Overte News

Monthly progress report

2026-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

This month, we talk about a large performance regression, the new dashboard UI and Flycam, and the weekly "Overte Warmup" event.

Performance regression fixed

We fixed a large performance regression introduced in version 2025.09.1. 74hc595 noticed awful performance on their workstation with old dual Xeon E5-2690v2 CPUs getting only 30 FPS with their Nvidia RTX3090 in the tutorial world. Even with such old CPUs, performance should be much better than that. Looking into it myself, I also saw a ~50% decrease in engine (physics) performance on my machine. In my case, 50% higher frame times still meant hitting the 90 FPS frame cap in VR and the 60 FPS frame cap in desktop mode, which is why I never noticed the issue myself.

Our changelog for version 2025.09.1 didn't show anything suspicious, so I set out to use a process called "bisecting" to find out which change introduced the performance regression. I ran git bisect telling it the last known good commit and the earliest known bad commit. Git then checks out commits in the middle for me to manually build, test, and tell Git if it suffers from the issue or not.

After just two hours I found the culprit: The virtual keyboard used in VR was parented to the avatar. It turns out that having the virtual keyboard follow you around is extremely computationally expensive, even when it is not in use and even in desktop mode. Why this is the case? I don't know. My assumption is that the keyboard and its individual keys have collisions enabled (probably because of the mallet input), and the physics engine checks if we are colliding with each individual key because of how close we are to them. Having to check for collisions between ~80 moving entities every frame is pretty expensive.

Interesting that something as simple as parenting the keyboard to the avatar in VR could have such large performance impact on desktop mode. The initial fix is just as simple: Only parent the keyboard to the avatar when it is actually in use.

With this issue out of the way, your laptop or old computer should be running Overte a lot better again. The fix will be in the upcoming 2025.03.1 release.

New Dashboard UI

As mentioned in previous progress reports, our upgrade to Qt6 is coupled to a complete UI overhaul. Recently, Ada started work on the new "dashboard", which is planned to replace the current tablet and HUD.

After a bunch of brainstorming, Ada came up with some mock-ups:

And went straight to work, teasing us with screenshots and short video showcases:

Short video showcasing the dashboard.

The new UI will be available in the upcoming months, once our update to Qt6 is finished and stable enough for a release.

Flycam

Another addition by Ada is a new flycam mode, which allows you to more conveniently move your camera around while using the Create app.

Short video showcasing the flycam.

It can be toggled by pressing F4 and will be available in the upcoming 2025.03.1 release.

Currently, there are no plans to remove the Altcam (toggled using the Alt key) or the focus mode, which allows you to focus the camera on an entity by selecting it and pressing the F key.

Sunday Overte Warmup event

I also want to take this opportunity to advertise our "Overte Warmup" event, which takes place every Sunday at 12:30 UTC time.

It begins at 12:00 UTC in VRChat and then switches to Overte at 12:30 UTC. The idea behind it is to spark curiosity in our VRChat friends and bring them over for this occasion.

Keep an eye on the #events channel on Matrix or Discord for up-to-date information about the event.

Monthly progress report

2026-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Website facelift

I finally took the time to give our website a little facelift. The news section used to be just a long text document. This was replaced with ABlog a blogging extension for Sphinx. It makes the news section a little more manageable, without adding much maintenance overhead. While I was at it, I slightly increased the font size and limited the width of the website.

Matrix bridge

I upgraded all of our Matrix rooms to room version 12, which turned out to not be as simple as initially thought. While t2bot (our Matrix↔Discord bridge at the time) supports room version 12, the bridge only worked in one direction.

After trying to self-host and finding out that the bot itself doesn't actually work with room version 12 (t2bot just uses a proxy to change requests), I set out to look for greener pastures. Here come a new bridge which I had never come across on my previous searches for a better bridge: Out Of Your Element It isn't supported by matrix-docker-ansible-deploy which is used for our Matrix server, but the setup ended up being reasonably easy anyway. After a whole bunch of user error on my part, I got Out Of Your Element working on the (at that point) still unsupported room version 12.

The end result has been great. Multiple people commented on how much better the new bridge has been working. As opposed to t2bot, it supports bridging emoji reactions (in both directions), and has been 100% reliable so far. The reliability being a big thing, because t2bot would frequently fail to bridge messages, or take multiple minutes to do so.

Here are Matrix (Element) and Discord side by side:

The Matrix side of our bridge is seeing a lot more usage now than it ever has.

Release version 2025.12.1

Overte version 2025.12.1 was released on the 17th of December. We had been dreading this one for quite a while, because it is a protocol breaking release, meaning that clients and servers are incompatible with previous versions, which made testing a lot harder than usual. Sure enough, we ran into a really weird regression, which only happened in one area of one specific server. Anyone joining and spawning in this area, would get stuck in safe-landing and never finish loading the world around them.

The reason turned out to be as simple as devious: In September we lowered the maximum package size of networking packets (MTU) to fix connection issues for users whose internet providers do not provide them with the usual full size of 1500 bytes. The one server which was having issues had a single entity, which fit into the old package size, but was too large for the new package size. Entities are created on the client and transferred to the server, meaning that it is impossible to create an entity larger than the maximum packet size… unless the maximum packet size changes. Because of this, the server didn't have any safeguards for entities not fitting into a packet and just kept retrying over and over again.

