Hi everyone!
Sorry that its been a couple months since we put out a patch. We've been very busy with a few major features and improvements that have required rewriting and refactoring a massive chunk of our codebase. As you can imagine, there are a lot of edge cases that need to be accounted for and we've been busy rooting out all of the bugs. We're in the home stretch, so we should hopefully have everything good to go for a patch sometime this week or next.
In the meantime, I thought it would be a good time to highlight the major changes coming in the next patch and what will be included in patches in the near future.
If you are interested in supporting us, getting the premium subscription goes a long way. It helps us continue to work on LAN Party and if we get enough subs, we'll be able to bring on some additional devs to help us get these features finished more efficiently.
Also, hop on our Discord! We appreciate any feedback we can get and I (Ryan) am always happy to help in any way I can!
Upcoming Patch Features/Changes
Room Templates & Default Room Layouts
In the next patch, you will be able to save a template of any of your rooms. This template will be an exact copy of the room at the moment you save the template. You can load room templates at any time to change your room layout to something completely new or to load a previously saved version of your room.
The marketplace has expanded to include room templates as well. You will be able to publish any of your saved templates to the marketplace, as well as add other player's templates to your library to use with your room.
While a lot of players enjoy the process of creating and decorating rooms from scratch, many players aren't interested in doing all of that and would rather have a fully furnished room to hang out in immediately. Based on player feedback we've received, we've updated the "Create Room" menu to allow you to pick a template to create your room with. We will also add several default room designs to use as a starting point as well. Starting from scratch will always still be an option.
This is a feature we've been dying to implement for a long time now, and we're incredibly excited for you to try it!
Dynamic Asset Creation
One of our guiding philosophies with LAN Party is that we want to give players the tools to easily put literally anything they want into LAN Party to use in their rooms. The problem is that most people (including myself) don't have a ton of 3D modeling/texturing experience, which poses a challenge when trying to create your perfect room.
Our solution is to partner with Meshy to give players the ability to create any 3D asset they want without needing other 3D modeling software. Meshy is a platform that allows users to create fully-textured 3D models with a simple text prompt, and we've integrated it directly into LAN Party. Simply go to Create -> Asset -> Generate from Prompt, describe the 3D asset you want, and it will automatically generate the asset and import it into LAN Party. From there, you can configure it like you would any other asset, upload it, and use it in your room. We will also be expanding this functionality for avatars as well in the near future.
We're really looking forward to getting your feedback on this feature and we hope this helps you personalize your rooms even further!
Major Code Rewrite/Refactoring
This one probably won't affect the player experience that much, but I figured I'd mention it since its been a major project of ours lately. We decided that with all of the major features we've added lately and plan to add in the future, a lot of our code (specifically in-room and room designer) needed to be rewritten and/or refactored. One reason we did this was for better code organization to make things easier on ourselves, but our main goal was to make our code more efficient and less prone to certain bugs.
Ironically, fundamental changes to our codebase can introduce new bugs due simply to how much certain systems have changed. While we believe we've rooted out and fixed nearly all of the bugs so far, edge cases are always bound to crop up. If you run into any bugs or issues, we encourage you to send in a bug report so we can see exactly what's going on and fix it. Also, it helps out a ton if you join our Discord and shoot me (Ryan) a DM. I'm always happy to help out, and its nice to have an open line of communication when trying to replicate a bug.
Near-Future Features/Changes
Linux & Steam Deck Streaming Support
As it currently stands, streaming in LAN Party does not work on the Steam Deck or any machines running Linux. This is because our streaming system utilizes many Windows-specific processes for encoding/decoding stream data and the common Linux compatibility layers (Proton, Wine, etc.) have trouble converting the processes properly.
We have been hard at work on a solution that will give Linux and Steam Deck users to fully utilize streaming in LAN Party. We've been struggling to get this new system to be as performant as our current system, but we've been making a lot of progress and we're hoping to have something ready for you guys to test out very soon.
Full Controller/Steam Deck Support
We've wanted to add full controller support for a very long time now, but we've been too busy with other features to really dedicate much time to it. However, with the announcement of the Steam Machine, it has jumped way up our list of priorities. We already have limited controller support for controlling the avatar in-room, but our plan is to expand controller support to all UI in the application.
