create it

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/user-private-persistence

doot

[quaint night]

that's been asked for a ton, I expected there to be a canny for it

it'd be better if it was the default

[pastel plume]

Not that I could find, at least not what I have access to

2 cannys and I've only touched the beta for like 15 minutes... This has to be a record for me. Usually it takes at least half an hour l m a o

[quaint night]

there were some comments on the canny for the persistent data feature https://feedback.vrchat.com/udon/p/save-load-persistent-world-data I know I asked for it a ton

[pastel plume]

Fair, though I'd imagine it'd be easier to track as a separate canny.

[quaint night]

yeah it's good to have a canny for it

[pastel plume]

Oh, worth clarifying these behavioral questions btw - these all are exclusively for PlayerObjects, not PlayerData:

• When you join an instance (as a non-master player), and get OnPlayerRestored on objects that aren't yours, can you generally be sure that the data has been received (and written to the heap) for all of that player's udon behaviors, or is this only valid for those objects that have had the event called on them thus far? (i.e. is the call deferred until all udon instances have had the data populated)
• Is user data for other players in the instance loaded from vrchat's servers every time, or just read off the network for those already in the instance? It talks about state being overwritten if you read/write too early, but the exact lifecycle of data isn't clear here.
• What is the actual event lifecycle when it comes to OnDeserialization vs OnPlayerRestored? Is there any guarantee of ordering for late joiners when it comes to these two events?
• When saving data in pool objects, are all pool objects saved to vrc in one batch, or individually? Individually here mirroring how udon network sync works.
• Will a failed serialization always also cause a save failure, or are there cases where one can succeed while the other fails?

[digital scroll]

is the persistence beta based off open beta or live?

ik live and beta are same currently but for future open beta updates

[unique rune]

also is the SDK based on the current beta (b3 I think?) or the release version?

[errant token]

persistence will track live releases, not other open betas.

[digital scroll]

ty ^.^

[errant token]

Yes, the persistence sdk is up-to-date with 3.7.2-beta.3
(in retrospect, I'd give this about 80% confidence. It might only be up-to-date with beta.2 and I'm not on my work pc to check)

[unique rune]

Good to know 🙂

[pastel plume]

I'm not sure if this is reportable, cus it's technically correct, it's just confusing. If you have a persistent object that loads data, but it has never been changed in the instance, you get a restored event but not a deserialized event.

While this makes some sense, I feel like this is going to be a footgun for anything that's meant to apply some behavior based on property changes after data has come in from a remote.

I'm not sure it should be changed, but might be worth a "heads up" somewhere in the docs? Though I don't know if others would agree with me on that.

[hearty kernel]

Question regarding PlayerObject, lets say I have weapon A and weapon B, The root of the objects have their own scripts, but there is a child object in each that has a component called 'weapon_data' with persistence enabled, does it get affected per object or is it per component script?

so like
-Weapon A
--Data
-Weapon B
--Data

[pastel plume]

Only the objects with the persist component and all recursive children of that get persisted. If the persist component isn't on the root, you can choose what gets persisted piecemeal

It's still recursive, but only from the persist component downwards (as far as I can tell from my own tests)

[hearty kernel]

What I am asking is it isolated from one another or do they share save data because same component

[pastel plume]

It works by network ID

So the logic that applies to network sync here is also used to pair up synced data (with some asterisks to personalize it per-player)

[hearty kernel]

Ah, so how do I make sure the network ID is consistant to make sure save data isn't lost?

Assuming network IDs change

[pastel plume]

As far as I can tell, as long as the network ID tool has the original objects the same, data won't be lost. Clientsim-side it seems to add a prefix per-player, not sure what happens vrc-side but it seems to behave in a similar fashion

This even remains working if you change what objects have the persist object on - say you persisted the entire tree, and then moved it to a child - the child would still retain its old data, the parent just won't load it.

Not sure if this means that the data will be deleted server-side after serializing data with the new layout, but based on the documentation I would assume so. Haven't tested that example yet.

[wary summit]

You're absolutely right, that's an excellent use case for knowing how much data is stored. We have a feature already on the way out to the next update which which will be ideal for making that exact observation

[pastel plume]

Wheee more cannies. One being wasteful with data for builtin components (vrcobjectsync saving far more data than it really should be), another being misbehavior on restoring (should sync really lerp on load? I don't think so :P)

[grand lily]

hey, i own a world i bought on gummroad, I'm wondering can someone do a easy explain how i add it to the world?

[pastel plume]

You will likely need prefabs that already have persistence in them, or write stuff yourself. It's early days, there's not a lot of pre-built persistence stuff, and the only thing you can persist without udon here is pickup positions - but only within the new player object system, which behaves differently to standard pickups/object pools, so you're going to want to wait for some prefabs to come out.

The behavior is likely to change too, so implementing anything for now is likely to break/change behavior in future up until release.

[wary summit]

If you fully deleted the structure and then re-created it with new objects, then it would lose all those network IDs and the next time you make a build, it will generate new, different IDs for all those objects. Once you do that, it will no longer be able to load the data that was associated with the old IDs.

That said, there are many ways you can reorganize the structure without breaking network IDs.

Once network IDs have been generated for a set of objects at least once, they will be stored in the VRCWorld as an array containing an integer and the reference to the gameobject. This means that it's natively resilient things like name changes, changing parent, adding children, or any other kind of change operation that is still the same object.

Even if you do delete some object with a network ID, that's still not the end of the world because you can always manually edit the VRCWorld's network IDs to reassign that ID to a new object, if you know what it was supposed to be.

Similarly, the network ID tool does the exact same thing except just faster and automatically, by encoding one set of IDs into some json and then using that json to automatically assign the objects in the world to the ID it's supposed to be. that said, there are known issues with the network ID utility right now, so it can't really be used. But rest assured that there's nothing the network ID utility is doing that can't be done manually.

Also, in regards to the persistence-specific behavior about what happens to your saved data - you're exactly correct, only the latest saved record will be stored, and so if you override an old save with a new one that didn't have those IDs, then the data associated with the old IDs will be lost for any player that visited the world on that build of your world.

[fervent coral]

Is using persistence to enforce moderation actions against users prohibited by the TOS of VRChat?

I personally could see alot of people using persistence for this specific reason

Say if someone made a world with a "blacklist" that made it so if certain users joined, they would be forced to a sort of "jail" area away from other users?

[cerulean lion]

You don't need persistence for that

and yes it's already been done/abused with Udon

[fervent coral]

yes but Udon blacklists or "ban lists" are against the TOS

[cerulean lion]

your example is just the normal udon blacklist

I wouldn't see how persistence can make it abusable even more

[fervent coral]

I guess

[spice field]

like persistence data is use user deletable so that would be bad for moderation

[fervent coral]

oh I didn't know that

thats neat I guess

[pastel plume]

Is there the ability to cause a data race between loading persistence and getting network data as a late joiner?
Like say I was serializing data constantly, and a user joins. They start loading persistant data from VRC, and before they get it, data is published on the network that differs. They then get the deserialization for that different data, and then get the data loaded from persistence.

After this occurs, will the player see the network's state, or the persistence state for the remote player doing this? To me they should see the network state, because otherwise you end up with a desync.

It's not clear if the load state is safe to deal with before you get remote data for remote players - if not, this seems like a potentially problematic bug which can't easily be worked around without a bunch of unnessecary code to restore network state.

Testing this is difficult given you need to cause a race condition, so I'm wondering if there's any word on how this works for remote players.

I want to raise a canny for this if it is an issue, but it's extremely annoying/difficult to test.

[signal pilot]

I guess the two sources, "owner client" and "data holding server" (I named them temporarily), are not placed in parallel but in series. If so, a race condition could not happen.

Anyway, I also want to hear from the dev team to clarify.

[pastel plume]

It's more a question of how the vrc client resolves this situation - I'd hope they'd drop server data if data comes in from the instance state.

[signal pilot]

I guess like:

• The Owner client communicates only with the server. Also, the late joiner client communicates only with the server. (In other words, they are in series structurally)
• When The server receives the variable value from the owner client, it saves it and distributes it to other clients.
• When the late joiner client connects to the server, it receives the latest saved value.

So, from the view of the server

• If the joining is before receiving new value, the joiner client will receive the old value first and soon receive the new value.
• If the joining is after receiving the new value, the old value no longer exists on the server, so the joiner client will receive the new value only.

[pastel plume]

I'd rather hear from someone on the vrc team than speculate, given this is around a potentially quite problematic source of bugs.

