Welcome fellow Avigens!

Tonight, I have an absolutely massive hardware and firmware update. We, at Avigen Co., strive to deliver products that stand the test of time and that are as inclusive as they possibly can. Knowing this, and with a metric ton of effort and overtime, I have finally achieved a state that we can all proudly call "Feature Complete"!! So strap on and get ready for these absolutely insane patch notes!

Now, first and foremost, an update that has been looooong awaited.........

Yes! I have finally managed to rip the guts out of the Avigen hardware enough that it can fit into a slim mobile device without problems! All of this without compromising on (almost) any features! You can still fold your wings, express yourself, destroy your friends by punching them in the face and more! This uses a new trick that is included in this update. Though, three compromises had to be made. One was obviously how much hardware I could put (also called "poly count"), which reduces significantly the quality of visuals. The second slight compromise I had to make was to cut out the head back banner scrolling effect. This took too much on texture memory and it would not allow to scroll it. The last one was to reduce the available screen area for the eyes and the beak, else a weird light leak would occur at the edges of those screens. This is something I tried to solve without compromising, but I had no choice. The team and I are sorry for these slight inconveniences, but first understand the little mobile headset trying to render at a decent quality our masterpiece. However, if you wish to use the full poly count version with Quest, you also have this option available if you don't mind a Very Poor rating and having most users require to manually show your avatar.

Using the same trick I used for Quest (without the "smack the hardware poly count down into broken PCBs" step), VRM was also now a possibility! But, the inconvenience is the extremely limited feature set of this coding language. This means that I had to cut off a bunch of features, such as the scrolling banner, screen pixel effects and most of the expression animations. The language only allowed to add one frame of animation per animation, which is very inconvenient, so almost every expression has been set as a Blend Shape Clip using the first frame of their animation. At least, it does display expressions! Just not as interactive.

Because of this exact same trick again, Beat Saber was also able to be revamped to work better! Expressions now work as expected and the Avigen reacts to different in-game events! Such as specific combo reached amounts, combo lost, level win and level fail (which the latter one is, yes, a BSOD.) Have fun slicing those cubes!

Now, you must be wondering... what is that sacred secret trick I'm talking about? It is what I call...

Another hardware and firmware change that has been added is a new Compatibility Mode. These versions have been re-thought to look almost exactly the same, but be more optimized for platforms that cannot support custom shaders and/or cannot handle the amount of materials and polygons the main base uses. There is obviously a difference in the looks, such as no reflections in the visor, the missing screen pixels effect and the inability to scroll the head back banner. It also does work slightly differently in the background, such as how the lights display, but everything should be looking almost exactly the same. This is how the Quest version, VRM and Beat Saber have been able to be achieved! The only potentially noticeable drawback is that due to having had to reduce the UV size on the eyes and beak (else the eye leak can appear like mentioned on the Quest announcement), these two screens might look slightly larger than they should (more noticeable in direct A-B comparison) and each animation frame will be slightly cropped out. Remember that these are meant for platforms that cannot work with the Base Avigen. So anything that can work without the use of Compatibility Mode should not use it. New source files have been created for Compatibility Mode textures and 3D source files have been updated to include Compatibility Mode models. The Compatibility Mode assets for Unity are included in the Base Unity Package.

A big thing missing on the Avigen was its lack of... booba. In all seriousness, it was missing a female version. So I've put the team hard at work trying to figure out the best design for a female chest piece. I've given my own designs, shares and thought on this and the final hardware landed into something we all like! When ordering an Avigen conversion from us, you can now provide your preferred gender and we will use the hardware, software and firmware to fit your choice! Wait... software? That's because not only the chest piece now has a female option, but you can also set the eyes to look more female like! The female eyes provided by default are rounder and have small eyelashes. All source files have been updated accordingly to provide the female variant and all Unity packages offer female prefab variants in the Project folders and the same scenes!

One last thing that has been done with this update is to provide an alternate version of the high quality textures. Want to go above 4K textures for your cinematic content but do not have the computer to process the gigantic 16K source files? Try the in-between 8K texture pack! This should spare yourself some precious RAM and VRAM resources while still offering a higher quality cinematic experience!

