Rec Room News

Codes and Links have been unified and polished, and can now be used on all platforms! Codes are used for Meetups, Friend Invites, and Referrals with more to come. You can discover, create and enter all types of codes from the new Code button on the home screen of your watch. For your convenience, you can also enter any code from the login screens. When you create a code, you’ll also see a unique RecNet link for that code. This link is helpful for sharing with others: it displays the code, helps install Rec Room, and even supports Quick Play for iOS and PC users.

Meetup codes - Create a private instance of a room that only other people with the code can access. Great for meetings and hangouts where you don't want to have to manually invite everyone. The meetup code also works for non friends which makes it ideal for quickly meeting up with people not already on your friends list.

Friend codes - Single use invites that will automatically add the player to your friends list and bring them to wherever you are in Rec Room. If you're in a private room when they enter the code it will auto ping you saying they have requested to join. This is a great way to quickly invite a single person to your friends list and quickly bring them to you.

Referral codes - Referral codes should only be used when a referral event is running. By referring new players during an event you can unlock different rewards. Watch out for in game announcements or announcements on our social channels for when these events are happening. We will be running one soon! There's also an 'event details' section of the Codes screen that will show if an event is currently active or not along with the event details. The referral code ensures we attribute new players to your account so that we can issue you the event rewards. Referral code players are not added to your friends list so that you can share this code more widely to anyone who might be interested in trying out Rec Room. This system will be updated over time with new features like sending you a notification when someone has used your referral code. For now there is no way to tell how many people have used your code until we issue rewards at the end of the event.

We’re also starting a Selling Inventions Beta - A small group of players are selling inventions for tokens. These beta sellers were selected based on their creation skills, their history of giving quality feedback, and their good moderation standing. It’s an intentionally small group for the beta period as we test out the system and find the flaws. Anyone can buy these inventions from the Inventions store in the watch. There are some really great things there: costumes, furniture, animated characters, games, and more.

And some general bug fixes:

• Fix for sign collision in disc golf, paintball, and soccer
  
• Fixed bug where settings screen could show incorrect options
  
• Improved navmesh baking to better respect the bounds of objects
  
• Improved quick action menu sizing on non-VR platforms
  
• Changed SetLeaderboardStat chip to use an 'invalid' mode by default. You will need to explicitly choose the assignment behavior in the configure menu before the chip works. In the case where a room instance breaks, the chip should revert to the invalid state preventing data loss for users.
  

As always, thanks for playing Rec Room!
Please see here for convenient links to controls, tutorials, comfort options, etc.: https://recroom.com/community
We love to hear your feedback, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think...

https://imgur.com/a/zcYRax0

This one's been a long time coming! We've seen so much enthusiasm and positivity around the Quests we've built over the years, and as long as community rooms have existed, the ability to build experiences with AI has consistently been one of our most requested features. Today we're excited to announce our first step in an ongoing journey to bring delightful, expressive, and robust AI tools into Rec Room for everyone to use! It all starts with Golden Trophy Goblins and JumboTron bots, but this is just the beginning, and you can look forward to many more AI features in the coming months!

https://recroom.com/developer-blog/2020/5/5/ai-in-rec-room-you-are-here

New Things for Creators to use:

- The Spawner Gadget
https://imgur.com/a/uKbLcCJ
This unassuming-yet-powerful little Gadget is now available in the Maker Pen Palette under Gadgets -> Other Gadgets. The purple base and beacon indicate the location for its spawned object, and the chip provides its circuit interface. This Gadget will ultimately be able to spawn just about anything in Rec Room, but today you can use it to spawn AI and some destructible props.
To spawn an AI, place one of these in your room, and then select it with the Configure Tool to select whatever you'd like to spawn:
https://imgur.com/a/qsxMXoU
Once you've selected something to spawn, you'll see a purple-tinted preview of the AI in the location where it will show up. To spawn an AI, send a circuit signal to the Red input pin!
https://imgur.com/a/Gj7woL2

