VRSL Documentation

– README.md

"VRSL is a collection of shaders, scripts, and models designed to emulate professional stage lighting into VRChat in as many ways as possible."

While on vacation during summer, I encountered a livestream on Twitch. I unfortunately don't remember who it was, but I do remember where it was:

Club Orion.

Club Orion isn't on earth. Its a virtual club in the metaverse, specifically on VRChat. Its community? Some of the most scrappy and technical AV talents I've ever known.

I wanted in.

Their weapon of choice?

VRSL.

VRSL (VR Stage Lighting) is their custom-built framework for adapting tradition lighting data into something that can work under the technical constraints of VRChat.

For (obvious) safety reasons, data can't be transmitted directly from one client to another.

Something needs to carry the data. So, they settled on the last thing I would have thought of on my own.

A video stream.

– VRSL-DMX:-Start-Here.md, VRSL Wiki

"What powers VRSL is the ability to transmit DMX data contained within a video stream. It is done this way as it is the best way to achieve the following goals:

• Having all players within their own instances of a world be synced.

• Allowing a given world to display data that any given user wishes.

• Allowing for live performances.

This method is the best because:

• Just by using a VRChat video player, all of the syncing work is handled.

• Video players of this nature can also accept streams, which allows for live performances to be possible.

• As VRSL's fixtures are GPU based, DMX data recieved like this can be instantly sampled into GPU data and thus never leave the GPU for the entirety of its processing. This results in entirely hardware-accelerated computation with nearly unrivaled performance."

I got my hands dirty with it, but began to face issues with their documentation. It was quite outdated, and questionably organized into a folder PDF documents.

I ended up reverse-engineering a fair bit of the API. Really I had to anyway, so it wasn't that big of a deal.

This is because my preferred lighting suite is... Touchdesigner.
Not exactly industry standard.

Getting familiar with the framework helped me in setting up the networks I needed to get my lighting data into something normal. Just in time too:

The framework's version 2.0 was just releasing.

– AcChosen, Creator of VRSL

"@everyone

ITS OUT! >:O"

I wanted to lead the charge on better docs.

With the help of the developers and many community members, we adapted and updated information into a detailed, navigable guide series on the Github's Wiki.

I asked. They accepted.

VRSL DMX: Your First Stream

Appendix: DMX

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