This website was created with WordPress out of a necessity. My previous site was built with simplestyle_purple, and every page required manual generation. The content all had to be hand created with a template I knew very little about, and as such, managing formatting was a horrendous nightmare. I had a retro site around that time as well that was just about as equally bad, maintenance wise, and WordPress had a lot of options that I liked.

This site and software lasted me through the entire emmVRC craze, holding two of the most lengthy postmortems I’ve ever written. My goal with this site was to document my adventures with tech, both with my organization as well as standalone projects like my arcade ideas. All of these ambitious goals, considering how bad I am at updating things all over the place, so the fact that it fell through is not surprising in the slightest.

WordPress is an absolute nightmare to manage. I didn’t realize how much maintenance would be required at the time, or how costly on system resources it would be to host. On my old DigitalOcean setup, the resources for the site would constantly max out my system resources under load, and it led to a lot of issues with the other services running on that host. It was later moved to self-hosting, and the load problem *somewhat* went away, but we’re now dealing with new issues, like how occasionally, the database connection will give out and WordPress will just serve an ugly error. Pair this with how much of a nightmare modifying someone else’s theme was to get the look of the site I didn’t even use and… yeah, you can kinda see why I want to move on.

Enter, Heartstone.me

This site is based on my own code, meaning I know the intricacies of all the HTML and CSS going into it. It’s designed with older web browsers in mind, meaning you can use this on computers all the way back to the 90s! It’s sleak in design, but still accomplishes everything I want from a website. The gallery is still not ready just yet, but with my new knowledge of backend code, I can put something together that should be just as functional as this site was, while being a lot less stressful, both for computers and humans.

As far as blog stuff goes, while I can do this with this website, I kinda want to give some other platforms the love.

You can access my modern blog content on my BlueSky page. This is where 90% of my blogging will go, if anywhere, so be sure to check it out! And of course, you can access the website I created, Heartstone.me.

As for this site, I will be giving plugins one final chance by using one to convert the entirety of this WordPress disaster into static HTML, so I can ditch all the backend requirements and just let this site serve as an archive of all this old content.

Thank you for supporting me through all these years! Hope you have an amazing day, and I’ll see you around!

First of all, if you haven’t read my previous blog post, you should read through that first. It gives a lot of context for the project, and the recent events leading up to this post. Check it out:

emmVRC and VRChat: A post-mortem

When I made that post, I was toying with the idea of continuing my development on ChilloutVR. After all, it would be the next logical step after VRChat modding. But the more I looked at emmVRC, and then at ChilloutVR, I realized that a good majority of what emmVRC used to provide is included by default in ChilloutVR. Avatar searching, flight/noclip, and a ton more player interactivity than we ever had planned. At the time, I stepped away from development to take a look at what exists, and to figure out what I wanted to do next.

I took multiple jabs at picking back up the project. I ported the old loader to ChilloutVR, requiring little modifications to do so. I even had third person available, and was planning out other integrations. But even through all this, and finding cool new things with UnityExplorer and, for once, dnSpy (couldn’t run this on VRChat because of IL2CPP), I was hitting a wall. I was having trouble finding what new features I could bring to the table, how to go about development (closed source vs. open source), or even how to work with the UI in the first place (CVR’s UI is based on HTML, which makes it a lot more challenging to programmatically modify). I ended up taking a couple months to myself to figure out where I wanted to take the project, and in those months, other modders have stepped up. There were so many mods that came to the scene in a very short time; mods that add new avatar features, mods that bring familiar elements to CVR, and a lot of the features that I could think of for emmVRC were all there in individual components.

Remember, emmVRC came from a time when mods were only just starting to come to the foreground. A fair deal more malicious mods existed than not, and they were mostly crude and janky (this is not to cast shade, but mostly commenting on what was available at the time). When I came to the scene, VRCModLoader was very new still, and there were only a handful of mods for it, let alone mods that weren’t broken by updates (VRChat had been obfuscating the game for a long time by now). When I saw the state of affairs of modding, I wanted to change things for the better. Dubya’s Ruby Button API gave me the chance to bring a new mod to the table that brought forward a lot of features I thought VRChat should’ve already had. Global Dynamic Bones, Flight… Avatar Searching (and this was when our search was just lists of avatars with user IDs attached. Fun times!)

