Rec Room News

Playing Rec Room with a controller or a touchscreen should be just as fun, creative, and social as playing in VR. We want players to have the same capabilities regardless of which platform they play on...and right now they don’t.

There are things you can do in VR that are hard or downright impossible to do with a controller. On the dev team we often talk about a gap that exists between the capabilities of players in VR and the capabilities of players on screens. With this update we’re taking a big step towards closing that gap, we’re introducing Ambidextrous Screens Controls.

Previously, on screens you could only use your right hand to interact with the world. Now, with these new controls you can use either hand (or both simultaneously!) with as few restrictions as possible, just like VR players. This means dual-wielding works in Paintball, and you can finally eat some pizza and drink some bubbly at the same time.

We didn't just iterate on controls, we also took the opportunity to apply a fresh coat of paint to the screens and touch HUDs, we even added the option to hide the HUD entirely when playing with a gamepad or keyboard/mouse!

https://imgur.com/gD1M68j

## New HUD!

We also redesigned the way that players access their Equip Slots on Screens. It’s now possible to store and retrieve objects from any available slot using either hand - just like in VR.

https://imgur.com/a/VeFy0Vq

## New Holsters Menu!

To fully support these new controls we had to shuffle around some button mapping, you can check out the updated mapping below. You can find these diagrams in your Watch Menu under Settings -> Help.

https://imgur.com/a/vtFRmhW

https://imgur.com/a/of2xDgz

https://imgur.com/a/qY07WiU

You can now form parties through the watch menu!

- When viewing a player's profile, select the "Party Up" button to send a new request or accept an existing one
- If you're already in a party with that player, the button will give you the option to leave that party instead
- Other players' party requests will appear in the Messages screen in your watch
- Like game invites, party request messages are temporary and appear for that game session only
- As a shortcut, you can also party up with nearby friends or players through the People screen

## General improvements

- Fixed a bug where extra text would appear when displaying bonuses at the end of a Rec Royale game
- You can now look at all the clothing other people are wearing via the new Outfit tab on their profile page, and you can buy any items you like from right there

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...

This update, VR players may notice a slight change to the visuals in the watch - this is our first pass at bringing a little dimension back to the UI. The navbar, dialogs and toasts in the new UI are raised above the watch surface now, but again, this is only a first pass, stay tuned for more to come!

## Polaroids everywhere

* Screen and Touch players can print Polaroids now.
* Polaroids display the username of the photographer.

## General improvements:

- Rec.Net: Added a page to display build contest winners
- Rec.Net: Updated the room browser UI
- Rec Room Plus members now have 100 saved outfit slots
- Fixed bug where tools could become stuck to players' hands when adding comments from room UI
- There is a new experience setting to disable notifications from gifts
- Stop player screen has an option to disable comfort mode
- Cheer screen now shows progress and disables button after pressing them
- Replaced the couch cushions
- You can now use ., - and _ as valid characters while naming new rooms, editing a room name from the watch and from Rec.Net
- While configuring Welcome mats to link to a room ., - and _ can be used
- While configuring Doors to link to a room ., - and _ can be used
-The Play Screen has been cleaned up, so players will no longer see the Top or Rec.Net tabs.
-If you have platform friends, you’ll see an import button on the friends page that lets you add or dismiss them.
-There is a new tab in the people screen to quickly see all of your pending friend invites and address them
-The Recent and Nearby tabs have been merged, and you'll now see nearby players at the top of the Recent tab
- Fixed bug where clicking "Visit" button in room published messages sometimes wouldn't take player to room
- Fixed "Clear All" button on Notifications tab of Messages screen
- Sorted cards in the new UI will display information relevant to their sort criteria. For example, if events are sorted by attendance, it will show how many people are attending, and if they are sorted by time, they will show what time the event will occur.
- [PC VR] Restored anti-aliasing on the Streaming Camera
- Smoothed the motion of VR players' avatars during rotation

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...

Introducing, for the first time ever, the Creative Tools Beta!

We are introducing a way to experience current in-development creative tools, the Creative Tools Beta. In each room you create, you have the option to enable Beta Content and are free to use this content anywhere in the room, and subrooms. This gives you an early preview of upcoming creative features, and offers you the opportunity to provide early feedback. A few important points about enrolling in the Creative Tools Beta are outlined here, including significant risks of using in-development tools:

• We may make drastic changes or even completely remove beta content features, which could break your creations in these rooms.
  
• Any room that uses beta content forfeits the ability to be entered into official Rec Room creative contests.
  
• You cannot create inventions in beta rooms. This may change.
  
• Rooms that use beta content will be marked with the #beta tag.
  
• Beta rooms may receive special UI treatment in the future to inform players of unstable content
  

We hope you enjoy these new tools, and more importantly we hope to hear your feedback about these tools so we can make them better before release. Speaking of new, and exciting creative tools...


Today marks a day we've been looking forward to for over 2 years. Since launching circuits in 2018 we've known they aren't for the faint of heart. With time and patience circuits can be used effectively, but their limitations make some creations impossible and their complexity makes building tedious. Every once in a while we make a fundamental improvement in Rec Room that expands the universe of possibilities for creation. We believe that Circuits V2 is one of those improvements and we are excited to share it with you!

The functionality we're giving you today is new and exciting, but also experimental. As per the experiment, any and all aspects of Circuits V2 may be changed before being moved out of Beta. - there is also still missing functionality provided by Circuits V1 that we intend to provide over time. Things like buttons, trigger volumes, and gizmos won't interact with this new system just yet. That being said, if there is a specific usability issue or missing feature you'd like to see changed in the future we'd love to know about it. With your help, we can make Circuits V2 even better!