Notice how I said the MTU was changed in September? The 2025.12.1 release wasn't the issue. The server just hadn't been updated until the protocol change required the server to be updated. The issue was actually a rare regression in version 2025.09.1.

Vulkan

The Vulkan backend was finally merged into master. This change has been in development for such a long time, it technically predates Overte itself. Huge thanks to NLnet and the NGI program for sponsoring 74hc595's work on it and huge thanks to 74hc595 and all the people involved for working on this huge undertaking.

While there is still a lot to do, before Vulkan will become our default rendering backend, it is already daily-drivable on Linux. If you want to give it a try, either build Overte from source using the -DOVERTE_RENDERING_BACKEND=Vulkan argument, or download any Vulkan build created by the CI-pipeline, such as this one.

itch.io release

Recently we ran into old regressions, which had not been caught in testing, sometimes for multiple releases, multiple times. This made us think it was time to get some more people on board and open up Overte to a wider audience. Itch.io, with its artist community and people who are used to games made by small teams or single people, seemed like the perfect place to open up to a wider audience, without immediately going all the way to Steam.

I spent a bunch of time designing Overte's itch.io page and even added support for “itch”, itch.io's desktop app, allowing automatic incremental updates. A feature, which none of our other distribution channels have yet.

While I am quite happy with how our itch.io page and the itch app support turned out, there is one issue: itch.io staff appears non-existent. After publishing Overte on the 30th of December, I noticed that it was unlisted. I contacted itch.io's support, and have yet to receive anything more than an automatic “Request received” message. On itch.io's Discord server many other users tell similar stories.

If I saw an open-source project in such a state, I would think it is abandoned or its developer is burned out. With a commercial company, I don't know what to think. Surely they would at least inform people of such long wait times. Whatever the case may be, having Overte on a store just for it to be unlisted isn't very useful. If this continues, we will just have to drop itch.io support again…

Monthly progress report

2025-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

This month, I decided to change it up a bit and report on the progress to date, instead of only to the end of last month.

Overte e.V. general assembly 2025

We held our annual assembly on the 6th of December. The highlights include:

2024 and 2025 both our income and our expenses were way higher than expected.
Our financial prospect for 2026 is good. We should be okay, even if we were to not complete any grant work. (Though donations are always appreciated, since my this assumes my work contract running out at the end of July 2026.)
Our accounting auditor found no issues. As in previous years, they extended their audit into governance and administration and found no issues or new recommendations.
We got a new honorary member within our ranks.
The board can now arbitrarily set the membership fee of non-natural persons (e.g. companies).

A detailed protocol was sent to all Overte e.V. members via email today.

Progress

74hc595 spent way too much time working on way too much stuff again 😉. Taking a break from Qt6, they have resumed work on getting Vulkan merged. (I literally got almost 70 email notification just from the Vulkan Pull Request.) They diagnosed and fixed performance issues which were stalling our upgrade to libnode 22. Of course, they also did their usual spree of general contributions like reviewing and testing Pull Requests, in addition to some smaller PRs.

Ada continued work on their UI overhaul, while also continuing to improve OpenXR support, adding better OSC support, and working on adding local lights to the forward renderer. As always, Ada also did a huge amount of other miscellaneous stuff.

HifiExperiments has been helping with all the graphics related changes and fixed OpenGL ES support.

RTUnreal spent a lot of time bumping their head against more or less random build system issues again.

I (Julian Groß) spent my time with small things as they popped up, including working on the next stable release.

We got a new contributor this month: Zedwick has been helping out with updating the documentation and fixing issues with both the chat and the Nametags app.

Part of the team went on holiday in Warszawa during the first week of December.

Invitation to the Overte e.V. general assembly 2025

2025-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Samstag, den 6. Dezember um 19:00 UTC (also 20:00 Uhr MEZ) ist es so weit. Die jährliche Mitgliederversammlung des Overte e.V. findet in Overte statt. Die Versammlung wird in Englisch abgehalten, allerdings werden genug deutschsprachige Mitglieder anwesend sein, um eventuelle Unklarheiten zu klären. Während nur aktive Overte e.V. Mitglieder mitwählen dürfen, sind auch nicht-Mitglieder herzlich eingeladen.

Die geplante Agenda ist wie folgt:

Wahl eines Versammlungsleiters.
Wahl eines Schriftführers. Der Schriftführer wird während der Versammlung Protokoll führen.
Kassenbericht für 2024 und 2025.
Haushaltsplan 2026.
Bericht des Kassenprüfers (Steve Pruneau).
Wahl des Kassenprüfers, sofern es Freiwillige gibt. Der Kassenprüfer darf kein Vorstandmitglied sein.
Bericht über die Vorstandsarbeit.
Vorstandswahl.
Abstimmung: Darf der Vorstand die Höhe der Mitgliedsbeiträge für juristische Personen beliebig festlegen? [1]
Abstimmung über die, am 8. Juli 2025 vom Vorstand beschlossene, Anstellung von Julian Groß. [2]
Abstimmung über Satzungsänderung um den Begriff „Zustimmungswahl“ für Vorstandswahlen zu erwähnen. [3]
Protokoll wird von dem Schriftführer und dem Versammlungsleiter unterschrieben.