This might be very conceited of me, but I really feel that emmVRC was one of the first, and probably most influential mods for VRChat. There weren’t really any other mods out there that provided as much in one package, nor were they as simple to use. My goal for emmVRC was to make the barrier of entry for modding as minimal as possible, and that even extended to emmVRC being its’ own loader (in place of VRCModLoader). And when IL2CPP was added to the game, and MelonLoader was finally released to the public, emmVRC was one of the first mods to work again, and come back even better than it was. I think that, without the presence of emmVRC, social VR game modding wouldn’t have taken off as fast as it did (actually, THAT might be the most conceited thing I’ve said).

Fast forward to now, and there are so many modders out there that have either moved to CVR as a modder, or directly work for Alpha Blend Interactive now. The niche that emmVRC was there to fill for VRChat doesn’t really exist in ChilloutVR. The game already has so much, and individual mods cover an even larger margin of it. I feel that, if I were to build out emmCVR the way I was imagining, it would just be competing against independent mods that do the same tasks, and that was never something I liked doing. I even made plans later in emmVRC’s life to split some of the features off into individual mods, but those never came to fruition before EAC was added.

Another factor in the decision I’ve made, is that… this entire experience has been exhausting. The back-and-forth games we had to play with VRChat in the entire existence of emmVRC, not to mention malicious third parties and drama in the communities, probably took a year or two off my life. There were so many points throughout the project that I said “I’m actually done.” And clearly, that was never the case, but the project had a lot of low points. A lot of what kept me pushing through was the massive support and kindness from the community, and for that… thank you all. Genuinely, I wouldn’t have kept it going if it wasn’t for all of you.

That being said, I can’t keep leading you on. My repo has sat dormant since July, and it’s become increasingly obvious that things aren’t working out.

The project has reached its’ conclusion.

I’m sorry to everyone who was waiting for a release, or any updates about progress. I genuinely tried to pursue the project, but I can’t do it anymore. There would be no point, and it would only serve to once again conflict with other mod developers who are already on the spot and doing an amazing job. It has been an amazing 3 years, but I think it’s finally time we put emmVRC, and by extension emmCVR, to rest.

So what’s going to happen now? Well, there are no plans to delete the server for now. There is too much history in the posts and discussions to just obliterate. What will likely happen, is that we will put the server into a read-only state. You will be able to join and look around, but no new posts will be allowed, nor will any occur on our part. For further mod development for ChilloutVR, I highly suggest you check out the ChilloutVR Modding Group. All of the mods I mentioned previously are available there, and it’s where I will likely be more active from now on.

For members of the Patreon, I would recommend that you pass your support on to Alpha Blend’s Patreon. That way, you can provide support to those who are working towards an even better platform. Supporting their Patreon helps to pay the developers who are constantly improving CVR and adding features, potentially including those provided by mods. If you would like to still support me in my endeavours, that’s up to you. I appreciate all of the support I have gotten thus far. I know I’ve been saying this a lot, but without all of you, we would not be where we are now.

What about the emmVRC mascot? Well, Rose never even truly signed up to be the mascot of the projects. She was my most detailed character, and I use her as a personification of myself. That being said, she’ll go back to doing her own shenanigans in her own world. I hope to, at some point in the future, document her origins, how she came to be, and her in-universe lore. If you’d like to keep up with that, check back to this website to see new posts and art.

If you are interested in something to remember us by, we have merch on our RedBubble store of the emmVRC logo, and I hope to be bringing some more out in the coming weeks. This will be available for as long as there is interest, so if you would like to grab some neat things to remember us by, check it out here! All funds raised will be used for paying my bills, and working towards my next projects.

Where am I going from here? Well, this entire project has taught me more about software development than I ever expected. My goal is to pursue a career in software engineering, but I’ll probably start with little hobby projects. If you want to see some of what I’m working on, you can check out my GitHub. I also do a lot of hardware projects, tinkering with both vintage and modern hardware. If you’d like to see my little posts and rambles, you can find them on my Twitter. You can also find cool and awesome art I’ve retweeted there, too!

But enough about me. I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the help and support of so many people.