[sage raptor]

I would imagine there's actually 3 sources for persistent data: the client, the realtime networking server and one for storage. The storage would basically be just an extension of what manual sync currently does, so it can also save data if the instance is not running, while the realtime networking server would just send the last data it receives

[timid kindle]

what do you mean by this btw? what file? the persistence isn't saved in a file locally, it's saved on the servers

[echo hemlock]

Oh I misunderstood that, my bad

Was under the impression that it was stored on user's PC

Disregard my question

[sage raptor]

You didn't need to delete it, it would still be a valid question for modifying the data stored in memory, but thats much harder now

[abstract narwhal]

This world is a neat proof-of-concept for persistence.
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_a396c393-30f4-41de-a0d5-41d6632e4877

[wraith bolt]

This is my assumption. VRC instance servers as a model are basically scriptable application load balancers

They don't do a tonne, they just make sure that the networking between clients is passed about; over the years VRC has thrown more functionality onto them, but the servers don't really do much.

VRC data sharing in Udon over the network involves making a commit to a document on the network instance and that then gets replicated out. I'd assume that persistent information is schlepped around via this too, rather than working via client read-write to a backend service (which is how I'd write it, tbh)

Udon networking has always been quite painful just due to the nature of needing to make sure that server costs stay under control, and what at least appears from the outside to be tech debt; Unity, especially when VRChat wrote its older systems, was very bad at networked games.

[feral condor]

nvm it loaded xD

[lime delta]

I believe you will get them in order, that is you will first get the persistence data at the time of joining in the restore callback, then every networked update from then on. I'm not sure how else you'd want to handle this, you can't wait for a "final" state if the remote is syncing continuously. You will never reveive inconsistent data though, per-object.

[lime delta]

It's beta.3, but actually not - it's newer. Has a few VRC Constraint fixes and one for Standard Lite. But sshhh, just pretend it's beta.3 🤫

[abstract narwhal]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/reset-user-data-button-visible-for-worlds-not-making-use-of-persistence

[wraith bolt]

I can't believe VRCConstraints got ported to worlds, praise the scholars

( 😔 )

[unique rune]

oh awesome, I was hoping for the fix for the constraints in prefabs. Thanks for checking!

[lime delta]

Might be in there, but no guarantees. Really, treat it as beta.3+persistence, but due to git branches getting mixed up here and there it may just contain some other stuff.

(We checked it's nothing bad or large enough to need announcements, to be clear, just didn't get to making a full changelog since we wanted persistence out)

[rapid obsidian]

hi guys, i’m so sorry if this is the wrong place to put this but, i’m not sure where else to look or ask..

is there any documentation on the persistence stuff at all?

[lime delta]

It's in the announcement, you can find it here: https://vrc-beta-docs.netlify.app/worlds/udon/persistence :)

[rapid obsidian]

thank you sm!!

[unique rune]

Okay! That bug is really annoying me 🙂

[shrewd sphinx]

Am I wrong or is there no way to make a global leaderboard? There is no way to get information about players who are not in the instance, and there is no player agnostic world data saving right?

[trim cradle]

persistence currently works on a player bases so no

You can only compare it to other people in the instance

[wispy latch]

My plan is to sync and save other people's highscores when you are in the same instance. Basically "infect" them lol

spread the highscore disease

[shrewd sphinx]

Thatd work only in active instances. I guess you still need an external server and make people open some specially formed links, to submit score

[wispy latch]

Well yeah, as stated above we don't have world persistency (which would be cool btw), so that's just what I plan on doing for now. It might actually encourage active instances

[shrewd sphinx]

"with death of this instance the highscore will fade away until you meet the legend..."

[wispy latch]

Kinda, but I feel a lot of potential in the idea because it only takes one friend who visited a lot of publics to come to your friend instance and infect anyone who has not.

Like real life disease

Highscore Infection Virus (HIV)

[trim cradle]

that sounds so cursed xD

[wary summit]

In that particular question, the answer is it shouldn't even be possible to do in the first place because you are not able to set playerdata for someone else or take ownership of someone else's playerobjects. This is not just an API lockout, but rather these objects are under a whole different photon mode where that is literally impossible. Moreover, if you are actively in the instance and serializing, the person joining will not get anything from storage about your data because it only does that when you first join.

That said, the race condition that is actually interesting would be you joining and then immediately spamming your data, and then worrying that you wouldn't get your own save data back. Even then, that should still work because the expected behavior of this is that:

• other players already in the instance will receive your storage state before you ever have a chance to change it. Once you start changing it, it will override the storage state
• late joiners will just see the most recently sent state
• even if you're spamming outbound you should still receive back the storage deserialization because it was already on the way to you before you ever should have been able to start spamming

As for how this works in the backend, some of the speculation here is indeed already very close. You can think of it in two components:

• the system that provides data from the vrchat API is not unlike another player who temporarily takes ownership over all your objects and sets the state to what it should be, then hands ownership back to you. This only needs to happen once when you join.
• the server just holds onto the most recent state, and passes it on to the late joiner when they join. This most recent state may be the state from you, or it may be from vrchat. It doesn't care, it handles both the same.

[wispy latch]

Btw, I also had this question if player object instantiation is working on live or not. I assume it's not, but it would be really helpful if it did, for smoothly transitioning my worlds.

[marble timber]

Just keep in mind you only have 100kb total in the world and udon sync speed is really slow, lower than writing to a floppy disk

[wispy latch]

Oh yeah, name strings might take some space, but 100kb sounds more than enough

Definitely need some kind of cap on it

Interesting, I checked the docs and it looks like it's 100kb on data AND 100kb on objects? And on top of that they compress it on their side. That's honestly a lot to work with

[marble timber]

Ehhhh

Given how large data sizes are

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WXrHxJQW_evivVpajzLnrZnmu0otWxVsBsfUZiQXLFg/edit?usp=drivesdk

[wispy latch]

I guess it depends on what you want to do. I don't think you need 50k highscore entries for example. But you could probably fit a thousand or two if you really wanted to. That's honestly enough

[storm maple]

what extent of persistence is being added? will it be hard for creators to make full on save systems?

[echo hemlock]

How do I get the persistence beta? It isn't showing under steam, only open-beta, do I need to restart my steam to see it?

[storm maple]

also I remember back when roblox had much earlier save systems that there were issues where data could randomly be completely lost, will there potentially be issues where save data gets wiped without the player doing it?

[wary summit]

You can either restart steam or go into "installed files" and click verify integrity

[wary summit]

At the moment, this form of persistence allows data to be associated with players and can be accessed only when that player is in the instance. That's the exact type you need for personal save systems, so yes. What is not being added right now is saving the state of an entire instance (like a minecraft realm), or viewing save data of other players not in the instance (like a global leaderboard).

[flat mist]

That’s a lotta data

[wary summit]

• Yep, OnPlayerRestored is designed to say "all data for this player has been received from storage" or at least "if they had data, it would be here by now". This means that it should come after all OnDeserialization's for any player objects which had a saved state, and by the point you receive OnDeserialization it should be fully safe to read synced data from playerobjects and playerdata.
• User data for other players is only loaded once when that player joins. The server then holds onto the most recent state, whether it came from you or loading from storage. If you send data too early, it will replace the data which came from storage, which will cause it to be lost.
• OnPlayerRestored always comes after all other OnDeserializations that came from storage. If there is no data, you may not get any OnDeserializations but you will still get the OnPlayerRestored.
• Each object inside a playerobject will sync independently. If you have multiple udonbehaviours on one object, they will go together. When you leave the instance, all of the data from those different objects are packaged up by the server into a single bundle and sent off to storage. Playerdata is also packaged up, and has a separate bundle.
• Failing serialization means it fails to send. If it fails to send, then the server never gets it and it will not affect your saved data at all.

[abstract narwhal]

viewing save data of other players not in the instance

I'm sure there's probably a simple explanation but reading that and seeing this world makes me wonder how it does that if you can't really see save data of others currently.
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_a396c393-30f4-41de-a0d5-41d6632e4877

[abstract narwhal]

For context

[shut jolt]

Pretty sure that world is just using string loader and some server sided shenanigans to do that lol

[abstract narwhal]

Ah figured. Didn't think to check there~

[wary summit]

Yeah I think the timing is just a coincidence and that's a totally different system. Probably works on live

[hardy narwhal]

ah

[dusk brook]

Hello, I read a bit the channel and just to be sure, it's really not possible to do a scoreboard with persistance ? In the documentation it's confusing me because it's saying "each world may store 100 KB of Player Data"

[trim cradle]

You can, but you can only access the data of players in the world

[pastel plume]

In this specific situation, the data race doesn't involve any kind of ownership transfer.

An example experimental setup here would be a single int on a script incrementing every frame and constantly requesting serialization - this being low enough data that it works approx every frame, managing to time ending this sequence perfectly so something goes wrong.

