VIRTA MIX #3: Vam1 Quick Guide (Patreon)

❔ How to get the Vam1 engine

You can get Vam1 from the developer meshedvr on his patreon page https://www.patreon.com/meshedvr .

❔ How to install Vam1

Download the updater file and run it. It will download the latest Virtamate 1 version in the same folder as the updater.

Run "VaM (Desktop Mode).bat" for desktop mode, "VaM.exe" for VR mode (it was built for Oculus/Meta devices) or "VaM (OpenVR).bat" for VR mode through SteamVR. I recommend the first time to run it on Desktop to set the license and make sure it works for you.

After starting it, you'll see a menu where you can set your license key. It's highly recommend to use the creator version, the creator key, even if you're not looking to be a creator. To keep it short, the game was abandoned a long time ago and it's mostly unplayable and barren with the other keys. With creator mode, you'll have access to all features and it will work with mods. You'll get a license key based on your subscription tier on meshedvr's patreon. Once you enter your license code, you'll see the game unlock:

❔ Where to get mods

you can find mods on the official vam site

there's many creators that do releases on patreon and a few on other sites

❔ How to use mods

Mods, or Addons in Virtamate terms, are files with the extension .VAR. These are basically zip archives that contain mod files. To use them, you have to put them in the game folder AddonPackages. You have to keep their original names. It's like this:{CreatorName}.{AddonName}.{version}.var . For example, SPQR.AliveCore.14.var.

Unlike other games where mods are centralized, in Virtamate 1 mods can serve multiple purposes and be used in various ways. In a sense, they're more like expansions packs. They don't do anything on their own. They just add content to your game, content which you can then load and use yourself.

When you want to load a scene for example, you'll see in your file browser all the mods that have scenes. You can select them and browse them, then open a scene from your addons. Same when you load plugins, textures and pretty much everything else in Virtamate 1. When you browse, things will be usually filtered by context. When you press a button to change a look, in the file browser you'll see the var addons that have looks in them.

Some of the mod content will appear directly in your main VAM UI, like hair items, clothes items and morphs. When you add mods that have any of these, they will automatically be shown when you're browsing through the UIs. The items will be mixed together with the default VAM hair, clothes & morphs items.

After you add new mods to your folder, make sure to restart the game for the changes to take effect.

❔ How to use plugins

A big part of virtamate 1 are scripts, or plugins. These are C# scripts that are part of the addon mod file. They have the extension .cslist or .cs. If you see both, you should pick the first one, the .cslist file.

There are 3 main types of plugins:

Atom plugins - these are plugins you add on an object in the scene, like on a model, and it will add functionality to that object (just for that scene). To add them, you can select an atom and go to the Plugins tab

Scene plugins - these are plugins that are more general, do things that are more global and not specific just to one atom. Like a plugin to add background audio for example. These can be added from the Scene Plugins tab in the main menu:

Session plugins - these are pretty much the same as Scene plugins above, with one difference, they last for your entire virtamate session (until you close it). Scene plugins will be part of your scene. They'll also save with your scene. Once you change the scene, those plugins will stop. With Session plugins on the other hand, those will run continuously, even if you switch your scenes. These plugins won't be saved with the scenes, they operate above the scenes, kind of like on the main menu level. To add these, you can use the Session Plugins tab from the main menu.

In all three cases, you just press Select File and pick a plugin (cslist or cs file) from your directories or mods. There isn't a clear way to identify which type of plugin is which. This is usually mentioned by the plugin makers in their plugin descriptions. And almost all plugins work in either of the ways. Session and Scene plugins are almost always the same, it's up to you to pick how you want to use them, either as part of the scene or as part of your virtamate session. And in both cases you can put those plugins on objects in the scene too, and that virtually works the same as scene plugins, the plugins become part of the scene. Many creators for example use PostMagic (visual effects plugin by MacGruber) by putting it on an empty atom in their scenes while other use it as a scene plugin. And some players use it a Session plugin, to have constant customizable VFX and filters that works across all scenes.