The CV2 functionality we are shipping today focuses mainly on AI scripting, and while functionality outside of that is still fairly limited, there are a bunch of other chips present that can be used to make some fun stuff. (We've made things like a text-based combat system where you initiate a fight by punching someone, and a "quiz show" that asks you arithmetic questions.)


You can find these in the "Other Gadgets" section of your Palette once you enable the Beta Content in your room.
[h2]Spawner Gadget V2[/h2]

This is a Circuits V2 version of the Spawner Gadget that provides much more flexibility. It works almost identically to the V1 spawner, but has more pins on it, like an input for you to override the spawn location directly. Note: AIs and Path Points have Control Panels on them which provide the flexibility to script your very own AI behavior. Read more about these in the CV2 getting started guide!
[h2]Path Points[/h2]

These are handy ways to set up paths for your AIs to follow. Drop these in your room and connect them with the wire tool to create a directional path. You can connect the "Self" output pin of a Path Point's Control Panel to an AI Path To chip to get the AIs on your new path. Note, you will also need a "Creation Object To AI" CV2 node connected to the output of the Spawner Gadget V2.


We have updated the Spawner Gadget so you can now configure the object that is set to spawn. Examples include setting an object as grabbable, tags, respawn delays, etc. However, much more exciting options have been added to AIs! Note, this upgrade applies to both the CV1 Spawner, and the CV2 Spawner Gadgets.

On AIs, we've made it so you can change the speed, health, team and other options. Note: some AIs may have extra configurables, so be sure to check them all out.
You can also recolor AIs to any color in the palette, just like you can for props.
We have also added the ILS Rum Jug to the spawner.

We also took a look at teleporting, which has been upgraded to allow a lot of the functionality Walking has had for a while. Teleporting now includes the ability to:

• Climb
  
• Fall when room scaling past an edge
  
• Bump/Push other players when the role setting is enabled in your room
  
• Platforms that use Pistons/Animations now provide proper support for teleporters. An example of this are elevators and moving platforms.
  

The comfort settings page has been slightly expanded to include more comfort options for the newly added features. These include vignettes, as well the ability to fully black out the screen during these scenarios, such as falling.

We've also combined the checkboxes for Motion Teleport (previously found in Settings > Experience) and the teleport vignette (under Settings > Gameplay > Comfort options) into a single "Teleport" slider on the Comfort Options screen. Please note: We weren't able to carry over everyone's settings perfectly. If you previously had motion teleport disabled, you might need to manually set the new slider to Full one time.

General improvements:

• You might have noticed that ever since creator announcements launched you've been seeing fewer room published announcements in your messages screen. Whoops! This build re-adds room published notifications to the messages screen, as well as invention published notifications, and general creator announcements. If you ever feel like you're seeing too many announcements you can toggle off the 'Subscriptions' message group in your options to stop seeing them.
  
• Fixed floating Goblin Elites in GT, CCC and UGC
  
• Fixed issue where duplicate club events sometimes appeared on a club details screen
  
• Enemies will trigger proximity mines
  
• The Desktop Sharing Speaker finally supports selecting different audio sources!
  
• Fix for an issue where volume settings would sometimes not save correctly.
  
• Reduced how frequently we warn you of the weekly limits when changing your display name.
  
• Avatar mouths should now only animate when players are actually talking
  

Some quality-of-life improvements to ^3DCharades:

• Maximum drawing time is slightly longer, 1 minute for Co-op and 45 seconds for Team Lightning. Game length has been adjusted accordingly.
  
• Guessers can no longer interfere by grabbing the drawing when it is not their turn.
  
• "Away from keyboard" prevention measures have been added to paintball and lasertag. Tokens, Tickets, and leaderboard stats will not be issued for these 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...

Introducing Club Events - a great new way to bring club members together! As a club leader (or someone with the events permission) you can create a club event using the 'events' button on your club details page. New club events will show up for club members the next time they log in.
Public club events still appear in the Events section of your watch, but only club members can view a club's private events. In the Clubs section of your watch, the "Upcoming Events" stripe will show you all current and future events for clubs you're in! Select any of these events to view details and RSVP. You can also view and manage an individual club's events on the club details screen.
If you create a new event from the club's event screen it will automatically become a Club Event. But you can also promote existing events to Club Events! On the details screen for an event you've created, select "Invite Players" and the Clubs tab to add, remove or change the club tied to an event. (Note: You can only associate one club with each event at this time.)
Club owners control who can create and associate events with their club. On your Club screen, go to "Club Settings" and configure the "Can create club events" permission for each membership level.
General improvements:

• You can now teleport to room comments in the world by clicking the "go to" button on comments in the UI. We're hoping this will help creators get more context about bug reports and feedback left in their rooms
  
• We now display creators' room showcases that they've set up on rec.net in Rec Room creator portfolios!
  
• Fixed a problem resuming Rec Room from a suspended power state on Quest
  
• Adjusted settings to reduce out-of-memory crashes on PS4
  

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...

This patch includes a Unity engine upgrade to 2019.4. This should give our team new tools & capabilities to improve the overall performance of Rec Room. Don't expect anything big out of the gate, performance will remain largely similar for the time being. There's more to come in the future.

As we get the new upgrade into place and start leveraging its new capabilities, we'll be able to make improvements in subsequent updates. In the meantime let us know if you spot any unexpected bugs or hitches which weren't happening previously. If you've got something, file it at HappyFox, or message !bugreport to RecBot on our Discord!
General improvements:

• We changed the screen share permissions so that everyone is able to see someone else's screen! If you're interested in being able to share your screen and are a PC player, please email us at [email protected]. You no longer need to email in if you just want to watch someone else's screen
  
• We also fixed a bug where players can climb onto rocks in Disc Golf :)
  

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...