	Hordini Got me into modding in the first place, as well as moderates many of the modding communities, and keeps me from going insane Twitter
Slaynash Originally developed VRCModLoader, as well as AvatarFav and VRCTools. Inspired me a lot, and helped a ton during development! GitHub – Twitter	DubyaDude Open sourced Ruby’s Button API, allowing emmVRC to integrate with the VRChat UI natively, and also helped out a ton during development! GitHub – Socials	Herp Derpinstine Local determined crazy person who built MelonLoader to make modding IL2CPP possible, in the face of the impossible. Also wrote the emmVRCLoader! GitHub – Twitter
Knah Wrote the IL2CPP Assembly Unhollower, the basis for all MelonLoader modding, and also helped to optimize emmVRC GitHub	Janni9009 Melon who has helped a ton with development all across the modding community GitHub – Twitter	Loukylor Helped to rewrite emmVRC to be more optimized and flexible GitHub
Speidy674 Helped fuel some of my early cravings to mod VRChat, and helped develop the first iteration of the emmVRC Network GitHub	Xhail Developed the second iteration of the emmVRC Network (the first to have avatar searching!) GitHub	Ben Completely rewrote the emmVRC Network to be more optimized and flexible (Project Plus), and also helped a ton with server management GitHub
MintLily Helped out a ton with emmVRC’s development and moderation, and is awesome GitHub	Supah Long-time friend of mine who has helped moderate the community since the beginning!	Rakosi Helped co-develop Lum with Slaynash, and added important features to answer questions and keep the community safe GitHub
Patchuuri Massive helper in the community, and very patient	Risk One of the first helpers in emmVRC, has been a massive help over the years GitHub	Mrgw98 Massive helper in the community, and also helped development during the bans
BLANKE Massive helper in the community		iana Massive helper and supporter in the community

and so many more I can’t even list here!

I’d also like to give a huge thanks to everyone in the various modding communities. Seriously. Without the help of all my friends and helpers, this project wouldn’t have even got off the ground. I can’t thank you all enough. If your name is not on here, shoot me a DM and I’ll fix it ASAP!

To conclude, thank you all so much for being here. This project has meant a lot to me, and although I’m sad to let it go, I am happy you all were a part of it. Take care of yourselves.

It started in late-2018, when a friend of mine was showing me a modification to VRChat that they found. They screenshared to me, and showed themselves ruffling my ears and pushing my tail around (this was WAY before physbones). I asked them how they were doing it, but was put off when they mentioned that they modded the game for it. At the time, I didn’t want to touch it at all, as it seemed like a lot of modding in the past was exploits and avatar stealing.

Fast forward to 2019, and my interest in vanilla VRChat was starting to dwindle. A lot of my friends didn’t get on anymore, and drama had put me off from others. I was in a position where I wanted something more. So I started looking into mods, and I came across the VRCTools Discord (this was before we became the VRChat Modding Group). In this server, I downloaded and tried out VRCModLoader, VRCTools and AvatarFav, and it was amazing. I was impressed by how smoothly it merged with the vanilla UI, and the functionality it provided. I was then reminded of the demonstration my friend gave me of their dynamic bones mod, and I immediately got to work.

Within a day or two, I was already working on code to execute with VRCModLoader. It was a painful process full of trial and error, but I finally got to the point where my mod would print to the console, and then stop. At this point, I decided to take some of my prior Unity knowledge, and try to recreate the dynamic bone trick my friend showed me. Before long, I had an integration into the VRCTools settings, and a basic implementation of “Global Colliders”.

I was also interested in having a proper UI for my mod. During this period, mods were transitioning from VRLoader (a primarily console-based modloader that had to be run after the game started) to VRCModLoader (an IPA-based modloader that started automatically with VRChat), and a lot of mods tended to either overlay a UI over the screen, or not have a UI at all, and use keybinds or the console. I wanted my mod to feel like it could have been part of VRChat. Around the same time, Dubya released Ruby’s Button API to the public, and I immediately took advantage of it.

