Rec Room UPDATE - the “First of the Year” Edition

TLDR

• Inventory Items, Room Offers, and Rewards are now part of Inventions!
• SO MANY updates, fixes, and customization for ranged weapons.
• Object Properties have been added in beta!
• We added “In-Room Voice Privacy Settings” for who you hear AND who hears you!
• More updates and fixes for FBA and upgraded bean avatars.
• You may have seen some of these notes in our patches - and that’s intentional! Since some platforms only get major updates, we want to make sure they know what’s new too.

Avatars

• We updated our hat placement logic a bit. Hats will now rotate and offset better– unfortunately, this may have moved your hats around, Sorry!
• Bean avatars can now try on pants and shoes in the watch store without switching to full body first.
• You’ll now slide in the direction you’re moving, instead of being based on your input.
• Your upgraded bean avatar found its balance and now stands up straight!
• The upgraded bean also got some small updates to animations while moving around.
• Fixed an issue where left and right hands picked things up differently - now it’s the same!
• Fixed a bug where you couldn’t scale upgraded bean avatars' facial features all the way up or down.
• Fixed a bug where the bottom half of a specific eye type could begin clipping through part of your mouth. Yucka.

Rooms 2

• Inventory Items, Room Offers, and Rewards now function as part of Inventions! Any new inventions that are saved in a room with chips that reference a specific Inventory Item, Room Offer, or Reward will bake that information into the Invention. When the Invention is spawned in a Room that does not have that content, it will create a new respective piece of content in that Room!
• Fixed an issue where frozen props inside a container could prevent you from using the Move, Rotate, Scale, Manipulate, or Delete tools on it.
• You can now delete frozen objects using the advanced creation mode hierarchy!
• Updated the invention palette tab to use carousels.
• Made resetting objects work as expected.
  • Resetting objects now resets their children, if they have any.
  • Resetting objects now resets any properties applied by circuits.
  • Resetting objects now resets any tags changed by circuits.

• Fixed a bug where some objects imported from Rooms 1 inventions would lose their object boards. (This won't fix objects that this already happened to, unfortunately - you'll need to re-spawn the invention to get a new, not-broken copy.)
  
• Fixed a bug where using the Connect tool to re-parent to an object which was already selected could break the Circuits hierarchy.
  
• Changed invention previews so they are no longer physical.
  
• "Toggle Button Set Is Pressed" chips are now working!
  
• Fixed a bug where the active Sun Direction component would be ignored when you join a room.
  
• MakerPen Clone operation will work now if the pivot is selected.
  
• Fixed the error message when cloning and copying pivot.
  
• Added the Showcase Poster.
  

Replicator

• Replicators will now assign authority of the object that they spawn to the player who used the Replicator Spawn Next Object Chip. This solves some issues with players other than the room authority correctly positioning spawned objects.
• The amount of chips that can be added to Replicators and Player Definition Boards is now limited by memory usage.
• Studio objects that have been replicated will no longer leave *spooky ghosts* inside a trigger volume when they are returned to the replicator.
• Fixed an issue where having a Replicator with a positive number of Preallocated Copies but no Target Object could cause a room to fail to load.
• Replicated objects with Handles will now no longer take your hand with them to the great beyond when returned to the replicator.

Circuits

• Added Object Properties in beta! These allow you to store values on any object with an Object Board by configuring a name and type. New chips to get, set, and check for the presence of each unique property will be added to the palette. Like variables, Object Properties can be synced or unsynced, and come with 'On Changed' events that fire when the value has been modified!
• Added the Player Left Hand Is Pointing and Player Right Hand Is Pointing chips in beta.
• Fixed a bug that you can not configure the sample audio chip properly in ACM.
• Fixed Object Misaligned with the Cursor And Self-Surface Snapping in ACM on Surface Snapping Mode.
• Improved performance of Chip cloning and of inventions containing Chips.
• Fixed a bug where the wrong Circuits chips would be visible/invisible after using the Hierarchy window to jump around between levels.
• Fixed “On Changed” events not firing for synced variables defined inside a Player Definition Board.
• Fixed a bug where some ports wouldn't properly update their type if a connected object board was removed.