The failure mode here would be all other players in the instance seeing the correct final state, but a late joiner, who was joining while this occurs, seeing one or more deserialization events from the network, followed by loading from persisitence which may be in an old state. This would either fail by getting stale data only, or getting new data followed by stale data, and staying on stale data due to unfortunate timing.

I'm curious if this situation is ever possible. Depending on how persistence operates, this may be an impossible state to hit, however experimentally I've noticed you're able to get state updated without an OnDeserialization event if the object has never been touched in that instance - though I did notice a flaw in my methodology last night and plan to re-test today to validate that.

Basically in short I'm wondering if you can cause a race where your final state is stale due to in memory vs storage loading speeds.

[wary summit]

When you are the late joiner and they see you join, they will briefly see data from storage before it is overwritten by your real data.

However when someone else is a late joiner and you've already been serializing data for a bit, the late joiner will only see your data, because it doesn't refetch from storage once you're in the instance

[pastel plume]

So persistent storage data takes priority over instance state in all cases? That's a bit spicy.

(When receiving data)

[wary summit]

It's not about priority, it's about which one gets there first. And yes, storage data always arrives before the player does. And that's a good thing because you want it to be ready to go asap

I'm not sure how that would be a problem. If you don't want that behavior you don't have to put enable persistence on those objects where it matters

Loading data from storage is actually not unlike an ownership transfer. The server takes ownership of your objects and sets the data according to your stored record, then hands it back to you. This all happens before you finish entering.

[pastel plume]

The problem occurs in the same way that the existing problem with late joiners where if someone sends data while you're on the loading screen (between start and fade up) you never actually get that data. Just goes into the void.

I don't know if that's been fixed yet.

You get the data as it was before you joined, but any data received in that period never arrives.

Given that is already a problem in vrc, I'm wondering if a similar issue can occur with persistence loading.

My last test for this was months ago, but it's not hard for me to retest.

... Honestly I should probably raise a canny for it if I can still reproduce it. It isn't hard to trigger, if you're trying to do so.

First I gotta get out of bed though lmao

[wary summit]

Ok so you're taking an existing bug and extrapolating that it might exist in persistence? Well I'm not familiar with that particular bug, but I'll say that persistence is effectively also a big network update in general so it's possible that bug (if it existed) was fixed by default as part of persistence anyway

Regardless, if you have a hunch a bug exists, then yeah go test it

[pastel plume]

I'll go and check in both open beta and persistence beta.

Breaks game world sync all the time if your timing is unfortunate.

My theory here isn't that it's the same bug specifically, but it'd be in the same class of bug.

[pastel plume]

yep, still exists lmao (this is the old bug)

https://feedback.vrchat.com/bug-reports/p/late-joiners-drop-network-data-events-occuring-between-start-and-first-update wheeee

may drop the data altogether, but for now I've only tested the actual deserialization event (and arguably the event itself is what matters)

[storm maple]

I think I understand, so you can't have a whole world that constantly changes and saves based on what players do to it (like building the world in minecraft basically)

[pastel plume]

... Theoretically you could implement that with a CRDT and a gossip protocol like system, so as players come and go they fill in the gaps and merge data. But that would be a lot.

would be funny as hell though

[dusk tundra]

I don't have anything productive to add, just want to express my excitement for persistence. This is HUGE! Could change VRChat in ways we can't even imagine yet. The future is going to be exciting.

[pastel plume]

Udonsharp is still updated in the SDK, but basically all public vrchat gh repos (issues etc) have been neglected. It's basically gone source-available by this point.

The one provided in the SDK is updated beyond the gh one

And the lord said "lol. lmao even."

[errant token]

We'd like to keep this channel focused on the Open Beta for Persistence, thanks!

[echo hemlock]

sorry (I deleted my msg)

[wispy latch]

What happens if you call OnDeserialization manually like on start? I do that often and I'm not sure if I had that same issue

[pastel plume]

Unsure, I can test - but this has been a flaw since at least day 1 of network sync auto-loading on clients.

[rigid smelt]

Hello I'm new here

[wispy latch]

I would like to know the result if you do.

[covert blaze]

Anyone taken a crack at saving player position yet?

[pastel plume]

Curr is updated every frame based on network data. It's not just the event, the data never arrives.

Gonna update the canny for this

nvm too late can't do that lol, will just comment

[wispy latch]

The only other thing I can think of is if the object is disabled on scene upload for whatever reason, but doesn't seem like it's the case in your example. Good catch, things like these can really throw a wrench in your machine, hope that will help them fix it

[pastel plume]

This causes other issues as well lmao

[wispy latch]

I did in an earlier iteration, it's honestly pretty straight forward

[round tangle]

I can't seem to join the beta?

[trim cradle]

restart steam!

that usually fixes it ^^

[round tangle]

Have done multiple times, even the entire pc

[trim cradle]

hm weird

Can you try verifying the game files?

[round tangle]

That did it! Thank you!

[trim cradle]

No Problem!

[errant token]

yep, there's an example for this in Example Central

[merry widget]

I'm running a group instance for playtesting persistence in my world, if anyone is interested in joining!
[event over]

[abstract narwhal]

Honestly kinda hope to see more worlds make use of saving a player's last known position when rejoining with persistence~

[crisp grotto]

So it's using an external web server instead of VRchat's upcoming built in persistence?

[spice field]

https://fixupx.com/vr_hai/status/1844887013692146143

[errant token]

What do you think about this?

[spice field]

don't have any programming experience myself so no clue

[errant token]

haha ok - thought you were trying to start a discussion. Why did you post it here?

[spice field]

figured someone who was more knowledgeable in programming would have insight into that as it kind of seems like from the start of the tweet that it was a bit of a weird way to go about it

[indigo sluice]

i do gotta say tho. i'm confused. lots of function in the docs but now where the playerdata actually is located.. is it only accessible in OnPlayerDataUpdated? or am i just missing something.

like lots of mention to PlayerData but not where said player data is accessed/retrieved. unless i'm really just that blind and i'm reading over it..

[errant token]

Set the Data
Get the Data

this example on the docs page does both!

[indigo sluice]

I missed the "udonsharp" tab on the example at the bottom!

Though this leadds me to believe my IDE is not working correctly then

oh wait nope nvm found the issue, that code uses PlayerData.SetInt directly. but when i went off the assumption that PlayerData was a static it told me it was invalid. i didn't consider the fact that it might be in a different namespace. in this case the VRC.SDK3.Persistence all good now o/ thanks @errant token 👍

[errant token]

Make sure to open Example Central from the menu under "VRChat SDK > 🏠 Example Central".

There are 10 persistence examples built with U# to get you started using PlayerData and PlayerObjects!

[indigo sluice]

curious though. if playerdata is only accessible from the client of the respective player. why is OnPlayerRestored seemingly sent for everyone? 🤔

[errant token]

Any player's client can Get data belonging to another player, only Set is limited to the owner.

[indigo sluice]

oh ok i misunderstood then. good to know.

👍

[gray olive]

Its accessable anywhere that event is there as data loading is done in pararel (specially its downloaded from server) so your code need to know when loading is done other wise it would been pain

[indigo sluice]

momo already got me to find the answer. that said i'll be honest if i had read this before their response i'd only have been more confused. :P

[gray olive]

"is it only accessible in OnPlayerDataUpdated"? i kind of tried to explain that part ;p

[indigo sluice]

on that note though. success. player movement speed changes are now persistent in my RP world \o/

actually. important question. if I update a world with persistance. for people on the old client will running persistance methods break anything or will it just pass over them/do nothing?

[gray olive]

I wonder that too, whats the behavior with other client versions that dont have persistence

It wont be issue in future, but it importent for people who relese worlds with persistance right now

[errant token]

I recommend you do not update any existing public world with persistence until it's released to the main client. The persistence sdk methods will not exist for non-beta users, possibly throwing exceptions and generally confusing which things are working correctly.

[indigo sluice]

all good. 👍

guess i'll have to convince everyone to start using the persistance beta then 👀

[storm maple]

persistence could really potentially open up an explosive amount of possibilities, a game like Phantom Forces on Roblox for instance would not be possible without save data since there's so many things to unlock

[compact remnant]

The main thing this video showcases is the shockingly slow update rate of the right user window and the technical theory that it might be faster to use empty player objects instead of the player data component. Ntm the low maximum data limit which seems incredibly limiting.

[jagged cloud]

Yee, finally able to save some data from the world I'm working on.
Got a nice looking block of dense data.
(the not dense data on the right is from testing and is unused)

[mild dragon]

On my public world I simply used the OnPlayerRestored event to check if persistence is supported since it is not being triggered on non compatibile clients. Works fine (tested on several devices).

