We've been hard at work on Anti-Extinction, and we've also been building something new alongside it: ShaderUI, our own universal UI library.

ShaderUI grew out of our experience with Unity shaders and UI Toolkit. We've also drawn on what we've learned from Avalonia for .NET 8+, Qt for C/C++, and the wider web and desktop ecosystem, including Tauri, Deno, and Wails for Go.

FilePilot and Taskslinger are our performance reference points. Their compact size and responsive custom UI frameworks are the kind of experience we want our applications to deliver. Software should feel quick when you use it, without needing a heavy resource footprint.

ShaderUI brings that goal to Rust, C/C++, Go, and other languages. Its vector-based rendering keeps interfaces sharp as they scale across displays. We plan to test Linux and macOS further down the line, but funding constraints mean neither is on the current roadmap.

We're bringing game rendering techniques into UI development, including anti-aliasing, UDIMs, compute shaders, and mesh shaders. Each feature has to prove useful for UI work. Our aim is to outperform web-based UI frameworks while keeping the library approachable for developers.

There are other features we're exploring too, particularly where we feel existing libraries fall short. We'll share those as the work develops.

We've already started moving our internal tools to ShaderUI, and we plan to release several products built with it, including the Alphazear Texture Tool Exporter (ATTE). The goal is native UI performance without bloat, with optional CUDA or ROCm acceleration for workloads that benefit from it.

For those following the technical side, ShaderUI's current platform includes:

Over in Anti-Extinction, player import has arrived. You can now play as your own character.

The core update also includes:

• PlayStation controller support and general controller support, including Xbox.

• A controller debug menu toggle.

• An upgrade to Unity 6.7 Beta 1.

• AgX tonemapping.

Patreon supporters will be able to upload 10 avatars, while regular users will be able to upload 1 avatar. These limits help us keep avatar traffic manageable while we finish building out our global CDN.

We're looking at Cloudflare for the initial avatar upload and download service. The transfer figures we're working with are roughly 5 to 38 MB/s, depending on the workload. Azure Data Lake Storage is another option we're considering for a future custom distribution network, with a 7 Gbps+ internet connection available on our side.

Those numbers need some context. Microsoft's published default limits for standard storage accounts are 60 Gbps ingress and 200 Gbps egress in specified regions, or 25 Gbps ingress and 50 Gbps egress elsewhere. These describe capacity across an account. Player transfer speeds will depend on the connection and delivery setup.

For the initial rollout, Cloudflare R2's free egress is a big draw. We still need to account for storage and operations, but avoiding bandwidth charges from R2 helps us manage the cost of delivering avatars. Its Standard storage operation pricing is:

Azure's bandwidth costs would also factor into any future move. As we grow toward thousands of players, we'll review the throughput and global coverage we need, alongside what we can sustainably afford.

For creators, the Avatar Exchange Format SDK will be distributed through:

• Unity Package Manager for Unity 6.7+. https://unity.com/releases/editor/beta

• VCC or ALCOM for Unity 2022.3.

The full roadmap is still TBA. One priority is building a dedicated avatar creation SDK that works without relying on VRCSDK. If you know your way around Unity, we want creating and uploading an avatar to feel straightforward, with as little extra setup as possible.

VCC and ALCOM users can add our Avatar SDK repository. The repository also includes our KTX 5 RC2 package, which we use internally.

For Unity Package Manager, open Edit > Project Settings > Package Manager and add a scoped registry with these values:

We also plan to release more quality-of-life tools and Unity features from our day-to-day work on Anti-Extinction and VRChat worlds. These are tools we use ourselves, and we're looking forward to putting more of them in your hands.

For instructions on porting your avatar to Anti-Extinction, see our discord server for help (docs are not published yet) discord.gg/NuvcEPQtFF