[1]: Momentan zahlen juristische Personen (z. B. Unternehmen oder Universitäten) die gleichen 60 € Jahresmitgliedsbeitrag wie alle anderen Mitglieder. Manche Organisationen sind unter Umständen bereit mehr zu zahlen, dürfen aber aus rechtlichen Gründen nichts spenden.

[2]: Der Vorstand hat Julian Groß bereits nach § 6 Der Vorstand (3) Aufgaben ( https://satzung.overte.org/de/#aufgaben ) angestellt. Die Mitgliederversammlung sollte trotzdem darüber abstimmen, ob sie mit dieser Entscheidung einverstanden ist.

[3]    Vorgeschlagene Änderung zu § 6 Der Vorstand (4) Wahl:
Von:
(…) Die Vorstandsmitglieder werden von der Mitgliederversammlung pro zu besetzendem Sitz im gesonderten Wahlgang bestimmt. In jedem Wahlgang geben die Mitglieder eine Stimme pro Kandidaten ab. (…)
(…) The board members are elected by the general assembly for each to be occupied seat in separate votes. During each vote, each member has one vote per candidate. (…)

Zu:
(…) Die Vorstandsmitglieder werden von der Mitgliederversammlung pro zu besetzendem Sitz im gesonderten Wahlgang bestimmt. Das genutzte Wahlverfahren wird auch als Zustimmungswahl bezeichnet: In jedem Wahlgang geben die Mitglieder eine Stimme pro Kandidaten ab. (…)
(…) The board members are elected by the general assembly for each to be occupied seat in separate votes. The used voting system is also referred to as "approval voting": During each vote, each member has one vote per candidate. (…)

Mit freundlichen Grüßen aus Paderborn
Julian Groß
Overte e.V. Schatzmeister

October progress report

2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Progress

74hc595 again spent most of their time working on upgrading to Qt6. While chasing down crashes on Qt6, they uncovered and fixed multiple old memory safety issues, which have probably been causing issues for years now. Of course, they also did their usual general contributions like reviewing and testing Pull Requests.

Ada spent a lot of time working on their new UI overhaul, which is part of the upgrade to Qt6. Here are some work-in-progress screenshots:

HifiExperiments has been working on a fix for the FBX texture coordinate regression 🔗.

RTUnreal has been fixing C++ build issues, both for Qt6 and our move to C++20. Without him, a lot of maintenance work would be stuck waiting for Qt6 to be finished.

I (Julian Groß) spent most of my time with small bits and bobs, including the stable release, support, finishing the GitHub Actions refactor, and fixing smaller regressions, which were introduced by all the large changes which were merged recently.

Release!

We made another release. Version 2025.10.1 (and 2025.10.1.1 hotfix), which includes only bugfixes; Most importantly, a fix for AppImages crashing on Arch Linux, and a fix for OpenXR support not working on NixOS. It is available here 🔗. After the hotfix, we noticed a packaging issue which caused Fcitx support to not work. This has also be resolved, so get the "Fcitx_support" AppImage if you are having issues with using your IME in Overte.

September progress report

2025-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Organizational

"AI Cryptocurrency Investment" scammers

Too long; didn't read: We fell victim to scammers and lost >190 €.

September has been a very busy month for me as the accountant. Our organization fell victim to a group of "AI Cryptocurrency Investment" scammers, who try to use our identity to build trust with their targets.

On the 12th of September, we started receiving multiple payments of around 250€ each on our bank account, which were seemed not intended for us. I (Julian Groß) didn't notice these payments initially, as I had already done the monthly accounting and didn't check our bank account. On the 15th of September, we started receiving payments on Stripe, which is our credit card payment provider, as well. Since I got an email notification about those, I knew of them pretty much immediately. Nothing seemed weird there at first; The transactions were using our donation form, so they were clearly labelled as donations. What was odd was that we would suddenly get such large amount of donations in the first place. And, looking closer at them, multiple people were supposedly sharing email addresses. At this point, I started reading through Stripe's documentation and contacted Stripe. Unfortunately, they were very unhelpful. Their documentation suggested this being a card testing scam, and that we should immediately refund everything. Their support was extremely slow, AI translated, and never had anything helpful to say. This is where the first mistake happens as well: I follow Stripe's advice and press the refund button on all the transactions. What I didn't notice at the time, was that Stripe keeps their fees. Meaning that on every refund I make, the Overte e.V. pays a hefty credit card fee. Multiple Euros per transaction. In total, we lost 163,50 € in Stripe fees. Once I noticed this the next day, I started returning only what was left after Stripe's fee. While that saved us from another losing another >100 € in Stripe fees, it ended up incurring a chargeback from one person who really wanted their 1,86 € back. As it turns out, Stripe (and credit card companies) charge 20 € per chargeback. Not to mention the bank responsible for the chargeback graciously rounded up the sum to 1,95 €. Contesting chargebacks incurs another 20 € fee. So I decided to just pay up.

In the meantime, I noticed transactions also going straight to our bank account. This felt way less problematic, since the fees are way lower than for credit card stuff, and we have rule of law there, rather than credit card companies and payment providers just offloading everything onto us. At this point, I got in contact with the Police, since the victims suddenly had names and identities, and as opposed to our Stripe account, I wasn't willing to just close it off. The local Policeman knew immediately what was going on and asked me to inform the victims by sending them messages via SEPA bank transfers. Turns out, instant bank transfers are faster than the police. At least as long as the victims check their bank accounts regularly.