General Improvements & Bug Fixes

• The "Voices I Can Hear" settings have been replaced with an "In-Room Voice Privacy" slider that affects who you hear but also who hears YOU in the Room. We also reordered the slider so random party members don’t get the most intimate position on the slider. Note that Voice Calls aren’t affected by this.
• VR players' beacon game is on point! No, literally - next time you're in a party or on a team in an RRO, point and press your controller's main trigger. You'll drop a beacon at the location the laser beam touches!
• Added quick chat for everyone, including juniors!
• You can now use that sniper scope again while prone!
• Added a new volume slider to the Audio settings page that controls the volume of Party Voice Calls separately from other Room voices.
• You will now open straight to party chat if you open chat and are in a party. Makes sense, right?
• Added better visibility for rooms that require a version update.
• The reaction wheel is now even snappier!
• Place now only affects specific maker Shapes and not Tools+.
• A lot of players were not seeing the "Supports Juniors" toggle and accidentally leaving it on for rooms that weren’t Junior-appropriate. To improve this flow we're making some changes:
  • Say goodbye to the "Supports Juniors" button in Room Settings > Moderation. The new hotness is "Age Rating" selection in the main Room Settings area!
  • You now have to pick an Age Rating (All Ages or 13+) before publishing a room. You'll get a helpful popup if you try to publish without selecting an option!
  • Existing rooms that kept their "Supports Juniors" toggle to the default value will see no option selected for "Age Rating", but will still support junior players for now. But you should pick an Age Rating anyway, so we know you mean it!

• Added home menu notifications to Nintendo Switch™.
  
• Fixed an issue with Auto Fire in The Rise of Jumbotron.
  
• Fixed a significant hitching problem for Quest 2 and Quest 3 players using Meta Link PCVR. Players should no longer experience hitches during longer play sessions!
  
• Fixed a bug where the "Join Room" button could be disabled if you canceled inviting friends to join a room with you.
  
• Fixed a bug where room instances might become un-joinable if you edited a bunch of Circuits.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented players from talking in Party Voice Call during loading screens.
  
• Fixed a bug where unowned items are unlocked when entering the portfolio of another player who wears those items.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Flintlock wouldn’t show the highlight beacon.
  
• Disabled Selection Bounds Rendering when MakerPen is dropped.
  
• Fixed a bug where a handle might become unable to be picked up.
  
• Fixed a bug where players with a large number of owned Avatar Items could not access said owned items.
  
• Fixed a potential issue with longer play sessions getting logged out on Nintendo Switch™.
  
• Fixed "nada, no rooms found" overlapping room search results when browsing by category.
  
• Fixed a bug that was causing the title screen to skip over the ‘new account’ page.
  
• Updated UI Elements in the Influencer Support Code flow. Also fixed a typo.
  
• Fixed an issue where players would crash when browsing carousels in the store.
  
• Fixed an issue where the quick action menu would not appear after your selection changes in R1.
  
• Crashes are becoming less common thanks to a number of fixes!
  
• Updated meetup code UI.
  
• Now players with all room roles have access to view the Permissions tab in room settings!
  
• Fixed blindingly light instruction text in the Room Loading Screen settings.
  

