We added some fun new features to the Studio Broadcast avatars - props!

So far you can add up to five props to your avatar at one time. The arrangement of the props you wear will be saved so they're all still in place the next time you come through.

Currently, you can choose from a bow tie, a mustache, cat ears, sunglasses, and a rainbow hair poof, with new props coming soon (keep an eye out for a monocle, tophat, and microphone).

Prop requests are welcome! And if you're Blender savvy, you can submit your own, also - they just need to be <400 vertices and created using vertex painting.

It's been a while since we've posted any updates so here are some recent developments in GonzoVR:

• There are avatars in the studio broadcasts now! There are two speaker slots where you can step up and engage in discussion as a cute little avatar. There's also a spot where only you can see your avatar so you can have fun and play around with it if you're not ready to join the conversation.
  
• We've improved the quality of the stream significantly with some excellent denoising solutions.
  
• We've made discussions easier to follow by decreasing the volume of viewer's voices unless they're in a speaker slot where they can be heard at a normal volume. This helps prevent people from speaking over each other and also gives some visual representation of the people talking.

Don't forget to join our discord[discord.gg] to stay updated and catch the studio broadcast every night at 6 pm PST!

This is just a heads up, there will be no studio broadcast tonight at 6 pm as there is every other night. Ela and Brendan will be unavailable tonight, but broadcasts will continue as usual starting tomorrow.

You can also still hang out and drive around the VRRoommate car broadcast and keep Gonzo company, he would probably be chill as hell with that.

Latest patch going up now:
1) You can now watch past broadcasts. Currently we have the Rob from Cyanide and Happiness, Abe Groening, and the cooking broadcast we did
2) Minor optimizations to the audio decoder
3) Better handling of the microphone, so hopefully the rare issue where your mic remains unconnected will be fixed
4) People with lower end GPUs and people on high pings get a smaller resolution pano which means higher frame rate and faster room joins

Also, the past broadcasts had some issues with the compression, so they don't look as crisp or as bright as they ought to. Not certain if we'll fix this right now

Here is a rundown of some recent patches:

-Minor optimizations to the audio encoder
-- Receives messages from the broadcaster app
-- Fixes with typing long messages and their display
-- Fixed rare null reference
-Fixed the rare issue where sometimes one eye would be black and rotated
-Lobby images and some marker images are now cached to your local hard drive, so they will load much faster.
-The desktop streaming marker will show the GVR logo if no one is currently streaming, and I put in a fairly sizeable performance improvement regarding CPU usage

Ela will be speaking at a VR event tonight so the evening studio broadcast will start an hour and a half later than usual.

We will be back to our normal broadcast schedule tomorrow, 12/2/18!

Join us tomorrow for a fun game called Billionaire Banshee! We will start at 6 pm. This is a fun card game where we will all discuss the pros and cons of going on a date with quirky people based on cards drawn in the game. Everyone on the broadcast is welcome to join in!

We have a special guest coming to tomorrow's evening studio broadcast! Meet Mike Falzone: comedian, YouTuber, podcaster, and musician. He's funny, insightful, and generally awesome.

Come ask for insightful, hilarious advice from one of my favorite funny people

Learn more about mike here: http://mikefalzone.com/

This Sunday (November 18) instead of the regular guest broadcast, we'll start a broadcast a little earlier in the day (probably 4 pm PST or so) where you can come and hang out with Ela and her friends while we play d&d! The group is known asI Hit it with My Axe.

You can look forward to meeting: Zak Smith (creator of Demon City, illustrator of the Gravity's Rainbow graphic novel), Sara Pocock (an animator who has worked on Community, and Cosmos), Morgana Altre (a character actor who has been in Stan Against Evil and played Edgar in The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell), and Adam Moore, an actor, writer, and gamer in LA. Chat with us while we play! The campaign is based on Zak's award winning campaign book called The Maze of the Blue Medusa.

Studio broadcasts will continue to take place at 6 pm PST for the forseeable future! So if you don't see a broadcast schedule, that's why.

-Nov 8, 2018: Friday night broadcast: it's our first cooking show! We'll drag the studio camera into the kitchen and you can help guide us as we figure out how to cook some damn thing. Will it be weird Brendan friendly pizza? Will it be some bomb ass cookies? You have until Friday to help us decide!

-And MOST IMPORTANTLY: Join us Nov 12 (NOT the 13th as originally planned!) for our next guest! Rob Denbleyker, one of the creators and writers of the webcomic and cartoon Cyanide and Happiness[www.explosm.net] will be joining Ela for the Monday night Studio Broadcast!