Apparently, this is a very common scam: - The scammers rope their victims in with promises of high-return investment opportunities. - They then have their victims pay a smaller sum to a place that feels trustworthy; In this case, a German bank account. Since it is a German bank account, at least the German victims have little to worry about. If it is a scam, they have someone they can hold accountable. None of this money actually makes it to the scammers. - The scammers then show their victims how much money their investments are allegedly making, and are offering them to invest larger sums. At this point, they have their victims pay money to a channel they have control over. In this latest case published by Eurojust it was mainly Lithuanian bank accounts.

While our bank was slow to respond, they were extremely helpful. They immediately knew what was going on, and offered to screen the transactions for us, meaning I didn't have to return the money manually anymore and didn't have to account for them in our books either, since they never actually make it onto our bank account.

The scam is still going on, but has slowed down considerably. Only one of the scammers appears to remain, and I now know what to do with any fraudulent transactions we receive.

So what did we learn from this? - The saying "Never look a gifted horse in the mouth" doesn't always apply. - We are legally required to pay back any money that wasn't intended for us. (See BGB § 812) - Credit card is an awful way of receiving donations, because it leaves you vulnerable to chargeback and contesting fees, and generally costs way more than even international and inter-currency transfers.

What are the next steps? I am still considering to completely stop accepting donations via Stripe. While the 163,50 € of fees was my fault to some degree, the chargeback fees are something we cannot do anything about with our current setup. Some donators already switched over to donating via bank transfer instead. Meaning that we receive so little money via Stripe now, that just two chargebacks per month are enough to completely negate the money received from there. At that point, I would need to shut that channel down. We could still decide to accept credit card payments via email then; Or maybe we can find some other payment provider who takes over such fees.

If you have any suggestions, questions, or input on this, feel free to reach out via our usual channels.

Infrastructure

Our Weblate translation instance has been slow or inaccessible for most of September due to crappy Chinese AI scraping bots. While this is probably not a deliberate attack, it manifests the same as a distributed denial-of-service attack on our infrastructure.

Anubis has been deployed to our Weblate instance, but unfortunately the low percentage of scrapers that do get through are still occasionally enough to overwhelm the server and flood us with error messages. Due to this, I had to shut down the server for multiple days. While it has been running without issues again for a couple of days now, it might get overwhelmed again until a solution is found.

Weblate added the option to back up individual projects, instead of the entire server, so we are currently looking into moving to a public Weblate instance. So far, this has been a slow process though: - hosted.weblate.org allows creating said backups, but it currently doesn't allow actually restoring them. - translate.codeberg.org doesn't currently support pushing to GitHub and still hasn't made a formal decision if they want to. We also haven't been able to reach their admin yet.

We are not aware of any other public Weblate instances.

There are some other open-source organizations hosting their own Weblate instances, so we might try to join with one of them.

Alternatively, we will just have to upgrade our server and/or pay for something that lets fewer bots through, like Anubis' "Thoth" service.

Progress

74hc595 spent most of their time working on upgrading to Qt6. Apparently, the Qt6 branch already works, even if it is still very unstable. Of course, they also did their usual general contributions like reviewing and testing a lot of Pull Requests.

Ada has been helping with the Qt6 upgrade, focusing on QML related fixes. They also committed some smaller fixes like fixing OpenXR trigger click reliability, in addition to reviewing, testing and reporting bugs, and prototyping their upcoming UI theming support.

HifiExperiments helped with a lot of triage, advice, and code review.

RTUnreal worked up upgrading dependencies and has generally been helping with build system maintenance.

I was mostly busy with handling the recent scam and the flood of broken Chinese AI scrapers. In addition, I worked on refactoring our GitHub Actions workflow files (shoutout to RTUnreal for the code review), fixed some smaller build system bugs and troubleshot regressions. I also started initial work on an itch.io release: Finding regressions introduced multiple releases ago isn't fun and showcases that there just isn't enough testing happening. This suggests that it is about time to try to get more users in. When this release will happen isn't entirely clear yet; We have an upcoming protocol changing release which will undoubtedly introduce more not-yet-known regressions, as well as require all servers and clients to be updated.

We also received bug reports and help from Alezia, Dale, and Krzeszny. Big shoutout also to KawaneRio for organizing Sunday's "Overte warmup" event.

Release!

We made our first release since switching from VCPKG to Conan. Version 2025.09.1 and its changelog are available here 🔗 and come with a huge list of bug fixes, improvements, additions, and changes. It does come with a regression that causes it to crash on many on some Linux distributions when opening a web view, like the Places app. A fix will be included in the next release. For now, affected users can get the CI testing build from GitHub or keep using version 2025.05.1.

August progress report

2025-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Organizational

Anstellung

Im letzten Beitrag haben wir um Spenden gebeten, für den Fall, dass unvorhergesehene Kosten für meine (Julian Groß) Anstellung anfallen könnten. Wie sich herausstellte, kostet die Beschäftigung tatsächlich etwas mehr (~30€) als ich erwartet hatte, nämlich etwa 1000€ pro Monat, wovon etwa 710€ tatsächlich auf meinem Konto landen. (Ich sage "etwa" und "ungefähr", weil sich die meisten Monate nicht sauber durch 4 Wochen teilen lassen.)