At this point, the mod was simply called “YoshiUtils”. I quickly began running through a ton of ideas in my head, adding features almost every day. YoshiUtils became emmVRClient, and I added features like flying and noclip into a supplement called “emmVRSusp” (or emmVR-Suspicious). I added the HUD, mirror toggling, program loading, and a ton more. emmVRSusp got merged with the main mod, and I continued on quality-of-life features. All of these builds were initially only shared between me and Hordini. About a week after I started though, I messed with some channels in my personal server, Emmy’s Corner (previously just a place for some mutuals to hang out), and released emmVRClient to the public around June.

From then on, things were moving very quickly. emmVRClient was renamed to just emmVRC (because it wasn’t a client to begin with!), and we got a lot of interest. Friends told other friends, and the server grew to the point of making a brand new server: the emmVRC Network. It was also around this time that we started considering a network for things like our own avatar favourites, and fun user-to-user interactions (some of which ended up in another mod of mine, TotallyWholesome). This was around the time that VRChat started up with the first banwave against VRCModNetwork users. This was most likely caused by the authentication endpoints that it used to determine if you were actually logged into the account your game said it was. It’s the primary reason why VRCModNetwork moved to a user/password system, and what led emmVRC to use pincodes.

Fast forward to April of 2020. emmVRC was having a lighthearted April Fools joke (every bit of text in the game was in OwO speak), when suddenly, the IL2CPP update was rolled out. IL2CPP, in essence, takes the code that is compiled from C# (what Unity games including VRChat are written in) and converts it into C++ code. This in turn completely broke how our mods and even modloader worked. For the first time, VRChat went modless, at least from the perspective of the main mod groups. I still have doubts that IL2CPP was added for performance, as performance was generally even lower after this point. We had already mostly known this was coming (IL2CPP was released in open beta first, as was EasyAntiCheat), and a bunch of really talented developers came together to write a brand new modloader.

This new modloader wasn’t just for VRChat. IL2CPP modding in general was very difficult in the past, and a lot of mods were written in C++ for specific versions and platforms of games. But this new modloader was able to significantly change the game of modding IL2CPP. Using the power of the “AssemblyUnhollower”, we were not only able to extract the method and object structures of IL2CPP games, but we were able to make them available in a format that could once again be modded using C#. Using Boneworks, development continued on this brand new modloader, which we called “MelonLoader”.

Within weeks of this breaking update, the rewrite for emmVRC (and several other mods) began. I posted a ton of teasers, and was able to stretch the game far beyond what I could do before. I eventually realized that this new modloader and system allowed for a lot more complex mods, and gave me a better understanding of the inner workings of VRChat. Just a month later, on May 6th, I released the open beta for emmVRC 1.0.0, the first release of emmVRC since the IL2CPP update.

Progress was moving faster than ever. With AvatarFav no longer being supported, I integrated avatar searching into emmVRC. Global Dynamic Bones was overhauled several times, optimizations were made everywhere possible, and new features were being added constantly. We hit a lot of milestones for the server, and emmVRC blew up quicker than I ever could’ve imagined. My passion for the project was at an all-time high, and I was devoting multiple hours every day to just messing with VRChat to develop new things.

Around November of 2020, VRChat began to test out “VRChat Plus”. At the time, it only offered some basic features, like extra favourite lists and badges. Coincidentally, only a week later, I was banned from VRChat for 100 years, for “creation and distribution of malicious mods”

Using alt accounts, I pressed on with development. After all, we had to keep mods working after the VRChat Plus update, and I didn’t want to let anyone down. We had ideas for an avatar database that could actively detect changes in the VRChat API, and update them in the search database to keep content current (and this was in production for a very short period!) But in March of 2021, VRChat made their first major decision: they banned a significant amount of mod creators from the VRCMG. A lot of us were faced with a choice: pull our mods and stop, or don’t log into our many year-old accounts. But when we announced this, the community made a HUGE fuss about it, all over the VRChat Discord, social media, and ingame. So much so that VRChat backpedalled on their decision, and agreed to “start a dialogue with some of the authors of these modifications”.

From this announcement spawned a group chat between us and some of the VRChat staff. It was made very clear that they were unhappy with us stepping on their VRChat Plus features (nevermind that we were doing it significantly earlier), and that they wanted some changes. This led to VRChat Plus enforcement for avatar favourites, as well as the removal of the “adblock” for non-VRC+ members. This decision led to a lot of unhappy people, but it was our hope that this would give a good impression, and make the VRChat team more likely to support us in what we were doing. Some of our dreams were actual mod support, or at least some kind of acknowledgement and idea of where we stood. We also reported exploits we found to them, for the sake of user safety. But actual discussions or information didn’t come up at all, and the last message sent in the group chat was in October of 2021.