Once you load a plugin, it usually has a custom UI you can open from the plugin list. From there you can configure more in depth how the plugin works. These UIs vary a lot, they're all custom made, so they each have a learning curve.

❔ How to use plugin presets

some plugins have their own preset system and have various internal presets. Like my ProPiercing plugin for example, it lets you create a combination of piercings that you can save and load anytime

Person atoms also have a Plugin Presets tab directly in Virtamate. This should let you save all your current plugins on that person as a preset which you can later load

Scene & Session plugins have presets too, in Scene Plugin Presets & Session Plugin Presets tabs in the main menu. These presets are interchangeable.

❔ How to load plugins automatically

With some big plugins, you'll might want to automatically load them, have them run directly when you open Virtamate as session plugins. Otherwise, you have to manually load them and configure them each time you play.

For that, Virtamate has a "User Defaults" system. It lets you save a default preset which loads automatically from "Change User Defaults" and then "Set Current As User Defaults":

When you select this, it will save all of your current Session Plugins. The next time you open the game, the plugins should automatically load.

❔ How to get better performance

Performance has often been an issue with Virtamate and you'll likely encounter performance issues sooner or later. To improve it a bit, there are some plugins and patches for it, namely the CPU Performance Patch that you can find on google or on the hub site. And the GiveMeFPS plugin.

To further improve performance, here's what you can do:

stick to only one or two models at most in your scene. More than that will hurt performance considerably. Even though the game allows you to add lots of characters, it was not designed for that purpose, but for small scenes with limited characteres. I don't remember ever seeing a scene made with 4 characters, and even 3 are rare. So if you have extra characters in your scene that don't really do much for the scene, it's recommended to drop them to save performance.

stick to as few lights as possible, even zero if you don't mind how it looks. Lights affect performance a lot, especially if the lights also have shadows enabled on them.

when activating many hair and clothing items on your model, make sure you disable physics on items that you don't absolutely need physics for. For hair for example, you might not need physics for the base of the hair items, only for different items like bangs or tails.

Lowering physics settings for clothing items that don't require high settings should help too. For clothes that have sim enabled (they have physics rather than being static), you can lower the number of Iterations. You can get them to look good even with 1 or 2 iterations if you play around with osme of the other sliders too.

For hair items, you can reduce the sliders for Curve Density & Hair Multiplier. These will reduce the count of strands of hair but you can counter that by increasing the Width slider in the Look Tab. Lowering the iterations to 1 or 2 is also recommended, unless you need the highest quality hair physics possiblle in the game. In most cases, you probably won't need super high quality hair physics, just basic physics will do the job and look almost as good.

Having too many mods in your AddonPackages folder will slow down the game during some loading times so it's recommended to clean it up often and keep just what you need and use.

On desktop, it's recommended to turn on the Desktop Vsync options in the game settings, or use a frame limiter plugin. The Vsync option will lock down the frame-rate to the frequency of your monitor and avoid rendering frames that your eyes can't really even see. If virtamate pushes your GPU to the max framerate possible, it's possible you'll get more stutter due to bottlenecks. An example plugin that limits the framerate is FrameRateControl from MacGruber's Essentials pack.

❔ Why are some mods missing & versions

The addons have versioning. Normally, you'll see only the latest version of each addon when you browse. Sometimes you'll might want to use an older version. My Alive plugins for example are very often unique and do different things version by version. Each version reflect the current plans & direction for the project, and some feature might get axed because they're not part of the plan. I also make lots of big changes often and push for trying to make things a lot better, but that's subjective. In some cases, some of you will like older versions better because those version just fit better how you play the game. The solution is to load the version you prefer. And you can do that very simply by unchecking this checkbox when browsing files:

When that's checked, you'll only see the latest of each version of an addon. If you have SPQR.AliveCore.13, SPQR.AliveCore.14, SPQR.AliveCore.15, then you'll see only version 15. But with that unchecked, you'll see all 3 versions and you'll be able to pick the version you like best easier.