Ich möchte allen, die gespendet haben, persönlich danken. Die meisten der Spender scheinen neue Leute zu sein, die Overte vor ihrer Spende noch nicht einmal ausprobiert hatten. Ich möchte auch besonders unseren regelmäßigen Spendern und zahlenden Mitgliedern des Overte e.V. danken, die Overte am Laufen halten. Ihr wisst, wer ihr seid, und ihr rockt!

Nächstes Mal sollte ich das Spendenbanner so gestalten, dass das alle Gelder für den Overte e.V. gezählt werden und nicht nur die zusätzlichen Gelder zu den regulären Spenden abzüglich der Transaktionsgebühren. Ich habe es aus buchhalterischen Gründen so gemacht, und das war wohl einfach eine schlechte Idee.

NLnet-Förderung

In other news, the NLnet Foundation has accepted another grant (amendment) proposal from us. After having been successfully working with them for over 1 1/2 years now, it feels great to still be among all the amazing open source projects supported by them.

We want to thank NLnet and the European Commission for fostering software freedom with their Next Generation Internet programme.

Projektplan

The funding will be used to pay developers to work on the areas listed below.

Features

Multi-packet avatar updates
linear interpolation for avatar updates
Finish multi-packet entity properties

Graphics

Vulkan frame transfer to VR plugin

Wartung

Switch to using a package lock file on Conan and updating it semi-automatically using something like Renovate
Try getting NSIS more foolproof (boolean checks are unreliable as they only check for one possible boolean naming scheme)
Document networking code

Bug Fixes

Fix networking congestion control ( https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/572#issuecomment-2799907780 )
Fix retransmissions ignoring congestion control ( https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/572#issuecomment-2799907780 )

Entity Transition Shader (Fade)

We have a special shader that makes user appear as if they were "beaming in" or "beaming out" when connecting or disconnecting. Apparently, there is unfinished support for doing this to other entities as well, which we would like to fix/finish and polish. This can be used for multiple purposes, but playing similar animations when people edit worlds, for example by deleting entities, is what got us to look into this.

Add/fix entity transition shader
Expose avatar and entity transition shader as zone properties
Expose entity transition shader to Entities.addEntity and Entities.deleteEntity (overriding zone properties)

macOS support

With the Vulkan PR almost merged into master, Apple getting rid of OpenGL isn't a blocker to our macOS support anymore. However, macOS support was broken for multiple years, always was on the back burner, and we moved build systems in-between, so this is a bit of a larger job. We have a good amount of macOS users who are willing to test, and even some people who are still running our last macOS version, eagerly waiting for a new one.

Get macOS development machine
Build with MoltenVK
Get all of our Conan packages to build on macOS
Fix the server software crashing on macOS
Set up automatic macOS CI builds

Android support

With the new Conan dependency manager, overhauled build system, and experience with Conan, CMake, and our build system, I now feel comfortable tackling Android support. We used to have experimental Android support, but Google changed so much of their build system API for C++ that that part needs to be completely rewritten.

Get all of our required Conan packages to build for Android
Add Android support to our build system
Set up automatic Android CI builds
Add initial OpenXR support to our Android client

Depot.dev

Overte got its first corporate sponsor: Depot.dev 🔗 is graciously providing us with their Continuous Integration services for free.

With us needing to build Qt from source on Windows, the free GitHub hosted Runners were timing out because our builds would take over 6 hours any time there was a Qt package cache miss. So we needed a solution which didn't involve constant babysitting of the CI pipeline, which would have defeated the point of having a CI pipeline in the first place. Getting faster Runners from GitHub would have costed us upwards of 2000€ extra per year, which frankly would have broken the bank.

This is where Depot.dev comes in. Not only are they way cheaper than GitHub hosted Runners and provide a lot more cache space, but they also offer discounts for non-profits and open-source projects.

Interesting enough, even the same spec runners on Depot.dev are actually quite a lot faster at building Overte than the ones on GitHub already.

Progress

Frankly speaking, so much stuff got done this month that I am having a hard time deciding what to mention.

On my side, I have spent most of my time with fixing up our Qt package for Windows and doing more build system improvements. Big thanks to 74hc595 for finding lots of additional issues in my Qt package. 😅 Together, we found out that release builds were actually building with Qt asserts enabled. Asserts are basically deliberate crashes, which exist to make us developers aware of something unexpected happening. They shouldn't be enabled in a release build, as the application often continues to function even when something we didn't expect happens. It's quite frustrating working on something that takes three hours to build any time there is a change on an operating system you aren't usually developing on, but I am quite happy with the results.

Thanks to NLnet, I also started working on macOS support. For now, I got all the required dependencies to build and am waiting for Vulkan to be merged and our update to libnode 22 to be finished.

74hc595 did a lot of work as usual. They fixed multiple audio issues, helped a lot with getting Pull Requests finished, tested and merged, fixed that weird bug with people starting floating while having their camera zoomed into the back of their heads, fixed multiple crashes on Windows, … you get the idea.

Ada also did a lot of miscellaneous bug fixes, but also upstreamed their Context menu, fixed a lot of issues with VR and OpenXR, added OpenXR body tracking support, added multiple new JavaScript APIs, et cetera. We keep merging Pull Requests and Ada keeps opening new ones.