- Navigation Data
We've built a lot of gameplay scenarios in our Quests and Laser Tag maps, but we've barely scratched the surface on the variety of environments these bots can play in. We're excited to see you push these limits, and because everyone builds environments differently, we've provided a visual indicator to help illustrate how these AI see the world and navigate through it. If a hallway is too narrow for a bot to fit through, you'll see that reflected in the navigation data. If a hill is too steep for AI to climb, you'll see that too, all without having to test all these scenarios manually.
https://imgur.com/a/gbGFL1D
https://imgur.com/a/Lwdl0XP
For creators, this visualization is a powerful design aid and time saver to help make sure your environments support the gameplay you want for your players. This information will then be saved into the room, and you’ll only need to redo the bake step when something changes where AI can move in the room, like moving walls or furniture.
Before you can have AI running around your room, open your Watch Menu, and go to This Room -> Settings -> AI -> Navigation and hit the button to bake NavMesh.
https://imgur.com/a/ZOQ0oIv
If you forget where to find this, you can follow the in-game prompt that displays if you attempt to spawn AI in a room that doesn't have navigation data yet.
**A couple quick tips for working with AI**
We’ve added a couple features to make it easier to iterate on your gameplay setups. First, we’ve added a Destroy All AI button to the AI Settings tab in room settings. This will clear out any AIs currently running around in your room. It’s easy to lose track of them as you’re testing a bunch. Second, we’ve added the ability to specify whether a trigger volume should only trigger once.
https://imgur.com/a/BYisIZR
With this set to true, if you just want one wave of spawns, your players will really only get one wave of spawns, rather than triggering spawns every time they touch a trigger volume.
We’ve also added a new Reset Gadgets button to the Maker Pen settings menu.
https://imgur.com/tQGFhPT
In Rec Room we have a very fluid line between creation and play. That said, as we add more complex features like AI, it’s helpful to be able to quickly try your experiences over and over, and see them the way your users would see them. This button provides a way to clear out non-permanent changes to the room, and reset the room back to the state it was in before circuits started running logic. This button currently only applies to the trigger count for Trigger Volumes, and the state of your Spawner Gadgets, but it’s likely we’ll expand this to reset other gadgets where it helps. If you work anything like we do, this one will make iteration on gameplay setups much smoother.
Lastly, we’ve added a configuration shortcut to our Game Rules chip in order to help Creators quickly configure their own games to run similar to our Quests.
https://imgur.com/a/jnP8jys
If you're using a Game Rules chip for game states, Reset Gadgets also gets called automatically on game start and game end. So if you have AI running around during pre-game, they'll get cleaned up before the game starts. And if AI are still alive when the game ends, they'll get cleaned up when you transition to post-game. The Reset Gadgets button is currently the only way you can manually trigger it.
All right, that should be enough to get you started creating with AI in Rec Room! As we mentioned at the beginning, this is just the first step in our journey to bring the delight and expressiveness of AI to everyone in Rec Room. As always, give us your feedback, both good and bad, hit us with all your feature requests, and stay tuned for more exciting AI features to come!

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While we were building our new AI systems, we also took this time as an opportunity to run a comb through our existing Quests to tune interactions and squash a whole bunch of bugs!
General Quest bug fixes:
- Fixed spawn points being above the ground in some spots
- Fixed lock icons not going away when you unlock mid level gates and end doors
Curse of the Crimson Cauldron:
- Improved visibility and flow in the ladder section of the bell-tower
- Pike Goblins' shields now react more physically to being hit by projectiles
- Fixed a spot where you could get stuck on a ladder in the first level
- Added some ramps to clean up areas where players were getting stuck
- Fixed some black textures
Crescendo of the Blood Moon:
- Fixed various props clipping into geometry
- Sound effects that previous had no mixer assigned are now in SFX or Ambience
- Fixed a visual on a skeleton hand that showed a book
- Fixed a sprinkler effect that wasn't visible in the first level
- Lowered miniboss' hit audio volume
- Fixed enemy pathing issues in the Lower Sanctum level
- Lowered Musket Enemy health from 100->75. This makes it a little more feasible to flank a squad of enemies
- Made some navigation improvements to the ballroom level, specifically reaching the door at the end of the room
- Fixed some mini-bosses not spawning silver
- Minor performance improvements in some scenes
- Adjusted volume of the fire traps to be more audible
- Fixed a spot in the boss room that you could get stuck behind props
- Fixed getting out of the map in the Grand Hall
The Rise of JumboTron:
- Fixed a wall that had no collision in the first level
- Fixed meshes being unable to utilize LODs
- Fixed JT grenade damage radius visual
- Fixed props clipping inside of each other
- Fixed some collision clipping to allow smoother movement on some staircases
Isle of Lost Skulls:
- Fixed a name not showing up on one of the loot chest pedestals
- Fixed a bunch of audio sources that had no sound channel assigned
- Fixed the hat being the wrong color for the third slot outfit in the ILS storefront.
- Fixed an enemy killzone not working in the boss room

We also made some fixes to Laser Tag maps:
Hangar
- Fixed Laser Launcher power weapon damage radius visual
- Fixed bleachers collision to be more accurate
- Fixed a hole in the map that let you leave the arena
CyberJunk City
- Fixed some UVs on the orange side tower
- Made the orange side tower's windows slightly taller so you can enter and exit from the windows easier
- Re-tuned occlusion bake values to reduce areas where parts of the map disappear
- Adjusted collision on the overpass so its more accurate
- Fixed a window collision that allowed teleporters to get on top of a building in the map that was unintended

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Unrelated we also added notification filtering settings to experience settings to help keep notification clutter down.