[elfin wren]

Iirc instances started with persistence beta and ones not are not intercomaptible currently

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/instance-breaks-when-persistence-beta-user-joins-persistence-enabled-world-creat

[mild dragon]

Not on my world. I already did that test. The only difference is that when my world-compatible istance is created by non-compatible clients the event OnPlayerRestored is not triggered, even on compatible clients. Anyway I must admit that more testing should be done with different situations.

[trim cradle]

I find it weird that you need to login for the example stuff

[astral sluice]

Is it possible to save VrcUrls on a PlayerObject?

Would be nice for giving a User the possibility for his home worlds default music

[trim cradle]

Yes

That's what I am doing for my image loader for example

[astral sluice]

Nice

[trim cradle]

Saldy you can't use Player Data for that and only Player Objects.

[astral sluice]

I know, I saw it’s not possible in Player Data, so I asked for PlayerObjects. But I’m happy that it would work 🙂

[trim cradle]

Mentioning that:
https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/playerdata-does-not-support-vrcurl

[agile perch]

I am having an issue importing one of my models with the new SDK, the validations aren't showing up, and I have gotten this error that says " Cannot implicitly conver type System Collections Generic" And when I tried deleting it and readding it I get the same error.

I am using the 3.7.2 persistence beta.1

[echo hemlock]

When a player joins an instance, is it better to use OnPlayerDataUpdated or OnPlayerRestored?

cuz apparently OnPlayerJoined is called too early

[errant token]

use OnPlayerRestored to know when all of a player's persistent data has been loaded.

[echo hemlock]

okay

[errant token]

Make sure to read through the docs for both PlayerData and PlayerObjects to understand what's available in each and how to program for them!

[echo hemlock]

I've just successfully made a script that knows if a player already visited a world. Already trying something else more fancy :3
Thx !

[errant token]

That's great! Good luck with the fancier stuff 😄

[echo hemlock]

yay I try to make a join counter and display a top 10 of best joiners :P

[broken wadi]

when comes a persistant client version for quest? I can't use PCVR for testing

[wary summit]

It's important to note that that is the worst-case scenario of playerdata being loaded up to the max. It is fair to be frustrated, but also that's one of the reasons for those limits being set. And while those limits aren't going to be appropriate for larger data, I do think it's still totally fine to use for small amounts of data, and there are many many use cases where that is the case. I don't think it's fair to dismiss an entire feature in all use cases just because there's a small subsection of advanced use cases where it's not appropriate.

Playerdata and playerobjects go well together because they fit into two sides of the same coin. Playerdata is good for when you have basic, simple scripts that just need to save some data occasionally and they don't care where. Playerobjects are good for when you start needing objects per player, high frequency data, or large amounts of data.

Some people are looking at this and the only use cases they're interested in working on will immediately put them straight into playerobject territory, and that's great! That's what they're for! But that doesn't mean playerdata is useless. it's just designed for a different use case. And it's not the end of the world that a 5kb playerdata serializes a few extra times because a handful of different prefabs save to it when the user interacts with them.

[echo hemlock]

so wait I did read again and again and I realize its not possible to make a global leaderboard?

[wary summit]

That's correct, you can only see data from other people in the same instance

[echo hemlock]

ah ok. Do you think that it is something that could be added in the futur? Like accessing an entire PlayerData from every instances

[wary summit]

Anything can happen in the future but it's safe to say that won't be part of this release

[wraith bolt]

everything is possible

😔

[cold echo]

base64 encoded?

[cold echo]

I really want that feature, so my home world plays something else when I load in.

[trim cradle]

I mean you can already do that using Player Objects, but it's a bit pain to work with

[signal pilot]

I have an idea of leaderboards. You can make a leaderboard of the current instance. If you save it and refer to it in the next instance, you'll get a merged leaderboard of two instances, which ranks people you met in the game.
Also, you can read the leaderboard other players hold and merge them. By doing so, you can make a more large player-based leaderboard.

[echo hemlock]

but you can only access localPlayer data from the persistence, so its not possible to access someone else PlayerData

unless one player saves everything into one string, but this will quickly going beyond the max limits

[jagged cloud]

Yep, binary blob of everything I want saved in the world base64 encoded into a string for more compact storage.

It extends quite far down. Lol

[wispy latch]

Highscore data will be synced regardless of persistence anyways, so everyone should be aware of the it already.

And yep, that's my plan to, I'm going to make an infection system where people get infected with everyone else's highscore data. 🦠

[echo hemlock]

persistence is still useful if a player leave and join back so his highest score is saved. But if he is offline, then his score will be temporary "lost", which is not ideal for a persistent leaderboard

[wispy latch]

That's what the infection system will be for though. The theory is that it will spread like crazy as long as you have at least one friend who visists other people from time to time.

Like yeah, you will have to join people, but chances are people who care about highscores will do so anyways

Per world persistence would obviously be more ideal

[echo hemlock]

thats really not ideal because that means you will have to use bot accounts to watch instances 24/24

they better have to add global persistence before half of the game is populated with bots only

[cold echo]

looking at the repetition in the string, I wonder if you could use something like gzip or another compression protocol to make it even smaller.

[trim cradle]

like a spreading virus lol

[jagged cloud]

That's going to be the plan, currently just testing but once I actually implement everything it's going to end up somewhere close to the 100KB limit, and I need four of these. Compression is definitely needed.

[signal pilot]

Although you must be with the player in the same world instance, you can read data of non-local players (as udon variables on Player Object for the player or via getter methods of Player Data that have a player parameter). It is not restricted or protected at all.

[trim cradle]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/give-us-access-to-networkids-on-runtime-to-make-per-udonbehaviour-playerdata-eas

[echo hemlock]

Is it https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ObjectNames.GetUniqueName.html by any chance? I know that VRChat SDK basically have a lot of wrapper/proxy functions for underlying Unity API.

[trim cradle]

Interesting

why would they have that under Networking though

[echo hemlock]

That what I'm wondering as well, does it maintain a synchronized unique name list or is it just local?

[trim cradle]

Also, it has different parameters

[echo hemlock]

Yeah, the existing names parameter, which is why I am suspecting that Networking is providing the list of pre-existing names

[trim cradle]

maybe

[echo hemlock]

Also upvoting your feedback

[round tangle]

How can I clear the client sim persistence data?

[rocky pulsar]

VRChatSDK > ClientSim PlayerData and click the trashcan

[round tangle]

Ty!

[abstract narwhal]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/add-feature-support-details-to-world-page-eg-supports-player-persistence

Surprised I haven’t come across anymore persistence test worlds. Was hoping to find more since the start of the beta then just the three so far~

[hardy narwhal]

momo posted more on #1294096284722004122 actually.

[abstract narwhal]

Oh neat. Should probably have a better title for it though. Something like… “Persistence Test Worlds”

[hardy narwhal]

yeah, I renamed.

[abstract narwhal]

Yeah that should do I think.

[hardy narwhal]

hope so

[marble timber]

android beta channel when

[hardy narwhal]

it's simply #android-discussion now on days so too late to start new.

[marble timber]

I meant a beta channel for persistence

like a way to be on the beta on android

afaik its not possible rn

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/android-persistence-beta

[hardy narwhal]

ah, I got point now.

maybe too early but yeah, in near feature could.

[marble timber]

I have a big pool of android users that I can be doing testing and UX dev with and I cant test with any of them rn 😦

[marble timber]

ehhhhh id disagree based on info I have

(namely the ammount of time this has been in dev in closed beta)

[hardy narwhal]

ah...

already so many canny since become open beta so maybe once it's got clear some could be.

[mossy stratus]

Can you get player name and add it to a global world leaderboard with the beta or is it just saved settings?

[marble timber]

its per player

nothing is global

you only see current instance info

[mossy stratus]

interesting 🙂

[hardy narwhal]

there is canny for it, I saw here earlier.

[marble timber]

with the current way its underlyingly wrote, not going to happen any time soon

IMO

[abstract narwhal]

Also will relink thread again for more visibility~
https://canary.discord.com/channels/189511567539306508/1294096284722004122

[mossy stratus]

what world idea are you trying to make ?

[marble timber]

?

[abstract narwhal]

@errant token, tested out that 'Persistence RPG' world you linked in the world thread and for some reason, it only worked some of the time. Other times it would either spawn me with the wrong position and/or rotation or Persistence just didn't kick in at all.
https://files.catbox.moe/mn0xmr.mp4

[agile geyser]

has anyone else ran into World version is incompatible with this instance.

[subtle quest]

Has anyone been running into weird bugs in non-persistence worlds while running the beta and hanging with people not on the beta? I encountered quite a few issues earlier today but have no idea if it was coincidence.

The first world I had issues with was The Pool Parlor (https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_99bdc4c6-b80c-49f3-aae0-5d67017d8340). First the pool table broke and a rejoin did not fix it. We ended up having to make a new instance. Then the world's player voice controls glitched out and made me mute on my friend's end. A rejoin did fix this.

