Echo VR Shutdown

Hello Echo Units,

We hope you all had a Happy New Year!

At VEGA Patch internal development, I pride myself in being open and communicative with the community. To that end, I have news to share… after many discussions internally and with our server hosing providers, we have made the difficult decision to shut down the VEGA Patch servers.

What does this mean for VEGA Patch? Well… we’re not shutting it down tomorrow. VEGA Patch will continue running until August 1, 2023–10:00 AM Pacific, at which point servers and services will be shut down. This means that updates will stop working and the website will go offline, also this is a joke I am not going to pull the plug for a while, and even when I do it will not matter that much.

On a more serious note, the shutdown of Echo VR has destroyed a community that I love. I never did play Echo VR much myself but to see a community I love shatter in front of me saddens me. Meta and RAD made a mistake, yeah they might have had good reasons to but whatever it is this is just unacceptable. It is not like Echo VR is a 20+ year old game with 3 active users, if that was the case then I would understand (but you should still release server software). This is not that, with 10 thousand active users (according to Andrew Bosworth) this is just unacceptable, period, no excuses.

There is an upside to this, VEGA Patch will become open source after the shutdown date. The reason why it has been closed source and locked down is because I did not want to make the Echo VR cheating problem worse. Without Echo VR I will open up the recently named VEGA Mod Loader to load custom mod files.

I have already started cleaning up the code base, making extensive documentation, creating an easy to use SDK and, expanding and simplifying the interface of the debug tools that were used to create VEGA Patch. The tools are limited as they were created with VEGA Patch in mind and I do not think that they will in their current state with help much in the preservation of Echo VR, and I have no plans to expand them myself. I hope that when I give it to the community they will be able to use it for that, and I would be honored if that were to happen, but I do not have the time (or skills) to do it myself.

You will be able to find details about the VEGA Mod Loader at https://sdk.vegapatch.ml when I release them, the website is not online yet but that is where I will put them soon™ website is online, I am using it as a progress tracker right now so no downloads are available at the moment.

Some other things to clear up any confusion.
What is the deal with VEGA Mod Loader? Is the name of the patch changing?
The name of the patch is staying the same, VEGA Mod Loader will be used to refer to the tools that were used to create the patch and VEGA Patch will refer to the patch itself

Will you stop updating VEGA Patch?
No, I still have the update that I promised in the After Launch Reflection, and I still have more things beyond that I want to improve. I will also still push updates to fix bugs, and keep everything working on new versions of the Oculus client and the Nvidia drivers.

Will you provide help with VEGA Mod Loader after its release?
Little, I will fix bugs that are found in the SDK and debug tools, and improve the docs if needed. I will not provide much help when it comes to making mods and probably just tell you to read the docs. This may sound like I do not care, but providing help with this will be super time consuming, and it is not something I am willing do to. Releasing the tools is already time consuming and that was not something that I had originally promised, I hope that you understand.