Have you ever wanted to copy something? And paste it over, and over and over again?
Well now you can, in Rec Room!
While Rec Room has had the clone tool for a while, we’re thrilled to bring official Copy/Paste support to everyone.
Copy/Paste is a great way to well… copy… and paste! Unlike the clone tool, Copy/Paste lets you paste whenever and wherever, not just next to the selection you copied (though the clone tool still has many excellent uses!).
To use Copy/Paste, first bring up the selection tool. Select and object, or collection of objects, and go to options. You’ll get a preview bounding box of the item (you can turn this off in the palette if you find it distracting).
Oh yeah, options, that’s new too! We’ve added a new pop-up menu (it replaces the yellow “...” menu) whenever you use the selection tool.
From there, hit copy. Now your object is saved to the clipboard.
The clipboard can be accessed in the palette next to search and settings.
The clipboard saves your last 10 copies with timestamps to help you stay organized.
Something to note is that the clipboard is a temporary place to record things you want to paste; you’ll need to use inventions if you want to save things between rooms, or between play sessions. Copy/Paste is a lightweight system that doesn’t handle all of the complexities of Inventions like permissions but is really good at being fast to use and a great workflow improvement in a single room.
It was interesting trying to get the preview images for thumbnails. A big game like Rec Room has a bunch of custom rendering stuff and we had to jimmy it a bit for those previews to look good. For example, we had to hide the makerpen, avatar items, etc from the thumbnail camera. We also "zoom" the camera that takes the thumbnail image so it's a little clearer at that small size.
To paste an object, just click it! You’ll then get a green outline the same size as the object and you can paste as many times as you like. The snapping features in the palette work great with Copy/Paste, so try surface and grid snapping!
We knew the goal here was a "deferred" clone, so the under-the-hood rules for "can this thing be copied" is pretty much the same as "can this thing be cloned". We also make sure to serialize the thing at copy-time so you get an accurate snapshot of it when pasting later. This empowers scenarios like: copy, delete the original, and still paste.
We take the bounding box of your selection, pick the axis that most closely faces you, and save that information for later when pasting. We also copy off a bunch of information like the size of the bounds so you can get a preview box that feels good. Getting this to feel good and play nice with our snapping settings took some love.
We hope Copy/Paste is a useful tool for creators and can remove some of the hassle of duplicating complex things.
Whether it’s populating city streets with custom made streetlights, copying circuits, or just having fun filling your dorm room with a bunch of stacked physics objects we think you’ll love Copy/Paste!