Avatar Auto-Rigging
At the moment, there are a few ways to configure a humanoid avatar for LAN Party. If the avatar is already rigged, you either need to rename all of the relevant bones to our naming convention in Blender or use the in-app bone mapper to tell LAN Party how to configure the skeleton. Both can be pretty tedious, especially if the existing skeleton is very messy. If the avatar is not already rigged, you can pass it through AccuRig rig it for you. While the results you get from something like AccuRig are generally pretty good, it still requires going through a different piece of software to configure your avatar before bringing it into LAN Party.
To solve this, we've implemented a full auto-rigging system into LAN Party. With this, you just need to import your avatar into LAN Party, click "Generate Rig", and we'll generate a full humanoid rig for your avatar. Our hope is that this makes it super easy to bring any humanoid avatar into LAN Party without any tedious gruntwork or the need to use other pieces of software. I'm pleased to announced that this feature is nearly complete, so expect to see it within the next month.
New Text Chat System
Right now we have a pretty simple peer-to-peer chat system. When you enter a room, you will only receive chat messages that are sent while you are in the room, meaning you won't get any messages from before you enter or after you leave. There is no chat history saved from previous sessions in the room. Additionally, while our current messaging system supports rich text, we currently don't support sending images or other media types.
This will all change with the new text chat system we are working on. The system will now be controlled by our database rather than being simple peer-to-peer, meaning that the room's entire chat history will always be accessible in the chat window. This also allows us to support images and other media types, meaning you will be able to send images and files to your friends in your room. If you don't want your messages to persist in our database, there will be an option to keep using the peer-to-peer system currently in place.
Our new system will be a tabbed system that will allow you to have multiple chats going at the same time. You will be able to stay and engage in a room's chat after leaving the room and you can join a room's chat without entering it. You can also DM your friends directly for a 1-on-1 chat, which can be helpful if you are playing a competitive team game in a room and want to give a friend information without everyone else seeing it. If you want to get the attention of a friend who isn't currently in your room, you can "@" them in the room's chat and they will be immediately notified.
This new chat system will also allow for direct communication between developers and players. Our bug reporting system has been pretty frustrating for us because there are so many reports where we desperately want to follow up with the player but there's no way for us to do so. The new chat system will have a "Developer" tab, where you can message us directly about suggestions and issues you are running in to and we can follow up for more info on bug reports you send in.
Virtual Gaming Setups
One of my favorite aspects of in-person LAN parties is getting to see everyone's unique setups. Its always so much fun to go around and see everyone's awesome rigs, monitors, accessories, and knick-knacks and we really want to replicate this experience in LAN Party.
Right now, if you build a unique gaming setup in a room, its pretty much locked to that room and you'll have to rebuild it in every subsequent room you join. Our solution to give you the ability to create "Virtual Gaming Setups" that you can dynamically place in any room you join. There will be a new option to create a virtual gaming setup in the Create menu, which will give you a cubic area that you can fill with a desk, PC, monitor, mouse & keyboard, and whatever else you want to throw in your setup. From here, you can instantly place your virtual gaming setup in designated zones placed by the room's owner. You will be able to get and receive virtual gaming setups from the marketplace as well.
Large-Scale Event Hosting
Our ultimate goal for LAN Party is to be able to support large-scale events with dozens or even hundreds of players in the same room. Think a fighting game tournament where you can walk around the room and see all of the different matches going on, with competitors paired up on couches and their matches streamed on a massive virtual screens in front of them. Or, think a watch party for a new show or movie with hundreds of players packed in a virtual theater watching together on a giant screen. We think that this would be beyond awesome will make virtual events truly special.
Obviously, there's a lot of work that needs to be done, particularly with optimization. We've been able to radically speed up the time it takes for room assets to load in, but avatars are still kind of slow. We're investigating new ways to greatly reduce load time for avatars, and if we're successful we'll be able to turn this dream into a reality.
Mobile Companion App
We're planning on developing a mobile companion app for LAN Party on iOS and Android starting sometime next year. This app will allow you to engage with your room's group chat at all times, as well as hop into rooms to join voice chat and view ongoing streams in the room, all conveniently from your phone. It will also allow players with a single monitor to engage with their LAN Party room while their monitor is taken by the game they're playing.
If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see in the mobile app, please let us know!
Localization
Its been awesome to see how spread out you guys are around the globe, and it has made localizing LAN Party for more languages that much more important. Expect to see LAN Party translated for more languages very soon!