We are soon releasing new updates to address hacking issues quicker and more effectively. Read more about it in this post.
Learn about how we do Custom Shirt moderation, our new appeal system and how we're applying these lessons to Avatar Studio in this blog!
We’re launching new player chat settings that give you more control over who can directly message you.
The full body avatar beta is now available for everyone! To celebrate, we wanted to share some of the nerdy details on how we made the full body avatar work and a refresher on why we did it.
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!).
Yes! Creators are now eligible to exchange their tokens for REAL MONEY. In fact, we’ve just cashed out several creators prior to publishing this article. Our creators have had such a tremendous impact on Rec Room that we wanted to enable them to turn their tokens into real money. Now, we’re introducing that system to you here.
Glass is something we’ve talked about a whole lot over the years. It’s been one of the most consistent requests from creators, brought up in every Q&A, and is something we’ve wished for on the team as well. We’re super excited to finally give our creators an easy and fully-supported way to make windows and water and more, without a giant martini glass or hacky strings of CSS.
For more info on how to use the new glass prop, check out:
We put a lot of love into this little cube, and we can’t wait to see what you make with it! But I know glass has been a long time coming, and it looks a little different than what we said we were shooting for, so I wanted to talk a little bit about why we’ve made the decisions we have, and what we hope for in the future.
We’re doing a little bit of movie magic here to make sure the glass looks nice and shiny everywhere. Some of our base rooms have lush, detailed reflection information built into them from their RRO days...and some of them don’t, because we don’t know what you’re going to build! But a reflective material only looks as nice as what it’s reflecting, so the glass was looking pretty flat in the Maker Room at first.
We don’t want a reflection that’s blatantly fake - but we don’t want it to be empty, either. So as part of our fancy shader, we’re piping in a little bit of nonsense data that will mix with the colors from the SkyDome chip in the Maker Room. Just enough noise to give it some gleam!
Accurate reflection, and fake, respectively!
We’ve had a lot of people ask us for glass as a material, and in fact that was our initial approach! Unfortunately, we ran into some issues with it.
When we were talking about glass last fall, we were also exploring ways to make our maker pen geometry render faster. We had high hopes for this work, and among other things, we were trying to solve one of the most pernicious problems with transparent shapes: sort order. (Bet you thought I was going to say performance!)
Roughly speaking, objects are drawn each frame in order from furthest away to nearest, based on their center, so that you see closer objects “in front.” Thanks to some shader magic, merging a bunch of maker pen shapes into one shape container makes them all count as one object for this purpose. That’s why it saves you ink!
Drawing things from back to front isn’t always perfect, especially with really big objects. Let’s say you’ve got a house that’s been merged into one shape container, and you make a little table to go inside it. For most of the places inside that house, the center of the house is closer to you than the center of the table. If the “further away” table rendered first, and the “closer” house rendered on top of it, you wouldn’t see the table at all. It might flicker in and out depending on where you walked. The results would be weird and really obviously wrong!
For opaque objects, there’s a “depth buffer” to make sure that if half of an object is hidden by something else, the stuff that’s hidden doesn’t get drawn, no matter which object is actually closer to you. This depth data means that it doesn’t really matter what order things get drawn in, except for optimization.
However, you can’t use this for transparent objects. They have to be drawn back-to-front or they look wrong - since you can see through them, there’s no faking it with a depth buffer. We found ourselves in the situation of having a house with glass windows, with a glass table inside it, and being unable to ensure that they’d draw in the right order.
There are ways to solve this, but unfortunately, we haven’t found a solution yet that runs well on all of our platforms. We aren’t finished exploring rendering options, but it’s a long term effort, and it became clear that waiting would mean you guys had to go much longer without glass. And we really wanted to get you something fun and useful sooner than that!
A real glass material is still on our wishlist! We’re also starting to discuss ways to let creators set up custom reflection information for their rooms, which will improve the accuracy of glass reflections and metallic surfaces, and generally make all of the lighting look nicer. We hope to continue to make glass more expressive, and to that end, expanded configuration options are coming very soon to let you enable decoration mode and remove the collision. And if you have any other glass-related requests, we would love to hear them!
But wait, there’s even more! Also introducing: Audio FX Zones! A resizable gadget that modifies sound within its invisible volume.
One of the delights we’ve had in creating Rec Room quests is the environmental storytelling we get to do. Sound plays a critical role in immersing you in these rooms. We wanted to give you the same power to bring players into special audio environments in your rooms, like how we take you into space in ‘The Rise of JumboTron’ or take you underwater in ‘The Isle of Lost Skulls’.