Whew! What a massive upgrade this was! With this much in a single update, there might definitely be some quirks inside it somewhere. So remember, if you find any bugs, please report them in the Discord!

Before heading to the full Patch Notes...

I wanted to personally say thank you for following me through this project. This was not an easy feat, knowing how many projects I have in my head and the full time job taking most of my time out of this. But I am really proud of what I was able to achieve here. I have seen many people use the base, have fun with it, make beautiful memes out of it... I didn't expect much from the first avatar I would release, but that just blew my mind. Thank you, all of you, for supporting my work!

But everything has to come to a close. I have several avatar ideas in my head, but I couldn't make anything else due to this Avigen update. I know myself enough to know that I would just leave this avatar in the dust if I started another one. But I want to get more avatars out, not be stuck on the same one forever. Thus why this will be the last official update that the Avigen will receive. If any critical enough bug occurs (thus why I said to report anything you find on the Discord), I will push a patch out, but probably not write a devlog for it. I am moving on to other avatars, and another season of Avatar Mondays soon!

Alright, it's time for some fully detailed patch notes!

• (General) FEMALE VERSION! Added a completed female chest piece to the FBX (as a separate mesh), added a female variant to the eyes (as a separate texture, but same source file) and chest screens (as a separate texture, but same source file).

• (General) COMPATIBILITY MODE! This is a version of the Avigen meant to work in situations where resources and functionalities are limited (such as no custom shader support). Two new sample scenes (High and Low quality) and new prefabs with the suffix "CompatibilityMode" have been added to the Unity Packages. Models and textures have also been included in the source files. Remember that these are meant for platforms that cannot support the fully packed Avigen.

• (VRC) QUEST SUPPORT! The Avigen is now fully supported on Quest with all the bells and whistles! Using the new Compatibility Mode files, almost every feature have been ported to Quest (the ones that were possible under the limitations.) The avatar has been managed to fit under Poor! If you want to upload the high poly model and don't mind being rated Very Poor, you also can! (both Poor and Very Poor prefabs exist, one with the reduced poly count, the other with the high quality model).

• (VRM) VRM 0.X SUPPORT! Using Compatibility Mode, VRM was achievable! Expressions and animations are very limited compared to other packages (due to how VRM works) but overall it is working quite well!

• (Beat Saber) BEAT SABER REVAMP! Using Compatibility Mode, Beat Saber was able to be revamped with more optimized assets and better expressions!

• (General) 8K SOURCE FILES! If you want to use higher than 4K textures for cinematic content but don't have the machine to open up the gigantic 16K textures, then you can use this new 8K middle ground to get higher grade visuals without compromising too much on storage! They are available as a separate download as AFPhoto and PSD files (They're still pretty big, but less intense to run than 16K)

• Moved the TOS to it's own file, which will be universal across any avatar I make (the "Mike Da Bird Universal Avatar License", which can be found here!)

• (Unity) Fixed the Rainbows and Cyber Split transparent material not having their Metallic Smoothness assigned, which resulted in the visor having little to no reflections in some situations.

• (Blender) Fixed some blend shapes that were on by default, but that should have been off ("Show transparent camera fix" which if on breaks visor screen rendering using Cycles, and "Arms - Shrink" which should be tweaked by the user and not be on by default).

• (General) Fixed a second sus blue pixel on the logo of the boot screen (applicable on every default retexture and the source file). There should not be anymore of those on there anymore after triple checking.

• (General) Fixed the visemes on the Rainbows beak texture where the gradients were not consistent.

• (General) Fixed the UV map of the lights on the pivot joints of the ears (looks like they weren't actually mapped, so they've now been each mapped to a column of the Light Gradients texture).

• (General) Added a missing polygon on the male chest piece (somehow this managed to be missing since the very beginning, no clue how this passed QA 6 times in a row. 7th time's the charm... and somebody's getting fired for this).

This update applies to every single package. To install this update in your project, import the Base package first (to install material fixes and the new Compatibility Mode), then import the new package for your selected platform. Note that some minor reorganisation and renaming has occurred between the previous update and this one, so some assets (like the BSOD sparks material) might become duplicates in your project. This will not happen if you are importing the Avigen for the first time.

And as said previously, because of the size of this update, please report any bug you find in the #Mike-Avatar-Troubleshooting channel on my Discord server!