#Avatar stopped working in Synthriders ‼⁉

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fluid verge
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Hi,
i have a problem.
Unfortunately, my avatar no longer works in the Synthriders game.
In the Synthriders settings, I can still choose an avatar, but only certain ones.
My personal avatar, which I created myself using the Quest app, no longer works.
I already uninstalled and reinstalled the game twice, and I even reset my Quest 3 to factory settings.
But still, nothing works.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?
Can someone help me or has anyone had this problem before?
Thanks a lot in advance! 🙏🏻

split nova
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If it has the new meta avatar things it wont currently translate over because the game is missing the avatar update from meta but im sure this is being worked on

weary gazelle
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When you push to the Avatar Editor from within Synth Riders you will be able to access the parts of the old Avatars which Meta is leaving around for a while longer. But anything you do with the new Meta Avatar system from outside the game won't be visible within

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Basically, any avatar with legs at this point will not be usable within Synth Riders

fluid verge
# weary gazelle When you push to the Avatar Editor from within Synth Riders you will be able to ...

I know that myself – that the Quest avatar isn’t directly connected to the SynthRiders one.
But still, there used to be a very similar avatar in SynthRiders – or at least, you could customize one to look almost exactly like the one from your Quest account.
That’s what I did, and it worked great.

But now the problem is: I can’t customize anything anymore. I only have a few random preset avatars to choose from – and honestly, they don’t look anything like me. Just weird ones, like old ladies and stuff.
Why did it work before and now suddenly it doesn’t?
There must be something wrong.

Two days ago, it was even worse – I couldn’t even see the avatar faces I was selecting. I had to click blindly and hope for the best. That definitely wasn’t normal.
Now I can at least see the faces, but still – I can’t recreate my old avatar like before.

Why did it work before, and now it just doesn’t?

weary gazelle
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Meta are deprecating the old style

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.. part of that is turning off services including the ability to edit

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Synth Riders does not support the new avatars at all yet, and you will get stuck from time to time, depending on what avatars are cached for you, with avatars that aren’t yours

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There’s not a lot we can do about it at all at this point until we update the game to support the new avatars.

fluid verge
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But I don’t even have the option to use my old avatar anymore, because it’s completely gone.

weary gazelle
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Yep, Meta are saving copies of your most recent old avatar for use

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If those aren’t available then you won’t have access to them

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I’m really sorry, but this isn’t a change which developers asked for; and Meta haven’t made it backwards compatible and haven’t made it easy to migrate.

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The game hasn’t had an update as you know since the 90s pack, so it’s all changes on Meta’s side of things

fluid verge
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So does that mean I just have to settle for the avatars that are available now and can’t use or set up my old one anymore?

weary gazelle
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Probably

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The problem is we do not control that infrastructure at all - that’s why Steam, PlayStation and Pico players have never had them, right?

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We will be updating them, but as I said - Meta haven’t made it easy for us to do so.

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Meta has left old avatars cached until the end of the year.

fluid verge
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And why do other people still have their avatars then?

weary gazelle
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I really don’t know - we literally just ask Meta what your avatar is.

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We don’t host it, change it or update it - it’s all handed off to Meta’s services

fluid verge
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Yeah, I get what you mean now. And I guess it’s just something that can’t be changed.
It is how it is, and I’ll have to accept it.

Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for your reply.
If I had known that before, I wouldn’t have set anything up in the first place.
But oh well… I still wish you a great day, and thanks again!

weary gazelle
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New avatars are coming - it’s just taking us longer to get to it than we would have liked - we do know that people are very attached to them though, so we will be upgrading them.

soft yarrow
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When will there be an update that supports the new style avatars? I'm playing on meta quest 3. At the moment, most people are invisible in online play, since their (old style) avatar cannot be loaded anymore., which I find quite an annoyance. Or perhaps the cache where the old style avatar resided has been flushed by Meta.

split nova
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the old avatars cache would have been flushed out by now sadly and all we can do is wait for the update from the team in the mean time if the invisible things is annoying you if you turn off metta avatars in settings for now and just use the andromeda floating head and hands and other doe the same it will be a little work around for now and to help with the trigger

soft yarrow
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Ok thanks, but is there an ETA on this issue? Since the last remark of the devs that the new avatars are coming was june last year?!

split nova
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as regards to this question im in the same knowledge as yourself, all we can do is wait for the Dev team 🙂

weary gazelle
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It's worth bearing in mind that our team has released a whole entire other game in the intervening time 🙂

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So we have been quite busy! Meta have only just let developers know in December of the actual date that cut off would happen - and it's not a straightforward process to move to these avatars, requiring significant alteration to the game for all platforms - not just Meta! - to accommodate this.

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I'm sorry that it's taking a long time, it would have been faster had the process of upgrading been made backwards compatible (for example, had they allowed the removal of avatar legs to make compatible experiences) and had the mandatory SDK updates required by Meta in order to update avatars been easier to integrate safely into a project for developers working on any platform other than Meta.

