VR Realms now reads HTC's face tracker, which the studio says it has not tested itself
Sketchy Realms has shipped the face tracking it promised for VR Realms, and widened it to HTC's face tracker and to a Quest Pro over more PC links. It also wrote down what it does not know about that: "This is new and we have not been able to test it on those headsets ourselves, so tell us in Discord how it goes."
A scene from VR Realms, which has been free on Steam since September 25. Image: Sketchy Realms
Two builds landed in 41 hours. Version 0.3.1 went up at 00:12 UTC on October 11, five lines long and billed by the studio as "A small update", and 0.3.2 followed at 17:29 UTC on October 12. Between them they turn the 0.3.0 feature list the studio published on October 10 into something installed.
Typing /face link in the game lists what a given headset offers.
The webcam starts off every time
"The webcam is off every time the game starts," the 0.3.2 notes say. "One click in Settings, Comfort turns it on again, as you had it." That is a stricter default than the one the studio shipped for eye tracking, where avatar eye movement went out to everyone in the room unless a player opted out.
A second change settles which camera wins. With a headset plugged in, the game now picks the webcam rather than the headset's own sensor, and /face cam list followed by /face cam and a number overrides it. Everything the software claims to do with the picture is the developer's account of its own code, and cannot be checked from outside the app.
MetaHuman avatars come apart into pieces
The larger piece of 0.3.2 is avatar plumbing. An avatar built from a MetaHuman "now has a face that talks, blinks, looks around and follows face tracking", and pressing Make modular avatar splits it up: the face becomes a piece carrying 51 shapes, while outfit, hair and cape become swappable pieces of their own, with a cloth cape that swings in the game. The Creator Kit that goes with it is at version 0.4.30.
One fix reaches work that is on the Workshop. On humanoid and VRM avatars, the studio writes, "a turned wrist used to wring the arm like a towel", and the forearm now takes half of the turn: "It works on every avatar already on the Workshop; nobody has to upload again." Brows, beards and anything else with face shapes follow the face on modular avatars, and sleeves stop spiking at the wrist.
Small repairs, and two polls
The 0.3.1 build was the housekeeping one: Drop Portal works again and keeps the laser on the hand that pressed it, and mirrors keep players in view when Range is set short, since range now counts from the mirror rather than from the player. In 0.3.2, a Workshop upload shows up in the creator's own menus straight away instead of waiting for Steam to list it, the Halloween hub gained three more arrival points, and the robot host's pop-up is private to whoever asked.
VR Realms is free and listed as VR Supported rather than VR only, so the webcam tracking is aimed at the players who have no headset to read their face in the first place. Two polls run at the studio's own site until October 25, asking what would keep players in the hub when nobody else is online, and which game Sketchy Realms should build next.