We also already have some updates to Clubs:
- Inviting all friends or nearby players to a club now prompts you with a confirmation screen.- “Sort By” options for club join requests work correctly now
- Club searches can now be run by hitting enter or submit, and provide more details about the search when no results are found
- Searching for players on club invite and ban pages should be faster and more responsive
- Club settings screen does not re-show Code of Conduct warning if the club is already public
- Club and member search text doesn’t get cleared when navigating
- Fixed a few typos in clubs pages, including the typography crime that was the word “CoOwner” :)
- Added join date to club member details page
- Updated validation and feedback messages for various club actions to be smaller and more concise
- Hitting the back button after removing a member or deleting a club no longer results in a 404
- Setting club photos now give better details about whether it is adding or replacing an existing photo

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Also some general bug fixes:
- Unfavorite button in player details page was truncated
- Tooltips on room report categories were incorrect
- Friends list was updating too often and making it unusable for people with many active friends
- Chat message behavior improved for unread messages
- Vote to Kick button behavior improved when initiating a vote to kick
- Fix that prevents WalkVR players being able to teleport off of Royale gliders
- Fix for getting stuck in strange animation states when player releases 2-handed tools (ex: Cannon)
- Fix for animation tool desyncs when player joins room after it has been saved
- Fix for not being able to set shape equip slots on costume dummy in screens
- Fix for screens players not being able to fly when falling
- Fix that makes 3D text display reflections and fog properly
- Fixes crashing and stalling when using the clear all notifications button
- Fixes comment UI paged grid from resetting to first page when cheering or reporting comment
- Reduces max number of comments user can leave per minute from 4 to 2
- Adjusted AFK detection on Steam VR to address issues with certain headsets
- Improved audio prioritization in rooms with lots of players

As always, thanks for playing Rec Room!
Please see here for convenient links to controls, tutorials, comfort options, etc.: https://recroom.com/community
We love to hear your feedback, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think...

We've added a new way for players to leave feedback in rooms they like in Rec Room -- the feedback tool! You can find the feedback tool in your backpack and use it to leave feedback, ideas, or bug reports in any user-created room. When holding the feedback tool, you'll see where other players left feedback in a room and, if you're a room creator, co-owner, or moderator, you'll be able to read the feedback by tapping the floating icons. To quickly manage feedback in a room you own, you can view recent comments in the new "Room Comments" tab under the room details UI. Creators can cheer commenters from comment bubbles to show their appreciation for their thoughtful feedback.

Creators will also receive watch notifications when their rooms have new comments. You can jump to these rooms right from the notification. Also, if your notifications list is getting a little too full, we've added a "Clear All Notifications" button to quickly clean up your inbox. Enjoy!

We also built out subroom welcome mats: you can now configure the welcome mat to support sub rooms and set the spawn point based on what room the player is coming from.

Also some bug fixes:
* Fixed bug where you couldn’t scroll past 10 clubs
* Fixed missing level up rewards
* Fixed infinite consumable bug
* Fixed bug that meant leaderboard stat values were truncated
* Fixed an issue where costumes didn’t respects world fade settings
* Fixed bug where arrows hung in the air when dropping the bow

As always, thanks for playing Rec Room!
Please see here for convenient links to controls, tutorials, comfort options, etc.: https://recroom.com/community
We love to hear your feedback, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think...