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We have had to dedicate a senior developer to this task for many weeks and I cannot overstate the complexity and headaches that trying to deliver this to you in our project has caused.

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In the intervening time, please turn off your Meta avatars and you will have the standard head & handswhich all other platforms use.

soft yarrow
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hi wirrel, thanks for the info, i have turned off the avatar for now, hopefully it can be fixed soon. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate 🥰

lethal turret
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Back in July you indicated you were aware that Meta were purging the avatar cache at the end of the year, and there were discussions about them further back than that. While I appreciate that you've been devoting development resource to the Switch version, the end-of-year deadline to prevent users going without avatars appears well understood.

I wondered if you can shed a little bit of light on what is making it particularly difficult to implement?

I develop for Android on mobile and as a non-VR dev I allow that I may be misunderstanding things, but I'm assuming that the apk bundle is Quest specific for our headsets and given that PCVR users see us as the robots and vice versa anyway, I'm curious as to the reason this is a cross platform issue.

split nova
# lethal turret Back in July you indicated you were aware that Meta were purging the avatar cach...

Research i have found the new SDK requires a minimum Unity engine version of 2022.3.15f1 synth riders is currently running on unity 2021.3.45f2 which an LTS release so my assumption here is an engine upgrade is definiatly required which cause more issues with other SDKs etc used being supported on that newer engine and having a small team that is stretched between a few games and platform releases its going to be dificult and with synth riders being cross platform each platform cannot be on mismatched version of the multiplayer back end sdk so inturn would require all supported platforms to recieved an engine upgrade to support

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now i could be wrong and i will happily hold my hands up to it

weary gazelle
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The problem is exactly as you outline, Omni, We run a monolithic project with multiple platform targets which is why this is a cross platform issue - a cascading effect as you have to consider every platform and all the minimum requirements of all third party software and platforms.

For example, moving to version X of Unity triggers an upgrade of packages A, B, C which in turn causes platform B’s SDK to need an upgrade, which comes with different minimum version requirements, and so you have to move to version Y of Unity which continues this cascade, and that’s all before you touch one single line of code!

Then you discover that on version Y feature A has changed, feature B is incompatible with one of your platforms, and feature C doesn’t work which can set off another cascade. Or you can find that SDK A is now incredibly intrusive and just will not coexist with SDK B leaving you with a mess to try and sort out all while you have to confine to roll production forward on the game in parallel for content delivery..

I can’t go into greater detail because of Platform NDAs but the update we have to make is straight to Unity 6, and as a developer yourself that may explain all I need to. We are also not the only developer going through this exact process.

I do not want to downplay the difficulty that just getting the various platform SDKs together supporting our workflow has been, and we are not done yet. I don’t expect players to be sympathetic; they just want their identity back. But this has been one of the hardest things I have seen the team undertake, and that is the reality and we cannot do it any faster.

All I can ask is that people who are desperate for their avatars be sure to let me know if you’re prepared to help test this feature! Because it will need testing for sure.

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Nothing is ever as easy as it appears looking at it from an outside perspective, right? 🙂

lethal turret
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I appreciate you taking the time to explain all that - with the Unity version minimum requiring a cascading upgrade to all platforms, the complexity sounds pretty painful indeed!

I can only speak for myself in terms of testing, which is an absolute yes, because I understand that requirement, but I hope many others will be willing to as well smolOniHappy

weary gazelle
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We have a great group of player testers, but I definitely need to take this wider again because it will be such a large shift

old minnow
# weary gazelle The problem is exactly as you outline, Omni, We run a monolithic project with m...

Wow! That is an incredible amount of work just to switch to the new API. In terms of estimation, it’s a classic, “how long is a piece of string”, problem, and an almost impossible to estimate amount of work.

Best of luck to the team in climbing this mountain and getting through the massive body of work to solve dependency hell.

Hopefully testing goes smoothly once it eventually compiles again, but I imagine that’s another very large amount of rigorous effort… even if it is completely problem-free.

soft yarrow
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Sure I would to like to sign up for tester! 🙂 . I did send you a PM Wirrel

robust wedge
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also happy to help testing if there's need!

ripe panther
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I'll test as well wirrel

weary gazelle
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@soft yarrow @robust wedge @ripe panther I have good news for you 🙂

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(Oh and @lethal turret too!)

ripe panther
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Oh oh tell me

weary gazelle
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.. anyone who would like to assist in testing updated avatars I will need a DM from you with your meta account email!

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We do have a test version with this feature working. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with the live version, but we'll be doing group tests and would love to get some more bodies in!

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@fluid verge I should ping you too!

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This is open to anyone who wants to join and test

grim basin
robust wedge
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excellent!Just need to look up my Meta e-mail

tulip radish
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I send a DM 😇

weary gazelle
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Thank you!

coral roost
white wing
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This is Quest only? Or PC as well? (I‘d be willing to test.)

weary gazelle
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We don’t have any desire to implement the federated system when it’s not likely to remain supported.

white wing
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(I have both, so just wanted to offer testing either.)

soft yarrow
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i sent you a pm @weary gazelle