Quest Compatibility and Uploading to VRChat
As Quest becomes more and more prominent on VRChat, compatibility for the Oculus Quest is more and more sought after. Thankfully, making a world Quest compatible is not very difficult, though it can be a bit tedious.
Since switching to the Quest build is slow the first time, it’s best to make edits and corrections to the PC version first. That and having a different hierarchy order between PC and Quest can mess up synced objects! So make sure that both worlds have synced objects in the same place in the hierarchy, and with the same names!
There are a few final optimizations that you should ensure you have before uploading:
- Ensure that your lighting bake is accurate (you didn’t edit any static objects since the last lighting bake and your light probes don’t have errors)
- Check VRWorld Toolkit’s world debugger for errors
- Bake occlusion culling
- Use the mass texture importer feature of VRWorld Toolkit to compress any textures that you haven’t already (click get textures from scene and then apply)
- Ensure all of your pickupables are the child of one gameobject in the root of the hierarchy (a rigidbody component updates every frame, and any parent gameobjects also must update, so having only one parent gameobject makes our physics more optimized)
Once you’re done, check VRWorldToolkit>World Debugger to see if there’s anything you need to fix, open VRChat SDK>Control Panel and switch to the build tab, and upload your world to PC! Now we can focus on the Quest version.
To make switching between Windows and Quest builds faster, we need to set up a local cache server. Go to Edit>Preferences>Cache Server and set the Cache Server Mode to Local. If the space on your main drive is limited then you can use a custom cache location on a larger drive. Now, the first time we switch from PC to Android and vice versa will be slow, but subsequent switches will be much faster.
There is also a tool called EasyQuestSwitch which we should import. Once opened and set up, you can add gameobjects and assets to automate changes between the two platforms. Since Quest does not support post processing, you can add a new slot and drag your post processing volume into it, then uncheck Active on Quest. In addition, make slots for all your materials using the Standard shader. Then in the project tab search bar, type standard lite, and drag the shader file into the Quest shader slot.
In the VRChat SDK window, there is a button to switch to Android (for Quest), but this has been reported to have bugs so we will switch by going to File>Build Settings (Ctrl+Shift+B), selecting Android and then clicking Switch Platform. This will take a while on the first switch, but subsequent switches will be faster.
Ensure that you aren’t using shaders that are completely incompatible with Quest (like the aforementioned water shaders with a grabpass).
Quest worlds have a size limit of 50MB. If it goes over the world will not upload. The quickest ways to fix this are to compress/lower the resolution of textures/lightmaps/meshes/audio files or to use larger ATSC block size for textures. All of that can be done with just a few clicks inside of Unity.
Open VRWorldToolkit and check to ensure there aren’t any problems.
Finally test the world using CyanEmu to ensure that everything works. If it’s all good, you can now upload the world to Quest!
If you have a Quest, test out the world yourself, if not, get a Quest tester to look for any issues. If everything works then congratulations! You did it! You now have the knowledge you need to make your own optimized, Quest compatible VRChat worlds!
So you’ve finished, now what?
The first thing I would recommend is to start using version control on your important projects, which is like keeping backups that you can revert to in case something breaks. There is a tutorial here about how to setup a local repository in Unity using SourceTree. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-05SQhI5rIZ0no3SfhqzAl7cxM0MBJCX
If you want additional information, on making VRChat content, I made a compendium for it on VRCLibrary.
If you want to learn how to make your own 3D models, you’ve probably heard of the software Blender. It is a 3D suite where you can make pretty much any game asset you want. I would first recommend following CGMatter’s 2 Blender for Beginners videos
and then looking up tutorials or in the documentation for whatever skills you need to learn. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a perfect course for creating game assets; Blender Guru’s donut tutorial is the most popular Blender tutorial series but it is not intended for making game assets, and I personally don’t like his unscripted tutorials.
However some of his scripted tutorials are quite good, like his one on how to create archviz. It covers not just the technical skills but also the artistic skills when making 3D architecture, like where to get references and how to use them. Keep in mind that it is designed around Blender and doesn't take into account the technical limitations of real time interactive software like Unity or VRChat. TL;DR don't use absurdly high quality assets for VRChat worlds.
If you want to learn more about coding, I’d recommend this free beginner video course by Brackeys https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPV2KyIb3jR4CtEelGPsmPzlvP7ISPYzR. It covers C# (which Unity uses) and you can make Udon scripts with it by using UdonSharp https://github.com/MerlinVR/UdonSharp. I didn’t cover UdonSharp here because this is meant to be beginner friendly and I only wanted to use Unity to keep the tutorial simple.
Never stop learning and adding to your toolset!