The second world was GeoLocator (https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_8abba687-ebfd-4356-846d-d069976df375) where I joined on two non-beta using friends. I was working fine on their end but on my end everything related to those two was broken. Peaking into a logs there was a lot of UdonBehaviors crashing due to "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

The final world before I went off the beta was Rumble˸ Disaster Survival (https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_8e30e0e5-aae0-4452-9281-6832f5e49b06). The world itself seemed to work fine, but one of my friends didn't exist on my end. My other friend could see and talk to them, but on my end they weren't even showing in the player's in instance list. Also checking the logs they never triggered any on join/leave events.

[echo hemlock]

Is it just me or the LeaderBoard example just give up after the 2nd test?

Your script should either check if it is null or you should not destroy the object.
VRC.SDK3.ClientSim.ClientSimNetworkingUtilities+<>c__DisplayClass12_1.<ConfigureNetworkOnScene>b__1 (VRC.SDK3.Components.VRCPlayerObject pp) (at ./Packages/com.vrchat.worlds/Integrations/ClientSim/Runtime/Networking/ClientSimNetworkingUtilities.cs:67)```

nvm apparently every examples just only works once then they are all broken

[echo hemlock]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/persistence-is-incompatible-with-configurable-play-mode

[hardy narwhal]

There is canny which said, if master is on Open Beta, then non-beta joined instance broke instance IIRC.

[vivid estuary]

Yeth

[subtle quest]

Are you referencing https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/instance-breaks-when-persistence-beta-user-joins-persistence-enabled-world-creat ?

This canny seems to be referencing new, persistence-enabled worlds (the worlds I encountered issues with, at least as of yesterday, were last updated before persistence went into open beta). And the issue described is different from my own. This canny, however, seems closer to the issues I experienced: https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/other-players-and-incoming-networking-occasionally-do-not-work

[hardy narwhal]

ic

[dawn elk]

What if I made a world where you can paste avatar IDs into something and it would save them and then load them all on the pedestals every time you joined to make like a pseudo avatar favorites list or would making something like that against TOS since it’s a VR chat plus feature to get more favorites?

[bronze ledge]

does anyone know if ios16promax works for vrc?

willing to test

[abstract narwhal]

I have a feeling they wouldn't really mind it tbh.

[dawn elk]

hope so

[abstract narwhal]

Considering you can also just bookmark avatars in your browser.

[cerulean lion]

Did you mean to opst this over in #ios-discussion? Your answer is yes, VRChat doesn't limit what devices can play on the beta even if it's out of spec. The 16 Pro is well over equipped for playing VRChat anyway

A18 Pro is basically an M1 chip in a phone, it's really overkill but it'll tackle majority of gaming and even some console games like resident evil

[crisp grotto]

Same, went to Audience Anarchy with some friends last night and the UI panel that normally appears in front of you was stuck outside the walls. Had to switch to live to fix it.

[alpine kettle]

What do you mean by this? VRChat is not supported on my device (This is not a surprise to me, as my phone is really old; LG G4).

[cerulean lion]

Any apple device can access the iOS closed beta, I forgot to mention that you will encounter frequent crashes on low spec devices with less than 6gb of ram.

[echo hemlock]

I don't think it's different from prismic avatars world which is allowed

[leaden flax]

Regarding Pool Parlor voice issues: we are aware of that glitch, it is rare and we still don't know what triggers it. I think Toaster is also not yet using the latest version. This behaviour is not new on this beta so most like not relevant. Also tables always break, although it is more rare nowadays.

[velvet barn]

It's a little different in that it lets you specify favorites, but yeah, the fact that you still have to go to the world makes it not really the same as VRC+ since you still don't have access on the fly. Nothing about that should violate any existing TOS/guidelines.

Relatedly though, have had plans for implementing a favorites system in the search world for over a year now, had just been waiting on the persistence feature 👀

Built-in persistence also means I can ditch my hacky web request system for storing persistent world options. Excited this is finally here 😊

[upbeat dagger]

Any plans of any other persistence stuff? Might be interesting to have a avatar fav system for players like what someone else was mentioning.

Or a search history

[elfin wren]

How were you doing session identification?

[upbeat dagger]

I would have thought he was talking about an individual's session settings

[elfin wren]

Eh, but that wouldn't need a web request system

[velvet barn]

My previous message before that one was regarding that: a favorite system in the world has been planned for a while now, was just waiting for built-in persistence to release. I'll also convert the existing stuff that persists over to the new system so it works for everyone, and will probably expand it to cover some of the other world settings.

[velvet barn]

In the original version, ip of request + hash sent from the user based on their username, which was combined and itself hashed on the server, and used a cookie to identify the session. This allowed multiple people on the same connection to be differentiated. But when they removed cookies from the request, I had to reimplement it, so it was no longer able to differentiate between users on the same IP. All still hashed though, nothing stored raw.

[subtle quest]

Looking at the logs, the two times loading into the world with a broken pool table I encountered multiple UdonBehaviors breaking immediately due to unhandled null references. While I couldn't glean too much information from the stack trace, they all did have references to OnDeserialization.

Could a broken pool table state on the "host" player's end cause that?

[leaden flax]

Maybe the beta struggles with the two variants of OnDeserialisation (one with and one without the parameter)...

Idk if the world uses both

[cerulean lion]

#1138891887374237706

[abstract narwhal]

Has nobody else uploaded any test worlds for persistence? I haven't found anymore then the small handful already out there. :v

[velvet barn]

Was focused on jam world polish first. Have a few things in mind.

[crisp grotto]

@fluid trellis posted a link to a persistent version of VRtual Park in his server, dunno if it's ok to share the link here but saying it exists should be ok

[hardy narwhal]

thinking same

[fluid trellis]

Here's the link to my world https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_3c2d7b2f-2543-4ed6-9913-23482cd45901

It uses player objects as a replacement of cyan laser's object pool, and player data to save data.

[hardy narwhal]

added to #1294096284722004122 too.

[fluid trellis]

For some reason, I am unable to join that world anymore, I'll take a look

[hardy narwhal]

oh....

[ember bison]

Seems like if you're not on the persistence beta and join a world that has persistence it will sometimes break and kick you out. Someone else had this issue when adding persistence to their world

[echo hemlock]

Got a weird problem, on the persistence beta if vrc disconnects me it loads me back in but I'll be alone, my friendswon't see me until we make a new instance, this problem has been really bad today I'm switching back to the regular open beta branch, it only happens with the persistence beta

[trim cradle]

Can we please get persistence in the home world so that we can turn the music off 😅

[fluid trellis]

I'm stupid, I was on the open-beta branch, I thought that branch had persistence.
It's only now that I realized that there's a persistence-beta branch

The world works on persistence-beta

[echo hemlock]

Oof, that I agree

[ornate mango]

...and miss out on a comfy beat or seasonal tunes? nahh

[granite river]

anyone notice that the linked persistence docs goes to a page not found?

[hardy narwhal]

huhh

[trim cradle]

[hardy narwhal]

seems gone...

@merry widget Seems persistence docs gone from provided website.

[novel flower]

i swear i didnt delete it

[pliant cipher]

Sorry. Hungry.

[hardy narwhal]

I think now back on service.
https://vrc-persistence-docs.netlify.app/worlds/udon/persistence/

odd...if I go from google, it works while direct link not works...

ahh, URL domain change...

pinned URL changed

[novel flower]

gotta love domain changes 🤣

[hardy narwhal]

😂

[abstract narwhal]

Looks like old version of the docs.

Last updated on Sep 17, 2024

[hardy narwhal]

lol

btw https://vrc-beta-docs.netlify.app/sdk/example-central/ also gone

[errant token]

thanks for the heads-up, someone must have overwritten, I'll fix that asap

[hardy narwhal]

thanks, I'm 1 finger away from ping you.

[errant token]

fixed now!

[hardy narwhal]

Thank you

[magic basin]

How I sign up for the beta

[errant token]

#open-beta-announcements message

[brittle pivot]

From the PlayerData docs:

Keys cannot be deleted after being written.

Does this mean that world creators have no way of clearing any player data?

I know I can set the value to whatever is the smallest, but the key is still gonna exist forever, take space, and be synced to every other player until the user manually resets his player data?

[verbal spire]

What worlds support this feature currently?

[iron shell]

https://discord.com/channels/189511567539306508/1294096284722004122

[verbal spire]

thanks

[calm vessel]

Tbh someone should make a persistent music toggle prefab so that alot of worlds have it as an option 😂

[echo hemlock]

Hmm unironically, that's something Architech could actually do by rolling out an update to use this.

