VRTK Developer Calls It Quits, Cancels Fourth Edition

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The VR development community suffered a blow on the first day of the year. The Stonefox, the solo independent developer behind the popular Virtual Reality Toolkit (better known as VRTK), announced that they ceased all development on the project. There won’t be any further bug fixes or feature improvements, and plans for a fourth edition of the toolkit are off the table.

The Stonefox had a Patreon page where they were collecting donations to help support the project, which is now closed. The developer left a short message titled “That’s a wrap,” which states that “the time has come to close down the VRTK Patreon” with a “Thank you” to supporters. In the comments, The Stonefox clarifies that the closure of the funding page corresponded with the halt of development.

“It means no newer versions of VRTK will be coming out, so in the future developers can use existing versions of VRTK still just fine (as it's open source, so the github page isn't going anywhere), but they won't have any updates or new features,” said The Stonefox. “In fact, VRTK v4 was basically a massive re-write to make VRTK so much better than it currently is now, so I guess for devs they won't get that.”

You may not be familiar with VRTK, but the loss of this toolset could be a big deal to some indie VR developers. The VRTK package is a set of open-source scripts that help VR developers skip the heavy lifting for common VR development issues and lets small teams focus on story, art, and making the game fun to play. The VRTK includes solutions for locomotion, object interaction, VR UI elements, body physics simulation, and several other useful tools.

Many VR titles feature elements from the VRTK package. Sea Green Games took advantage of the VRTK to build Stage Presence. Strange Company used the VRTK to help build Left-Hand Path. Blueteak uses The Stonefox’s toolset in its hit archery game, QuiVr, which was among the top 24 highest grossing VR titles on Steam last year. And dozens of other independent developers used VRTK in their games. Put simply: Many gamers have experienced what the VRTK tools offer.

The VRTK is open-source and hosted on GitHub, so it’s not going away any time soon. But the VR industry is in a constant state of evolution, and it’s only a matter of time before a stagnant toolkit becomes a forgotten relic. Perhaps someone will fork the project and take it on from here.

Kevin Carbotte

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dstarr3
    Uhhh... This article was not ready for showtime.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Was the developer actually expecting to collect very much revenue from donations, for such niche product?

    It's good that it was open source and that they're not taking down the Github page, but for them to rule out a v4 basically means they don't intend to grant anyone else permission to work on the project. And that feels a bit childish.

    They could have just put out a call for a new maintainer.
    Reply
  • bddckr
    20551385 said:
    Was the developer actually expecting to collect very much revenue from donations, for such niche product?

    It's good that it was open source and that they're not taking down the Github page, but for them to rule out a v4 basically means they don't intend to grant anyone else permission to work on the project. And that feels a bit childish.

    They could have just put out a call for a new maintainer.

    Thanks for your uninformed opinion!

    - The donated money was for the community to pay artists, developers and others to work on new features.
    - It was open-source from day one.
    - The maintainer always intended it to be free to get more people access to development as a whole and to ease VR development.
    - The maintainer has been asking for community help since day one, but even small contributions were nowhere to be seen pretty much, so not enough involvement to even think about additional maintainers.
    - It's MIT licensed, the maintainer can't prevent anyone from working on it.
    - All the maintainer stated is that his repo won't get v4 - someone else can do however they chose.

    tl;dr: The community always knew that it's gonna end up like this - the sole maintainer has been asking for help for more than a year now. Without any contributions in the first place calling a new maintainer is way off.
    Reply
  • grimfox
    That's a bummer, but not a surprise. He wasn't earning enough from the Patreon to make it a full time gig. And there wasn't a lot of support in the community to aid part time development. It's a shame to see a talented developer call it quits like that. I wonder how many devs using the kit were contributing to the Patreon. Hopefully someone will recognize this guys talent and float him a job offer for a platform or development.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    20552731 said:
    Thanks for your uninformed opinion!
    Hey, I was just commenting on the info presented in the article - seems like that's your real issue, yet you lash out at me. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to whine.

    20552731 said:
    - It was open-source from day one.
    - The maintainer always intended it to be free to get more people access to development as a whole and to ease VR development.
    - It's MIT licensed, the maintainer can't prevent anyone from working on it.
    I didn't say otherwise. Good job with reading comprehension.

    I'm sorry nobody supported your project. Better luck next time. If I'm honest, it seems like you've still got more to learn about how to run successful open source projects.
    Reply