HifiExperiments added initial VRM file format support, fixed remaining issues with his new multi-layered materials, and helped Ada and 74hc595 with graphics work as usual.

Alezia worked on improving the Snap app, added bookmarks and per-Place user counts to the Places app, and cleaned up the Places app's code.

We also got a new contributor this month: RTUnreal started work on packaging Overte for NixOS. To that end, they already added support for our build system to use only system libraries, uncovered and fixed some bugs, and have been a huge help with the libnode 22 upgrade. Considering how many people already dabbled with trying to build Overte using Nix and gave up once they realized how much work it is going to be, it is especially great to see RTUnreal get changes merged into Overte.

Release candidate!

On the topic of progress: We tagged our first release candidate since switching from VCPKG to Conan. Version 2025.09.1-rc1 and its changelog are available here 🔗 and come with a huge list of bug fixes, improvements, additions, and changes. So far, this release candidate has been rock solid, so it might turn into a full release already next week without any additional changes necessary.

Help us hire a team member!

2025-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

We are in the process of hiring our long-term contributor Julian Groß, allowing him to dedicate more time to Overte and get things done.

The current proposal is a one-year-long contract for 13 hours per week at German minimum wage. While not much, this is enough for Julian to survive and make work on Overte his main profession.

However, while the Overte e.V. can technically afford that, we are cutting it close. That is why we are asking for your support!

We need to keep some financial cushioning in case of unforeseen costs, so we are doing our first fundraiser to reach our goal of 3000€ of additional funds over the next couple of months.

Donate now ♥︎

We've obtained another NLnet grant!

2025-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

After the success of our previous grant, which enabled myriad fixes, improvements, and new features, we are pleased to announce that we've obtained a second NLnet grant!

The NLnet Foundation continues to support many amazing Open Source projects, and we're honored to continue partnering with them.

As with the previous grant, we commit to keeping users and developers up to date with the progress made on these items, both during our usual Saturday development meetings and on GitHub, so that everyone can follow along with the progress.

Projektplan

The funding will be used to pay developers to work on the areas listed below, with the possibility of extensions and additional work.

The agreed upon deadline for completion is December 1st, 2025.

Features

We would like to allow less technical users to more comfortably make use of all the features provided by our scripting engine. To that end, we would like to add a visual scripting system.

Visual scripting (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/982)
Chat messages in 3D space (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1147)
Add copy and paste buttons to VR keyboard (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/130)
Support OpenXR finger tracking (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/224)
Cryptography functions in scripting API (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/tree/feature/cryptography)
Add live translation support to chat

Graphics

Our engine uses its own internal graphics API, which is largely undocumented. Documenting this API is a lot of work and important for the future maintainability of the project. Additionally, we would like to spend more time on Vulkan optimization, especially on troubleshooting performance issues on Intel Arc graphics cards.

Vulkan optimization
Internal graphics API documentation
Have local lights affect MToon materials (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1131)
Expose normal map attenuation distance as zone property (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1139)
Use standard physically-based-rendering for voxels (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/749)
Allow switching between graphics APIs through command line option
Add splat mapping functionality (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1163)
Add a no-filter texture filtering mode (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/145)

QML Localization

As Overte is used by people from all over the world, we want to add localization support. This task aims to allow translating all internal UI created using QML. (Most, but not all, of our UI uses QML.)

Mark strings as translatable
Generate translation files automatically
Hook up to Weblate translation system
Build with translations
Check if we include the required fonts
Add German translation (as a reference test case)

Wartung

CMake 4.0 is around the corner, dropping support for some legacy compatibility, which seems to break almost every one of our dependencies. Libnode has similarly received updates, including breaking changes.

Update Overte for CMake 4.0 compatibility
Fix building dependencies on CMake 4.0
Update libnode to the next LTS version
Improve build instructions for building with KDevelop and CLion
Add automatic Docker release builds
Finish getting Overte into Flathub
Update to Qt 6 (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1243)
Package Qt 6 dependency for Windows
Package Qt 6 dependency for Linux
Package webrtc-audio-processing
Switch to libdatachannel

Bug Fixes

Fix MToon materials not showing up in Material Inspector (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1028)
Text entities: show tofu character on missing character (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1133)
Add "blocklist" for known broken graphics drivers
Fix server Console trying to connect to highfidelity.com (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/578)
Fix QML warning message spam on Windows (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/593)
Fix problems with HifiControlsUit.SpinBox (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/921)
Fix uninstalling Overte not removing cache from AppDataLocal (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/952)
Fix avatar bookmarks silently failing on broken syntax (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/192)

UI Rework

Our current UI is a mix of different themes, design philosophies, and programming languages (https://github.com/orgs/overte-org/projects/8). Specifically our Create app could use some improvement (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/1145).

Framework for default QML applications
Rework Avatar app
Add grid shader to Create
Allow switching Create windows between external and embedded windows
Rework asset browser
Rework voxel edit mode
Allow parenting entities using drag and drop in entity list
Add a tree view to entity list
Add a free camera mode to Create
Improve material management in Create
Add centered scaling to Create
Rework More app
Rework settings
Rework Pal app (People list)
Rework log viewer
Rework Snapshot app
Rework Emote app
Rework running scripts window
Rework Places app
Rework notifications
Add theming support
Prefer using system file-picker
Add dashboard user interface

Integrate results from UX review and security audit

Perform UX review
Perform Security audit

Danke an

NLnet, for continuing to support Overte.
Julian Groß, für die Aushandlung dieser Vereinbarung.
All of the developers who have agreed to take on this work.
Die Overte Gemeinschaft, die dies möglich macht.