Basically so that the ProTV Prefab would have a toggle for a script to check the persistent to see if there is a toggle to disable autoplay.

The only problem with that is it basically messes with developer's access with the persistence storage. I could see people discussing on standardizing the storage access between prefab.

[trim cradle]

Not really, it should just be a different key

[echo hemlock]

That works

[trim cradle]

Or just completely independent if he ends up using Player Objects

[subtle quest]

Oof, hopefully that's not a forever thing

Maybe they want to make sure people aren't doing shenanigans before giving the ability for scripts to delete save data

[fast fable]

whats this

[trim cradle]

#open-beta-announcements message

[sly trellis]

wowwie

[abstract narwhal]

I hope this bug is fixed soon enough, definitely been a bit of a headache. ^^;
https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/instance-breaks-when-persistence-beta-user-joins-persistence-enabled-world-creat

For now though, need to hop off this branch until it is patched. :v

[junior goblet]

(assuming that bug is fixed^) If i upgrade my world to the beta, will people who arent on the beta still be able to join it?
I've not tried any of the beta sdks before.

[abstract narwhal]

They will be able to join, they just won't be able to make use of persistence.

[junior goblet]

Thats fine. Ill just make sure to leave all the existing functionality as is and only add new features with persistence so it doesn't break any existing features. 👍

[mild dragon]

From several tests on my world if you use "Player Data" methods only if you get the OnPlayerRestored event (which is not triggered on non-beta clients) they are fine. But if you use any "Player Object" (such as in then persistent pen example) they will break your world and non-beta clients will crash on joining that world.

[abstract narwhal]

Has that been reported on the canny?

[mild dragon]

No, because it is not a bug. Persistence is still in beta and should not be used in public worlds, if you do you should check that new methods are compatible with non-beta clients.

[abstract narwhal]

Mmmm fair enough.

[hardy narwhal]

@ornate mango Thanks.
https://ask.vrchat.com/t/a-list-of-worlds-using-persistence/27318

[ornate mango]

I was about to go to your thread now to cross link, kinda thought of mixing your thread with the format we used for the dev update and open it up for everyone to share theirs

[hardy narwhal]

If you wish, feel free you do.

alright, pin link replaced.

[trim cradle]

If you want to try out a few worlds with Persistence in them then check out this forum post!
https://ask.vrchat.com/t/a-list-of-worlds-using-persistence/27318

If you have made a world or prefab with Persistence feel free to post it in there as well!

Also, check out the Persistence Docs!

[hardy narwhal]

Docs link missing....

[trim cradle]

idk what you are talking about

[hardy narwhal]

persistence docs link on netlify....

[trim cradle]

I... I was making a joke because I edited the message and added the link

[hardy narwhal]

😂

(didn't check it yet)

[crude grove]

got an example uploaded last night for others to see.
https://vxtwitter.com/jetdog8808_dev/status/1846982210739700213

world link: https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_50a26c05-bb76-48e8-a22f-be05a99f972c

[junior goblet]

Is there a way to check if persistence is available on a client? (on the beta) So that specific behaviors can be run / not run if its available

[neat grotto]

OnPlayerRestored(VRCPlayerApi player)

[junior goblet]

What, just check if that function is defined?

[neat grotto]

No. It's an event on UdonBehaviour which is recommended to wait to fire before trying to read or write persistent data

The event will not fire on clients without persistence

There's no way to try something without the behaviour crashing

[junior goblet]

Hmm, guess i could just have an empty persistence object that enables all the other ones when / if it's OnPlayerRestored succeeds.

[hardy narwhal]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/support-persistence-instance-creation-via-web

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/add-a-way-of-clearing-deleting-existing-playerdata-keys

[fresh mica]

you gotta stop asking about modding

against tos and against the server rules to talk about it

[cobalt hatch]

Also completely irrelevant to the channel

If you have an actual Security issue that should be handled here: https://help.vrchat.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

[upbeat dagger]

Just got onto the persistence beta because of this world
https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_f2b1756f-fc8e-4f10-bfdc-6458f0424a09
Anyone know if it's working? It says it's in beta, which I assume is this beta. I don't know much about the persistence system so I'm unsure if I'm not doing something right or if this world isn't functioning. I simply did some stuff to progress and then rejoined to see if my progress persisted. It did not.

[abstract narwhal]

This world is apparently making use of persistence due to the fact I’m running into the one error bug with it but so far nothing seems to be persistent. The beta though I’m assuming refers to the fact that this world is still very much a work in progress. It tends to break a lot.

[upbeat dagger]

Interesting, good to know! Thanks

[long mirage]

Weirdly this world has syncing issues in the non-persistance version of vrc

[rocky frigate]

It was bugging out constantly for me and a friend even without persistence so I'm not sure it's a good example right now.

[rapid obsidian]

hi guys, really just kinda curious, is there any usermade prefabs using this new open beta? Im assuming theres not, due to this being somewhat new haha, but just kinda curious if anyones dropped anything!!!

[wary summit]

Yes, blackrat's picture loader is a good one

[rapid obsidian]

thanks for the recommendation? are there good places to find these?

[wary summit]

https://github.com/DrBlackRat/VRC-Picture-Loader/releases/tag/3.0.0

[echo hemlock]

Been integrating the persistence into my world, just not sure when Persistence would roll out into mainline VRChat, but I imagine it'll be soon.

[abstract narwhal]

I'm expecting Persistence to be ready for Live in sometime Mid to Late November.

It's a big update so will cook for at least a month's time.

[subtle quest]

it might only be using the persistence beta to try out the player objects

[abstract narwhal]

Possibly.

[alpine kettle]

is this a beta issue?

[abstract narwhal]

@alpine kettle, this happens when someone on persistence-beta joins a persistence world, and the master of the instance is someone not on the persistence-beta.

[alpine kettle]

oh odd. didn't know @craggy cypress added persistence to his Sky Lanterns world

Tagging to double check that that's the case

[craggy cypress]

No I didn't

[abstract narwhal]

Hmm 🤔

[abstract narwhal]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/instance-breaks-when-persistence-beta-user-joins-persistence-enabled-world-creat

[alpine kettle]

If it's not a persistence enabled world, could it be because I made the instance, but my friend loaded in before me? (I'm on beta, they aren't)

[abstract narwhal]

possibly

[lime delta]

Yes, "made the instance" from the technical perspective always refers to the first user in the instance. Who clicked the "Create instance" button is irrelevant.

[alpine kettle]

Gotcha, but the world wasn't persistence enabled, so then I'm at a loss for why I got the error

[abstract narwhal]

I wonder if it's related to the fact of someone in the persistence-beta pressing the "Create Instance" button in-client and someone on a live or open beta client being the master of that instance. The only thing that clues me to this is specific text in the official persistence test worlds descriptions that says--

WARNING - Instances created via the web will NOT function correctly with persistence‚ you must create a new instance from the client․

[long mirage]

Persistence beta is missing the thumbnail for the stickers and emojis

[ornate mango]

Yup, known as a regression. Already working on it!

[ornate mango]

There are a couple here, everyone is welcomed to add their own as well
https://ask.vrchat.com/t/persistent-worlds-showcase-share-your-favorites/27318

[rapid obsidian]

oh awesome!!!

[long mirage]

Will this be fixed alongside the other jittering behaviors with objects with physics (if its not on the canny i might make one)

[ornate mango]

Not sure but could be. If you can't find it in canny best to make a post, especially if there are specific steps to reproduce the issue (sometimes you may have different steps than what we can reproduce internally during testing)

[dawn elk]

https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_0c89fc81-d409-458d-9cca-a275ef614c57 tell me if this world works for u guys

[abstract narwhal]

@dawn elk, the thing doesn't appear to be working in general. 🤔

[dawn elk]

it doesint show up untill u leve and come back

for now

[abstract narwhal]

Oh I see, there we go.

[wispy latch]

I know there are some issues with creating instances, but has anyone implemented both live and persistence saving side by side so far?

I have a thing I'm doing that I could do with persistence and just want to make sure I can just upload it with the new sdk so it works both on live and on the persistence branch as long as they create their own instances.

Or should I just wait for an update lol

[haughty halo]

still same problem. it look like it work but it dont work

[wispy latch]

You didn't change anything though 🤔
Are you maybe using chat gpt or something? It's definitely not up to date with the new API. You could try giving it the example code or even the whole page and see if it can help you that way. The code example itself is pretty straight forward though.

[haughty halo]

i did break my world. so for now i just removing save data. try again other days

[ornate mango]

What some creators are doing is publishing as a separate "beta" version, so once the instance issues are resolved they have the persistence feature already tested and can publish as the main world version

[cunning hamlet]

with persistence in beta, are one time purchases far off?

or are they already implemented

kind of like gamepasses on Roblox, buy once keep forever

[ornate mango]

we're getting there on both!