We promised it was coming Soon(tm). You waited. You asked on the Discord, you asked on the Reddit, you asked in AMAs. Well, the wait is over because this update brings:
* New **Clubs** feature! Rec Room Clubs allow you to create and manage communities of like-minded players!
* You can create a club for any topic/interest/reason you like (Code of Conduct permitting). Want to create a club for fans of scary horror rooms? You can do that! Want to create a club to discuss your favorite books, movies, games, etc.? You can do that too! We hope to see clubs large and small, public and private, open and invite-only, covering a wide array of topics and interests!
* You can use any room you created as a clubhouse for your club, and club members can choose to spawn in the clubhouse by default (bypassing the Dorm Room).
For a quick overview of how Clubs work, check out this video:
https://youtu.be/Xf6CcPpnM00
* Clubs is a new top-level button in the watch!
https://i.imgur.com/6wEbnBC.png
* NOTE: Clubs is built with a preview of a new UI system we're working on. So when you press the Clubs button you'll be transported to a _strange new world_ where the UI looks different. Lots of work remains to make it polished, so please give us feedback on what you like/don't like about it!
https://i.imgur.com/zUqozy1.png
* Once you're in the Clubs UI, you can browse existing Clubs, or tap "CREATE CLUB" to create your own.
* You can be a member of as many clubs as you want, but you can only create five clubs at any one time. We have limited it because we expect you to actively manage and moderate your club in accordance with the Code of Conduct. If it attracts too many reports you may receive moderation penalties including removal of your club.
* Please note that the new clubs feature replaces the old clubs we experimented with a loooong time ago on rec.net. Old club creators will be notified of the new system and the old clubs will be deprecated in 30 days after this update. Old clubs are not compatible with the new clubs system so creators will need to create them again in the new system. This means the old club name in your bio will disappear. But we are looking to bring that same functionality back soon to show and link to all of the new clubs you create or join! The good news is you can now be in as many clubs as you like and there is no limit on the number of players that can be in a club.
* New clubs don't have rec.net pages yet but we want to get to that work soon!
We can't wait to see the clubs you create, and we hope you find them useful and inspiring. This is a brand new feature, and we have plenty of improvements planned. So please let us know what you like/don't like about clubs and help us make them better!

We've also added another highly experimental new feature: The ^ARRoom! This "room" works using the AR (augmented reality) capabilities of the latest iOS devices to bring the full Rec Room experience into the real world! Check it out:
https://twitter.com/recroom/status/1238896912465448961
* iOS Users can go to Watch > Create > My Rooms > AR Room to enter AR mode. From there you can use the Maker Pen as normal to add props/shapes/etc. Rec Room will scan your room so it knows where the various surfaces are (walls, floor, tables, etc.) and things will bounce off them, etc.
* Players on other platforms can be invited to the "AR Room" by the iOS player. Rec Room will represent the scanned surfaces as colored shapes, so you'll be able to have some idea of what the remote room looks like! It's pretty weird, to be honest, but it's a science experiment and fun to play with =]
* Please note that the "AR Room" cannot be saved.
* iOS players can also play in any room using experimental AR Locomotion. In addition to the on-screen buttons, you can walk around your real-world space to move and aim your device to look.
Please let us know what you think of AR mode!

As always, thanks for playing Rec Room!
Please see here for convenient links to controls, tutorials, comfort options, etc.: https://recroom.com/community
We love to hear your feedback, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think...

Meetups have been polished up for your convenience!
* There is now an extra dialog when creating a meetup to prevent accidents. Remember that when you're in a meetup, your friends can only get to you by invite or with the meetup code/link!
* Your last successful meetup code is remembered for you.
* You are now notified when you enter a meetup, either when joining or when the private room instance you're in is converted to a meetup.

Additionally:
This update is a _minor_ engine upgrade that should get rid of the "Rec Room Requires Focus" warning on PC. We also hope it will allow us to get rid of the annoying "crash on exit" on PC which has been happening forever, but we haven't quite landed that change yet.

Please note that we still have a _major_ engine upgrade in the works!

In order to limit violations of the Code of Conduct, we are now launching Rec Room on PC via Easy Anti-Cheat (aka "EAC"):
https://easy.ac/en-us/
EAC may cause certain anti-virus programs to flag Rec Room as suspicious. If you experience this, please check these links for instructions on how to ensure Rec Room is allowed to run on your system:
https://recroom.happyfox.com/kb/article/47-common-error-codes/
https://easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/antivirus/
...or use one of the channels listed here to get in touch with us:
https://recroom.com/community
We want to help!

OK, also some bug fixes:
* Fixed bug that broke edit mode when creating on screens. Sorry about that :-/
* Fixed an issue that could cause bad performance on some iOS devices
* Fixed an issue where you couldn't connect chips spawned from inventions
* Fixed LookAt gizmo losing its assigned roles after a room save
* Fixed issue where "View All Creators" button wouldn't always repond
* Animation gizmo - fixed a few issues where it could pop or desynchronize, and one where it didn't undo moving connected objects
* Clamp gizmo - fixed issue where it would jump to random positions (sorry)
* Circuits - fixed an issue where floating point values didn't work with non-US locales
* Lost Skulls - Fixed some visual/lighting issues in Boat and Town levels
* Fix gadget visibility being tied to holding the maker pen
* Fix maker pen laser appearing to "stick" to objects during some operations
* Fix for checkpoint volumes not loading properly

As always, thanks for playing Rec Room!

Please see here for convenient links to controls, tutorials, comfort options, etc.: https://recroom.com/community

As always, we love to hear your feedback, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think...