VRCDN News, Change of Goals, Network Changes, and more! (Patreon)

Hey hey! We've been busy behind the scenes working on a TON of new stuff, and with this weekend being the first showcase of some of it we thought this would be a good time to give a quick overview of the network, what we've been doing, what to expect, and anything else I can think of.

First of all I'd like to address some concerns that were raised over this weekend's Slyfest potentially overwhelming our network, do not worry we have already discussed this internally and we wouldn't have agreed to host Slyfest if we had any concern it would affect anyone elses stream....that being said let's talk about our first big change!

We are permanently adding new servers to our core streaming network, these servers will be in NA and Europe to help with the quickly growing demand in these regions. To be exact, we are doubling EU capacity and increasing NA capacity. This will break the status API that we have in place but this is due to be replaced in October as we slowly move away from our old and unreliable status monitoring to the new one we have been designing internally.

Over the next few weeks we will be trialling servers in Asia to host the growing demand of viewers and streamers from the region. These servers will handle ALL traffic from countries in Asia and will hook into the core network for that sub 1 goodness! We are aware of the potentially high latency issues which is why we want to trial them and get feedback before fully committing to having our service present in Asia.

Next we have some exciting new features that the Slyfest team will be helping us stress test during their festival this weekend, take it away Slyfest team to reveal what we've been up to!

Slyfest Information Video 

That's right, our VRChat bot can now dynamically create new instances for an event it is managing if the active instances are already full! We feel this is a HUGE feature as events in VRChat are just getting bigger and bigger and we are sure Slyfest will push our bot to it's limits!

The second thing they announced is a long awaited feature I'm sure..... stream transcoding! Slyfest will be using our brand new stream transcoding service to supply multiple resolution and bitrates to help those with slower Internet connections. Sadly I cannot promise that this feature will be coming to the core network as the CPU / GPU cost is a bit more than we have... but I can confirm that it will be available for our commercial users.

Now lets talk about some internal shifts in our goals. VRCDN at it's core is and always will be a global streaming network focusing on non-profit operation with our main focus being on groups, clubs, festivals, and anything the VR community from any VR platform is trying to do, that being said our team can see gaps where an app or service would improve an experience or make something possible that was previously thought to be impossible. Our range of skills from programming, global infrastructure management, reverse engineering, and just general tinkering allows us to do more than most and thanks to all of you EXTREMELY generous backers we've been thinking outside of our streaming box and were able to create things like the VRChat instance manager bot (which will hopefully be available to the public for free by late September! this includes non-VRCDN backers!), my personal project Discord music bot thingy (the videos were shown it being used in VRChat, but it is platform agnostic) and something I know may seem odd at first but I'm sure will become more useful as we get it into the hands of developers.... Let me introduce for the first time!

Logo reveal

The VR Overlay Framework! This has been the passion project of our @Klukule after he realised making SteamVR overlays is rather challenging and wanted to create a method that doesn't require delving into C++. VROF is Chromium based framework that allows you to write overlays which can be positioned anywhere in VR space or attached as part of SteamVR dashboard interface using standard webtech (HTML, CSS, JS) and combine them to addons. VROF will be releasing for free on Steam as :soon1::soon2: as it's ready and will allow users to share their addons across Steam workshop! I just want to add that we are not trying to compete with OVR Toolkit. OVR Toolkit is an incredible piece of software and we 110% recommend it for putting desktop apps into VR, Klu's overlay framework is more for tinkerers who want to create VR overlays without having to write a full desktop app or their own custom overlay addon.

So what's next for VRCDN? Well as we shift to including new apps and services to go along with the core streaming network we will also be fully re-designing our website since....we got half way through it and got side tracked....my bad! As far as other future projects go we are thinking about potentially hosting a creator-jam to help support game changing projects as much as we can! Again, I cannot stress enough how much you make possible from backing our Patreon!

That's it from us for now! As usual we will be keeping an eye on the Discord and social media for any questions, discussions, or just if you want to rant about how Unity has crashed for the 40th time!