NLnet grant extended again!

2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Wir haben eine weitere Verlängerung des NLnet-Zuschusses mit den folgenden zusätzlichen Punkten erhalten:

Wartung

Korrektur von Warnungen und Einschalten von Warnungen-als-Fehler (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/930)
Application.cpp aufräumen, damit sie nicht 10.000 Zeilen lang ist (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/931)
korrektur der Einstellung von Gelenkdaten nach Namen (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/613)
Ersetzen des alten Wearables-Systems durch Avatar-Entitäten, um doppelten Code zu vermeiden. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/932)

Text-Entitäten

Unsere Text-Entitäten brauchen etwas Liebe. Sie sind klobig und vor allem verwenden sie ein benutzerdefiniertes Format, das nirgends dokumentiert ist. Das bedeutet, dass wir keine neuen Schriftarten hinzufügen können, was insbesondere deshalb schlecht ist, weil die aktuellen Schriftarten nur ASCII-Zeichen unterstützen.

an den Rändern abschneiden, anstatt komplett zu verschwinden (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/583)
Wechsel zu einem Standard-Schriftformat (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/126)

Grafikverbesserungen II

Umgebungslichtfarbe hinzufügen (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/6)
Laden von MToon-Materialien direkt aus glTF (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/933)
Optionale Kameraausschnitte (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/618)
Benutzerdefinierter Shader-Fallback (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/640): Ein Fallback für den Fall, dass ein Shader nicht geladen/kompiliert werden kann und einer für den Fall, dass ein Benutzer prozedurale Shader deaktiviert hat
Freigabe weiterer Grafikeinstellungen (Tone-Mapping, Bloom, prozedurale Shader, AO) (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/740, https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/741, https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/14)
hinzufügen von Tone-Mapping- und Ambient Occlusion-Eigenschaften zu Zonen-Entitäten (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/934)

Diverse Verbesserungen II

Hinzufügen von VR-Laser-Glättung, die besonders Menschen mit unruhigen Händen helfen wird (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/883)
Erhöhung der Ladepriorität von Avatar-Entitäten (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/834)
Hinzufügen der Option, dass ein Avatar nicht angezeigt wird, bis seine Entitäten geladen sind (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/834)
Verbesserung des derzeitigen Ladeprioritätssystems (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/834)
Hinzufügen einer Eigenschaft zur Beeinflussung der Ladepriorität von Entitäten (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/834)

NLnet grant extended!

2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Wir haben eine Verlängerung der NLnet-Förderung mit den folgenden zusätzlichen Punkten erhalten:

Linux FHS-Unterstützung

Der Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard definiert das richtige Dateilayout einer Anwendung. Diese Arbeit beinhaltet diesen Standard zu übernehmen und erlaubt einige nette Verbesserungen hinzuzufügen.

Dies wird:

Paketierung vereinfachen und erlaubt die Aufnahme von Overte in Linux-Distributionen.
SELinux Unterstützung vereinfachen.
die Erstellung mehrerer Instanzen vereinfachen.
macOS-Paketierung vereinfachen.

Meilensteine:

Domain-Server und Assignment-Client Implementierung (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/903)
Interface Implementierung (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/904)

LDAP-Unterstützung

LDAP ist ein gängiger Authentifizierungsmechanismus, der von vielen Unternehmen unterstützt wird. Active Directory ist mit LDAP kompatibel.

Dies wird Overte helfen, sich viel besser in die Unternehmens- und Universitätsinfrastruktur zu integrieren. Diese können dann ihr eigenes internes System zur Kontrolle der Authentifizierung verwenden. Wir ersparen uns hiermit, diesen Code selbst zu entwickeln, was wenig interessant ist und von anderen Projekten bereits besser gelöst wurde.

Meilensteine:

Grundlegende Unterstützung in der Domain Weboberfläche, um mehreren Benutzern die Authentifizierung zu ermöglichen. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/905)
Grundlegende Unterstützung als Alternative zum Directory-Server: Benutzerkonten, Domain-Verzeichnis. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/906)
Vollständige Alternative zum Directory-Server. Unterstützung für Benutzerbeziehungen, Datenspeicherung und Profil-Metadaten. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/907)

IPv6-Unterstützung

Die Verbreitung von IPv6 hat in letzter Zeit ein recht hohes Niveau erreicht und ist besonders in Umgebungen wichtig, in denen IPv4-Adressen knapp sind, wie z. B. in Unternehmen, Universitäten, in der Cloud und bei großen Installationen. Einige Provider verlangen bereits zusätzliche Gebühren für IPv4-Adressen, sodass die Unterstützung von IPv6 dazu beiträgt Hosting von Domains günstiger zu machen.

Meilensteine:

Grundlegende Unterstützung in der Domain-Server Weboberfläche. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/908)
Unterstützung für das Abrufen von Assets über IPv6. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/909)
Unterstützung für Domain-Server die auf IPv6 laufen. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/910)

SELinux

SELinux ist ein Sicherheitssystem, welches es ermöglicht Anwendungen und Dienste voneinander zu isolieren.

