Firelis

Any time they say "The vast majority won't be impacted", that's a lie. Always. Keep pushing back.

Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults. Hey folks – I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news. I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.

And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.) Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence. Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details. And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!

Discord is already starting to walk things back a little, so people should keep doing what they're doing (cancel Nitro, leave feedback/criticism, direct contact through support tickets/phone/email/etc)

YouTube video by CallMehPun Hey, no, stop just calm down, don’t do it!

Me trying my hardest not to spoil what the next update to the Sonic avatars is going to have before all the characters are done : www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkNs...

Sonic Level Objects Test by Firelis Object Test

vrchat.com/home/world/w...

This object test world is now in Community Labs! (PC only for now)

You can test out the 2 main object templates I've been working on since late December in there, they're still in progress and I've yet to fix certain issues, but still!

WIth this update being out, progress on the avatars will stop as the next one will be a much bigger update that should've happened before most of the cast even got the air dash.

I apologize for the lack of bug fixes and tweaks during this time

The map objects may still receive progress, though.

Slight technical note : You might be able to desync the team up on purpose by teaming up with somebody and then only one player switching avatars, this is because the system is technically not applied to the local player, but to the remote player. This will be addressed in a future update

This team up system will also matter more when future interactions and abilities are added, I will talk about it when the time comes

Since this is the first version of the team up system for these avatars, some features will be added in the future (such as teaming up from a distance), and I'll try to stabilize it whenever I update these avatars if something wrong shows up. Expect it to be a liiittle janky or buggy

You can leave the team from technically anywhere (at least in theory, but VRC might make it not work sometimes), and a jingle should play telling you that somebody who was teamed up with you has left the team and PvP behavior will return to normal between both players

To team up, 2 players need to stand near each other and press the team up button at the same time. A jingle will play if it works!

Once you're teamed up with someone, you cannot hurt each other even if PvP is enabled. From each other's point of view, it might as well be turned off.

I can't really demonstrate this visually currently but the PvP, which had been disabled for a little bit, is back! Now with a proper toggle and a team up system!

More info in replies :

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, Shadow has his eye animations *and* I figured out why one of his idles never showed up

Movie Shadow also got his eyes animated

I'm currently in the process of adding eye animations to everyone's idles. For now I did the Frontiers cast, I'm about to move on to Shadow & Movie Shadow

I'll get to it in time, I'd just like to make progress on other aspects of these avatars and the map objects as well (especially since very update requires uploading every avatar all over again, which takes a very long time, adding more avatars would extend that time)

As for Shadow, the only real issue (beyond the usual quality reduction) is that the idle that was ported over from Frontiers still uses the same framerate as Frontiers, so I had to do some internal trickery

To be clear, it happens when I export the FBX, the animation looks just fine in Blender itself, and I know the issue happens in Blender because I reimported the FBX in a new scene

If anybody knows what could cause it, please lmk

For some reason, Sonic's arm cross idle keeps having this issue, I've tried all afternoon to fix it and it seems to happen directly on Blender's end, but I'm not sure what causes it

Added another pathing system to automation objects, very much meant for the rail.

Until now it has been using more or less the same waypoints system as everything else, but now you can also use + shaped collision meshes to orient the station, so you don't have to place 10 million way points!

Little break between all the scripting

SONIC 2 ILLUSTRATION

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 (1992) #Sonicthehedgehog #Sonic

I am aware of all of this, the avatar is still pretty early. Mainly because I had a more stable base but it wasn't a public one and I was trying to change a bunch of systems all at once and it didn't always work out, and I haven't worked on it in a while

Things are still a little jank on the animation update side of things, but with all the little scripts I added and changed, I feel like it's finally starting to feel like someone could make levels out of these

Backgroundese Fonts for Nonsense Text in Games We've made a family of fonts we call Backgroundese for creating nonsense text in your games and other projects.

We've made a family of fonts we call Backgroundese for creating nonsense text in your games and other projects! 100% Free for commercial use. #GameDev

Finally added braking to this (no anims yet, it just slows down faster when holding back)

Here :

XTreme Sonic （SRB2 Mod） by Firelis This is a PC only port of an SRB2 character mod Mod ˸https˸⁄⁄mb․srb2․org⁄addons⁄xtreme-sonic․511⁄

I made an avatar out of the XTreme Sonic mod for SRB2 by MotdSpork with a similar air ability : vrchat.com/home/avatar/...

It is PC only as I can't do sprite avatars on Quest

If I do anything else SRB2 related, it'll be as a reply to this

I made a BUNCH of scripts to activate objects, play sounds and fire a animator trigger parameters when different things happen with these objects (to reduce the amount of needed scripting one would need to get things working)

And that also means I added a force jump contact on the lane switchers

It's literally in the avatar's description, so yes

Lane switching + Update on deceleration