You now have the ability to make a great throne room with heavy echoes, or a misty field with muffled sounds, or a partially flooded submarine where you move in and out of underwater sections and metal corridors with creepy reverb.
To enable this, we’ve included our first implementation of Audio FX zones. Using the maker pen you can find Audio FX Zones in the ‘gadgets’ and then ‘other gadgets’ section. One of our use cases for the Audio FX Zones has been to let you tell the story of a complex place through how it sounds, which means you need lots of capability with the shape of the volume.
You can use all of your regular tools to scale, move, and rotate volumes to fit most spaces. We’ve also added in the ability to make spherical Audio FX zones so you can fit curved spaces as well.
Sometimes, you’ll find yourself overlapping these zones, which is why we’ve also included a priority section. This will let you set some zones to higher priorities, so in case you’re standing in an overlap, you’ll hear the effects of that zone, over others.
We’re excited to see how you use the different effects, and want to hear what you’d like next!
Learn how to add extra character to your rooms with audio effects by watching a quick tutorial here!
As always, thanks for playing!
If you’re a creator in Rec Room, and have spent some time making custom Rooms, you’ll have noticed that everything you create in a Room has an Ink cost and there’s an Ink limit in each Room that determines the amount of stuff you can put inside it. If you’ve noticed this, it’s probably because you’ve “run out of Ink” and asked yourself something along the lines of “why can’t I have more?”, and then subsequently things like “why does this or that cost so much!?” or “why does Rec Room hate my creativity??”
I will try to explain a little bit about why the Ink system exists, how it works, and hopefully answer some of these questions.
Note: this is the end of 4-part series on Tomb Heist that started with costumes++ and continued with AI features and doors++.
Tomb Heist! is the name of the current Maker Pen Experiment we are building internally at Rec Room using only the maker pen. Unlike previous #RRO rooms, Tomb Heist will be released as a community room. As we build it, we’ll be creating and releasing new creative tools.
Note: this is part 3 of a 4-part series on Tomb Heist that started with costumes++ and continued with AI features.
It’s been a while, but just to recap what Tomb Heist! is all about:
Tomb Heist! is the name of the current Maker Pen Experiment we are building internally at Rec Room using only the maker pen. At the end of the project, this would not be released as an #RRO, but rather a community room. As we build it, we’ll be creating and releasing new creative tools.
In the coming months, we will be making improvements to rec.net centered around creators. Specifically, we want to make it easy for you to showcase all of your Rec Room creativity. We want to allow you to transform your rec.net profile into a full-fledged creator portfolio, akin to other creative portfolio websites such as artstation.com. For creators with a lot of content, we also want to make it possible for you to choose what content visitors see first on your profile.
To focus the Circuits V2 efforts in the Tomb Heist! Project we decided we wanted the AIs in this mini quest to behave fundamentally different from the regular AIs that we have in the rest of our RRO quests. We wanted to use existing enemies that players could already spawn in their rooms, but have them do something beyond just rushing at players and attacking blindly. We wanted them to be more akin to tactical adventure games like Metal Gear or Tomb Raider, but most importantly, all the new behavior had to be completely done in Circuits V2.
A long time ago, in a Rec Room far far away, when Sandbox Machines roamed custom rooms, the first version of Circuits was conceived. We wanted a way for players to add logic to their rooms, a way to allow rooms to be dynamic, more alive, and hopefully, more fun. Thus, Circuits were born, the “logic” system in Rec Room, used to drive everything from game rules, to player spawning, to Gizmos and sound effects…
Today we want to talk about the Selling Inventions Beta we just kicked off, and the other features we’re planning that will enable players to earn more tokens. We’ll get into what’s going on now, what we’re planning Kinda SoonTM (in the next 1-3 months), and what we’re excited about in the longer term. As with everything we do, we want to remain flexible here to adapt to how you are using the features, so the farther out the planning gets the looser it gets.
Last week we released a new feature called Room Comments, and this week we wanted to take a deep dive into why and what this means for Rec Room.
We thrive off of community feedback at Rec Room and we want to give creators a chance to engage in deeper collaboration within their communities. Internally we’ve talked about this as “audience connection” - we want creators to feel as connected to their audiences as we feel to our player community...
And we’re back! Our second edition of the developer blog gives you a sneak peak at our roadmap for creator-facing features. We have some powerful new tools for creators in the pipeline, and we’re excited to share a little bit of our plan. Creator tools aren’t the only thing we have cooking, it’s just our focus for today. Other plans will have to wait for their own time to shine [|=)]