SELinux wird den Domain-Server und optional Interface isolieren, um sicherzustellen, dass Exploits nicht den Rest des Systems beeinträchtigen können. So könnte ein Exploit zwar den Domain-Server knacken, aber den Server nicht dazu verwenden, andere Computer anzugreifen oder die privaten Daten des Benutzers preiszugeben.

Meilensteine:

Domain-Server isolieren. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/911)
Assignment-Clients isolieren. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/912)
Versuch, mehrere Instanzen mit Isolation zu unterstützen. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/913)
Isolieren mehrerer Overte-Server voneinander auf demselben Rechner. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/914)
Interface isolieren. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/915)

Leinwand-Textur

Damit wird ein neues Konzept einer softwaredefinierten Leinwand-Textur eingeführt. Skripte können darauf zeichnen, und Clients erhalten Updates.

Dies birgt ein enormes Potenzial an nützlichen Funktionen:

Software-definierte Texturen
Skript-generierte Namensschilder, Banner, Statusanzeigen, etc.
Bildschirmfreigaben ohne externe Abhängigkeiten
Whiteboard
Synchronisierte Weboberflächen
Server-seitig gerenderte Weboberflächen. Dies würde bei der Quest-Implementierung helfen.

Meilensteine:

Grundlegende Implementierung. Texturobjekt, simple Operationen wie das Malen von Pixeln und Blöcken. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/916)
Canvas-API. Unterstützung für Schriftarten, Formen wie Rechtecke, Kreise, Kurven, usw. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/917)
Bildschirmfreigabe (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/918)
Synchronisierte Weboberfläche. (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/919)

We've obtained an NLnet grant!

2024-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Die NLnet Foundation ist eine Organisation, die viele großartige Open-Source-Projekte unterstützt. Wir freuen uns sehr, dass auch wir es auf die Liste geschafft haben!

As part of the agreement, we commit to keeping users and developers up to date with the progress made on these items at least every two months. For that, we'll keep track of it during our usual Saturday development meetings, and use tags, projects and other functionality on GitHub to make it easy for anyone interested to follow the progress.

Projektplan

Die Mittel werden für die Bezahlung von Entwicklern verwendet, die an den unten aufgeführten Bereichen arbeiten werden. Es besteht die Möglichkeit, dass zwischen uns und NLnet weitere Förderung vereinbart wird.

Die vereinbarte Frist für die Fertigstellung ist der 17. Februar 2025.

Ein Teil der Arbeit hat bereits begonnen und kann auf GitHub eingesehen werden: https://github.com/overte-org/overte

Audio-Überholung

Verschieben von Audiozonen in Zoneneigenschaften (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/69)
Hinzufügen von Audio-Entitäten (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/69)

Diverse Verbesserungen

Hinzufügen einer wantsKeyboardFocus-Eigenschaft für Webentitäten (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/6)
Hinzufügen von Interpolation bei Modellanimationen (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/317)

Grafikverbesserungen

Beheben von Fehlern beim Rendern von Schatten von Rückseiten (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/547)
Zulassen von undurchsichtigen Partikeln (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/issues/776#issuecomment-1868203856)
Finish overhauling TAA with velocity buffer (https://github.com/overte-org/overte/pull/501)
Hinzufügen von Unterstützung für GPU-Partikel

Vulkan

Wir verwenden derzeit OpenGL für das 3D-Rendering, welches leider in den letzten Jahren immer mehr an Unterstützung verloren hat. Einige Plattformen wie MacOS haben es sogar komplett verworfen. AMD kümmert sich nur wenig um OpenGL, und Treiberfehler sind ein häufiges Ärgernis.

Vulkan wird einen viel moderneren, leistungsfähigeren und besser unterstützten Renderer bieten und sollte uns erlauben MacOS in der Zukunft wieder zu unterstützen.

Drahtgitter-Rendering
Vorwärts-Renderer (für Low-End-Hardware)
"Aufgeschobener"-Renderer (voll funktionsfähig)
Optimierung
Frame-Übertragung zum VR-Plugin

Verbesserungen des Bausystems

Dies wird die Arbeit an Overte angenehmer machen und die Entwicklung erleichtern. Es ist wichtig, um die Wartung zu vereinfachen und künftigen Mitwirkenden das Leben nicht unnötig schwierig zu machen.

Umstellen auf Conan
Aktualisierung der Dokumentation
Verbesserung des Bauprozesses

Danke an

NLnet, dass sie uns diese großartige Gelegenheit geben.
Julian Groß, für die Aushandlung dieser Vereinbarung.
Sam Gondelman, Karol Suprynowicz und AnotherFoxGuy für die Übernahme der Arbeit.
Die Overte Gemeinschaft, die dies möglich macht.

New website

2023-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Da unsere alte, auf 11ty basierende Website nicht mehr gepflegt wurde und niemand wusste, wie man sie bearbeitet, haben wir eine nagelneue Website mit Sphinx erstellt, demselben System, das wir seit Jahren für unsere Hauptdokumentation verwenden. Dies ermöglicht uns unter anderem auch, die Website mit Weblate endlich in verschiedene Sprachen zu übersetzen.

Wenn Sie bei der Übersetzung dieser Website oder anderer Teile von Overte helfen möchten, gehen Sie zu weblate.overte.org 🔗.