VRChat’s UI 2.0 update was in development around October, and it had me super excited. Obviously, Ruby’s Button API (which I had been maintaining for IL2CPP up to that point) broke, because the old UI was essentially discarded, so I got to work on a new UI system. Seeing how the new UI was coded made me even more happy, as it was adaptive and sensical, and was very easy to expand. I was able to not only bring emmVRC to this new UI system, but make things even better. Menus were organized better, and icons helped to garnish what would have been a bland menu of text in the past. Sliders and other UI elements were finally able to be added without jank, and the possibility of proper menu styling features was just the icing on the cake.

About a week ago (July 22nd), rumours were spreading that VRChat was implementing EasyAntiCheat. At the time, it was unconfirmed, but sure enough, 3 days later, it happened.

This led to a SIGNIFICANT public backlash. A canny post was made with over 22.7k upvotes (as of the writing of this), a petition was created with 14.2k signatures (as of writing again), and a lot of fuss was made all over social media. Hell, we even got interviewed for Motherboard.

Ultimately though, VRChat did not care. As of July 26th, the security update is live, and mods have once again gone dead.

In case you didn’t know, this update added EasyAntiCheat to the game. This is a kernel-level anti-cheat solution by Epic, which is also prevalent in games like Fortnite and Elden Ring. It prevents the use of MelonLoader entirely, detecting it as an “untrusted system file” (which it is, and that is the nature of how it injects into games). Some bypasses will and already have come out, but doing this puts everyone at risk. Not only could VRChat start banning people if the anticheat is found to be bypassed, but Epic would not be happy about a bypass being available for it. And more to the point, we could play cat and mouse with the developers for the coming years, but ultimately, the VRChat team lost my trust. Not only did our discussions not provide anything but “we want this and this” without any return, but their blatant ignorance towards their entire community made me lose any faith I had remaining in them.

They didn’t just kill off emmVRC, either. Mods like VRC-CC, a mod that adds closed captions for movie worlds and video players, were also killed off in this movement. Mods that allow you to use your menu while lying down are gone. A significant number of mods that literally enhance the safety of the game, via checking avatars before loading (AdvancedSafety), or enhance the janky IK system (IKTweaks), are all gone. Not to mention the literal thousands of avatar favourites we have stored in our database, and ReMod CE in theirs. Not only are the mods not compatible with new versions of VRChat, but old versions have been locked down and disabled, and all the old instances are being closed.

VRChat claims that they are going to work on adding some of these things in future updates, but that could take months, or even years. Modders already had these features working, and working well. Now that those mods are gone, the pressure is on VRChat to bring those features to the mainstream, and I don’t see them actually pulling that off. Regardless, I’m done. For those who are interested in keeping emmVRC working, we have released all of our source codes on GitHub. We cannot release our database contents, for obvious reasons. Avatar exports are no longer available either.

If you used emmVRC in the past, and want your avatars exported, please make a ticket in the Discord!

With that though, I leave you all with this code, and these final words. I don’t know what is to become of emmVRC. I don’t want to leave the community hanging, but I’m also not going to quarrel with VRChat any further. I’ve been toying with some ideas regarding ChilloutVR, but it’s way too soon to make any promises. But I will say, thank you. Thank you to our massive community, for sticking it through to the very end. Thank you to our Patreon and direct supporters, for keeping emmVRC running throughout all these years. Your support is what made this possible, and emmVRC was so much bigger and better than I ever could’ve imagined. Stay safe, and I’ll see you soon.

Source code

This website will be dedicated mostly to both my art, as well as my technology adventures. This could be anything from IBM 5150s to the cutting edge of computer hardware. I’m also really into video games and the technical aspects behind them, so don’t be surprised if I toss in some cool game-related projects, especially as I start to learn more about developing for the 6502 and 68000 CPUs!

That’ll be it for now. For all of you coming in, welcome, and enjoy your stay!