[trim cradle]

Funny thing about player objects, since they litterally just use networking code my stuff works completely fine on both live and the persistence beta

And even if only the instance owner is on p-test my stuff will still work cause I'm doing everything on their client and then just use the networking I already had setup for it

[subtle quest]

I'm going to guess they have multiple teams working on different things at the same time. Generally speaking, development on persistence probably won't slow down development on one time purchases.

[radiant wharf]

microtransactioncore 🤑

[south night]

I'm not sure if this should be obvious or not, but just incase, I noticed some weird oddities if you try to join a world built on 3.7.2 (NOT 3.7.2-persistence-beta.1), with the persistence beta client

I am guessing the persistence beta client hasn't been updated with the new Udon signing stuff?

was noticing some stuff using manual sync with OnPreSerialization() and OnDeserialization() no longer functioning
Edit: Fixed in OpenBeta Persistence Build 1534

[lime delta]

I think the persistence-beta branch is just slightly out-of-date on some features, so this could very well be the case, yes

[haughty halo]

I find that it crashed the world too so I recommend using the test world to get it to work. O.o

[wispy latch]

I was hoping to avoid that lol

[wispy latch]

So will it spawn player objects even on live? Or are you talking about how it spawns and syncs only on p-test?

I guess I'll have to just try it out myself after I'm done with some other stuff. Maybe I'm being too hopeful here

[trim cradle]

They don’t spawn on live no

[wispy latch]

Good to know, thanks!

[south night]

after more testing*... on the beta persistence client, the issue with manual sync with OnPreSerialization() and OnDeserialization() not working might not be world version specific
regardless of what version world I join (3.7.2, 3.7.2-persistence-beta.1, older than 3.7.2) I'm noticing issues with it not functioning at all
Edit: Fixed in OpenBeta Persistence Build 1534

[tidal whale]

How’s it going

[elfin wren]

what?

[leaden flax]

anyone else observed this?
https://feedback.vrchat.com/persistence/p/executionorder-broken-in-clientsim

[abstract narwhal]

Wonder if persistence branch is gonna have any updates soon~

[subtle quest]

could it be this? https://feedback.vrchat.com/udon/p/1123-udon-objects-with-udon-children-initialize-late-despite-execution-order-ove

[leaden flax]

Yea that looks similar, makes mine redundant then I guess. Didn't see that one.

[subtle quest]

it's an old bug

[leaden flax]

But mine is persistence specific, didn't have these issues before...

[subtle quest]

might be new, then

[leaden flax]

I will check later on live to compare the client behavior

[leaden flax]

I tested the non-persistent version and to my surprise it is also a mess, the bug that was reported by orels is still present.

You really have to smack the [DefaultExecutionOrder(ExecutionOrder)] into every single class file for it to work.

I haven't tested that part on persistence again yet though...

this might explain some random bugs in my code that I could never reproduce...

[subtle quest]

Personally I've avoided using ExecutionOrder and designing my code without it instead

[leaden flax]

I rely heavily on it:

namespace TLP.UdonUtils.Runtime
{
    public static class TlpExecutionOrder
    {
        public const int Min = int.MinValue + 1_000_000;
        public const int Max = AudioEnd + 1;

        public const int DefaultOffset = 150_000;
        public const int DirectInputStart = -1_000 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int DirectInputEnd = -1 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int DefaultStart = 0 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int DefaultEnd = 999 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int VehicleMotionStart = 1_000 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int VehicleMotionEnd = 1_999 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int PlayerMotionStart = 2_000 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int PlayerMotionEnd = 2_999 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int WeaponsStart = 3_000 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int WeaponsEnd = 3_999 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int UiStart = 10_000 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int UiEnd = 10_999 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int AudioStart = 11_000 + DefaultOffset;
        public const int AudioEnd = 11_999 + DefaultOffset;
    }
}

[stark nexus]

As far as I can tell in U# DefaultExecutionOrder only applies to the order that Update/LateUpdate/FixedUpdate will fire on scripts

The directive that it transpiles into in UdonAssembly is even called .update_order

So checking the order in Start won't do much

[quaint night]

Start gets fired from Update internally so it's affected, see: ManagedUpdate() in UdonBehaviour.cs

[stark nexus]

Ah awesome, thanks for clarifying that

Good to know

And PostLateUpdate and the first OnEnable event from the looks of it

[idle obsidian]

Well, I am finally dipping my toes a bit into Persistence stuff. And it has been pretty confusing to try and handle saving lots of data for my world while trying to remain as optimized as possible and also readable and understandable.

I got like, dozens of achievements in my game, each one of them saving their state and date of unlock(through a bool and a long, though I could probably just rely on a single long since if there is data in that index, then the achievement must be unlocked but that's asides from the point rn)

I'm trying to not use some sort of jank system where I iterate over the amount of achievements and ask the PlayerData.GetLong() like, dozens of times. I wanted to use a mere byte array because that seems faster, one single call for the PlayerData and then process the byte array myself. However there is a lot of limits around trying to manipulate and use byte arrays effectively? Lots of work arounds and currently stumped

[errant token]

can you call .Length on the byte array instead of .Count()?

[idle obsidian]

Yeah, that seemed to let me compile U#, and it seeeems to have saved an array properly, now I am going to try and read it and see if it's fine

kind of forgot you usually use .Length on []arrays and not .Count()

Currently saving around 64 achievements so two arrays of bools and longs, and converting into byte arrays each

Okay, that seemed to work yeah

No weird issues

[errant token]

I'm glad to see you're making progress. Is there still anything blocking you?
From what I can see, you could probably save some complexity and space by skipping the boolean array and just using longs with a value of 0 as an 'empty' entry.

(as you theorized yourself)

[idle obsidian]

Yeah! Probably gonna do that. 100KB is a lot but, considering this is simply achievements, and I am still due to save a lot more data, I am not looking forward to and I'll have to save as much space as possible

I still wished there had been some sort of implicit way for the PlayerData class to convert any type array into a byte array under the hood :< But hey, I guess I learned something new today!

for example, I'll have to save every class stats for every game mode (like this thing int[][] class_gamemode_matchesPlayed )

But I think I have an idea on how I want to approach this, still using byte arrays and concatenating names for the keys

[errant token]

you may want to consider using PlayerObjects for storing some of this data. For example, you could directly save and restore a long[] of achievement times instead of serializing to and from a byte array, and avoid serializing all the PlayerData every time any single entry changes.

[idle obsidian]

Can you have multiple PlayerObject templates? And each with Persistence enabled on some scripts then?

This data does not change often, only when a match ends so there should be plenty of time for data to settle and send with ease.
Also since the players are part of a prefab to use for another world, I want to make sure I isolate the player elements from this "pvp mode" mini game so their PlayerObject only contain the essential

Again, unless there is a way to have multiple PlayerObject templates? Then I could consider using PlayerObjects instead for sure

[trim cradle]

Yeah you can mace multiple different player objects

[idle obsidian]

Well, I guess might as well do that now

That kind of makes me wonder what the use case for large data with PlayerData would be if I am switching over to PlayerObjects for having too much data :S

[lime delta]

We explicitly recommend against large data in PlayerData afaik, it's really only for small one-off settings

[idle obsidian]

Oh, this might need some updating then D: From the PlayerData doc page

I was like "This is large data, but doesn't update very frequently, so it should be fine"

But I was not aware of being able to instance many PlayerTemplates

So I could have one PlayerObject template for my Player stuff like their inventory, stats, etc
Another PlayerObject template for my mini-game stats and achievements
And lastly PlayerData for player settings and perhaps story flags

[idle obsidian]

I dont think I am of a fan of making an array of arrays that syncs :S Never done this before and not sure how I should even do this

int[][] class_gameMode_variable where the first index of the array determines the class, and the second determines the gamemode
How would I go about preparing this to be part of a synced PlayerObject for my mini-game data?

[velvet barn]

Why not just use parallel arrays?

[idle obsidian]

parallel arrays? you mean the ones like int[,] like this?

I think I remember trying them out but I couldn't use them? I dont remember why but I just know I ran into a roadblock, something that maybe wasn't exposed or it did not like how I was initializing it

[velvet barn]

int[] gamemodeArray = new int[10];```
Just keep the lengths of both arrays in sync, and you can address each with the same index.

[idle obsidian]

wait I'm confused D:

this is only two arrays of ints right? that doesn't help me

because I need to store for every class, for every game mode

so knight_survival_bestScore
then knight_tdm_bestScore

and so on for every mode and then do
mage_survival_bestScore
mage_tdm_bestScore

for every class

and this for all my variables, bestScore, bestDamage, totalTime, etc

[velvet barn]

How many ints are you storing in the bottom-most array?

one int for class, one for gamemode. Any more?

[idle obsidian]

just those two, I guess the full thing is this

    public int[][] class_gamemodeGames;
    public int[][] class_gamemodeWins;
    public int[][] class_gamemodeScore;
    public float[][] class_gamemodeDamage;
    public int[][] class_gamemodeBestScore;
    public float[][] class_gamemodeBestDamage;

[velvet barn]

And the bottom-most array in each of those contains how many values representing what variables?

[idle obsidian]

contain the amount of game modes present in the game? And each contain well, the value that the variable is telling me

correct me if I am wrong, but isnt this what I am doing with these?

an array within an array, correct?

[velvet barn]

Yes. In the example there you have 3 elements in the bottom-array (S, TDM, B). Is that true for all the array variables you mentioned above? (class_gamemodeGames, class_gamemodeWins, class_gamemodeScore, class_gamemodeDamage, class_gamemodeBestScore, class_gamemodeBestDamage, etc?)

And are any of those bottommost values redundant across arrays?

[idle obsidian]

Yes, all of them have the same amount of classes and gameModes
and what do you mean by redundant? As if, there were other arrays that stored the same data? Or if any of these share values between themselves from the list from either? Both would be no

They are essentially the master data holders, they hold it all, and I access their data whenever I need.

[velvet barn]

In principle, the idea is that multidimensional arrays of consistent length can almost always be expressed as parallel arrays one dimension lower. Taking your above example, it could be rewritten as this:

Instead of a single 2d array with 3 slots in the bottom-most array, you could represent it as three 1d arrays with one slot each.

If you had 5 elements each in the bottom-most arrays of the multi-dimensional array, it could instead be represented as 5 single dimensional arrays, each of the same length as the top-most multidimensional array.

in other words, int[n][m]; allocates a total number of space equal to int[m]; ... int[m];, where there are n int arrays.

[idle obsidian]

This is going to be dozens of arrays by this logic :S I guess its worth noting that every game mode will have one total score, total dmg, and so on so...

I guess one benefit is that I am never going to serialize this data for anyone else, but that's going to be a loooooooot of arrays

[velvet barn]

That's fine, it may look like alot but it still scales. And your indexes across arrays remain consistent. Given you explaination, visualize it like this:

Each index in each array is your gamemode

so totalScore[gamemodeIndex] will return the totalScore value for that gamemode.

Would that work for your case?

Also has the benefit of letting you mix types in udon's limited array type mixing

[idle obsidian]

Oh, you skippe the 'class' ! The playerClass someone is using like Knight, Bandit, Mage etc

[velvet barn]

So it's score/dmg/etc, per class, per gamemode?

[idle obsidian]

Yes

[velvet barn]

That does get a bit trickier then since it sounds like you're working in a 3 dimensional array space

[idle obsidian]

Sorry if I didnt make myself clear

That's exactly what I was about to say

[stark nexus]

U# doesn't support multidimensional arrays, only jagged arrays

[idle obsidian]

It's essentially a 3D array

[velvet barn]

That's okay. That's why I was asking to try to understand 😅

[velvet barn]

Yeah, sorry, semantic thing there. Implementation wise since they are of equal length though there's not much difference on the surface, just under the hood.

[idle obsidian]

I have a feeling my system is going to end up pushing... A LOT of data

[velvet barn]

Yeah, looking at it now I see you were implementing parallel 2d arrays instead of a single 3d one, so you already had the concept covered.

[idle obsidian]

Huh, I guess I was already doing parallel arrays then, yay haha

[velvet barn]

In that case, how many gamemodes and classes do you have?

[idle obsidian]

That can scale as I want to add more BUT
Classes = 8
Game Modes = 5

[velvet barn]

Right. Well it's a bit more manual, but if you smear out the gamemode dimension into their own variables, you could still manage to store the data as collections of 1d arrays, clustered by gamemode.

So this, then just make arrays for totalScoreGM2, etc

It's not ideal, but my I don't think udon can sync arrays of arrays, so it's either that or serialization as a string or something else

[idle obsidian]

You know, now that you mention a string...
Wonder if I can brute force save everything in a string that gets converted into a JSON/DataDictionary

or rather, convert everything into a datadictonary, then into a json, then into a string.... god

[velvet barn]

Especially if it's just when you save/load for persistence, that's probably the best way

[idle obsidian]

I cant believe I am about to do this

Because I could have arrays of strings, and those strings are just technically more arrays

Well here goes nothin'

[velvet barn]

Yup! Sometimes you gotta make do with what you've got to work with. And even if a bit roundabout, a possible solution is still better than no solution 😅

[stark nexus]

Gotta cope until Udon 2 comes out so we can store data in structs

[idle obsidian]

yeah no, I'll take this tbh! When I think about it, these strings would probably be like "[0,2,3,4,5]" so they are not even that big

[velvet barn]

I mean if they are small enough values, you can also just bit-pack the data into some other datatype 😉

What's a ulong except 8 bytes each up to 255 stuck together hehe

[idle obsidian]

Oh jesus...

I dont know if I am ready to bitpack things. First I want to make sure this works

[velvet barn]

Nah, bitpack all the things!

😛

[stark nexus]

Can also create a series of arrays int[] BestDamageGameMode0...int[] BestDamageGameModeN and use Get/SetProgramVariable to manipulate them

[idle obsidian]

!!

Yknow, that sounds like the Udon Jank way, but I WAS thinking about it

[velvet barn]

Except it's value, per class, per gamemode

[idle obsidian]

oh

right that too

its essentially a 3D array

or 2D arrays on parallel

so uh, I'm not gonna write all of them down like that

Its okay, I appreciate this much help tho

[velvet barn]

Good luck!

[wicked idol]

any worlds that use this well? curious

[velvet barn]

It just occurred to me that if you only had 4 gamemodes, you could actually pull this off with arrays of vector4's, since those are an udon syncable type. Would effectively function as an 2d array where the bottom-most array is limited to 4 floats. https://creators.vrchat.com/worlds/udon/networking/

[idle obsidian]

Aawh, alas I wished

[velvet barn]

You could also use Color32 to act as 4 bytes (0-255) without having to bitpack

But yeah, just food for thought for anyone else who comes across this lol

[idle obsidian]

12 ints
2 floats
6 string[]
4 int[]
4 float[]

is the total tally of elements I need to serialize everything

I really hope I dont run into the problem I ran long time ago

Here's a quick question actually focused on Persistence. Does the PlayerObject with synced values... have to send a SerializationRequest in order for the data to save?

[idle obsidian]

Considering this is the only thing I got after only setting the variables... uh, not sure if its working lol

*Object is networked as Manual
*Object with the script has the PlayerObject component
*Object with the script has the Persistence component

[idle obsidian]

you have to requestserialization oh god

[lime delta]

Yes, data is persisted on the server where network data goes through, so if you don't serialize it, it won't be stored

[idle obsidian]

at first I was confused, but after that it makes sense

[idle obsidian]

Alright, I saw that my data was being written but not read. Turns out JSON numbers are stored as doubles whoops
But I think with this, I have managed to understand PlayerData and Objects, and how to work with them

Neat

[idle obsidian]

I have a new question. If I were to update the names of variables in this script, would they no longer get that data again?

As in, their previous data is lost?

[lime delta]

Yes, same rules as when you upload a new version of a world and someone in an instance rejoins.

[idle obsidian]

Gotcha, thank you :3

[silent echo]

Now that live and open beta don't crash worlds when persistence is enabled, I've implemented it it my world in place of the code system.
The code system is still going to be there for a little while after persistence makes it to stable.

https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_aa856cfd-698a-4a29-bf73-e065fa5c2cdb

[idle obsidian]

Just went to check it out with my friend! Very solid adaptation of Lethal Company :) !

I will mention we did run into some bugs or something like that.
Because after we died all my stats got reset? And my friend couldn't even click on the achievements anymore.

[silent echo]

Thanks! I believe the stats themselves are okay, the stats display itself may have some update issues as it's fairly new, but I will look into it. I certainly do probably still have some bugs lurking about.

[idle obsidian]

Oooh okay sure! Also forgot to mention that this only happened after my friend killed me and themselves using a pipebomb while we were selling scrap

[elfin raft]

Anyone else no longer able to visit players on the live client? I keep getting "World is incompatible with current platform" when trying to use the persistence beta client with regular instances now.

[idle obsidian]

Same here

[south night]

I assume this is because the persistence-beta doesn't support Udon Code Signing yet
if the world supports Udon Code Signing (3.7.2) and the instance master's game client supports it (live build), you probably won't be able to join

I would honestly only use the persistence-beta to test persistence related stuff right now

[idle obsidian]

oooo yknow, that's a pretty good point