Ranged Weapon Updates

• Customize ranged weapon prop behavior: Lots of new options to configure ranged weapon props in various new ways. Want to make the laser tag shotguns more accurate? Go for it!
  • New options for ranged weapon props! All of these can either be configured with CV2 chips, or directly via the config menu of the gun. This brings a level of control similar to what you already have for Gun Handle and Projectile Launcher-based weapons to our weapons in the maker pen palette.
  • Accuracy - affects both the spread of bullets (like from a shotgun) and the accuracy with which screens players fire.
  • Recoil - affects recoil on screens and controller haptics on VR.
  • Projectile Speed.
  • Projectile Lifetime.
  • Projectile Impact Force - Modify how strongly shooting a physical object will move it.
  • Projectile Gravity.
  • Sound Enabled.
  • Manual & Automatic Fire Rate.
  • While Projectile Launchers could previously have customized sound and gravity in their config menu, we did not have chips for them before. The new chips that let you control sound and gravity for our ranged weapon props will work for projectile launchers too.
  • Not all new properties will be available for all weapons. If you want full control you can still use custom weapons with gun handles + projectile launchers, but we at least wanted to give creators more control over the weapons that we have. For example, you cannot use these new properties to make a paintball pistol have automatic fire.
  • Gun Handles can now be configured to have a "Center" reticle option.

• Other CV2 features: New chips to check whether a weapon is on cooldown (meaning the gun is unable to shoot due to fire rate) or reloading.
  
• Various Ranged Weapon & Projectile Launcher bugfixes:
  • Reduce scenarios for players accidentally shooting themselves with weapons made from a Projectile Launcher and a Handle of some sort. This can be reenabled with the “Can Hit Player Holding Tool” setting if you’re trying to use projectile launchers for some weird purpose that needs this.
  • Fixed issues where projectile launchers hooked up to a gun handle with automatic fire wouldn’t actually fire as fast as circuits told them to. The max fire rate of projectile launchers has been raised from 15 to 30 (in addition to some under the hood changes to account for the fact that it wasn’t actually previously reaching its max fire rate). By default, this will only affect new projectile launchers for backwards compatibility reasons. To update your old ones to use this fix, configure them with the maker pen and disable the “Use Legacy Projectile Throttling” setting.
  • When hovering over a CV2 port of type Projectile Launcher, you should now see the object's name like normal.
  • Fixed a bug where From Creation Object could say its result was valid with the Is Valid chip when the output type was Projectile Launcher but a Ranged Weapon Prop was passed in, even though passing it into projectile launcher chips would give invalid errors.
  • Bullets shot from a projectile launcher clamped to a gun handle will now explode paintball mines like regular bullets do.
  • Fixed a bug where running Ranged Weapon CV2 chips on certain not-yet-supported ranged weapons broke circuits execution without a CV2 error - these will now log a warning but continue execution.
  • Fixed a bug where the Rec Room Object Reset chip didn't properly reset all Ranged Weapon/Projectile Launcher configurable fields.

• List of all new ranged weapon chips: (*Note: anything prefixed with “Ranged Weapon Prop” works only on our existing maker pen palette weapons, but similar functionality should already exist on either Projectile Launchers or Gun Handles. Anything prefixed with just “Ranged Weapon” can work either for our existing weapons or for Projectile Launchers too.*)
  • Ranged Weapon Prop Get Is On Cooldown.
  • Ranged Weapon Prop Get Is Reloading.
  • Ranged Weapon Prop Get/Set Projectile Impact Force Multiplier.
  • Ranged Weapon Prop Get/Set Projectile Spread Multiplier.
  • Ranged Weapon Prop Get/Set Recoil Intensity Multiplier.
  • Ranged Weapon Prop Get/Set Rate of Fire.
  • Ranged Weapon Get/Set Projectile Gravity Enabled.
  • Ranged Weapon Get/Set Sound Enabled.
  • Ranged Weapon Get/Set Projectile Lifetime (renamed from Projectile Launcher Get/Set Projectile Lifetime).
  • Ranged Weapon Get/Set Projectile Speed (renamed from Projectile Launcher Get/Set Projectile Speed).

Dodgeball

• Changed Dodgeball to count outs only on the player that was hit (finally, no more catch-outs!)
• Dodgeballs no longer count as out when they hit another player.

Rec Room Studio

• You can now configure mood chips!
• Object boards are now configurable!
• Fixed a bug where Rec Net Image components could cause the game to crash when used in a Unity Button.
• Fixed a bug where the Sun Constant and Sun Direction chips could not be used to change the sun.
• It is now possible to select and preview SFX, Music, and Ambience audio tracks.
• Removed the cause of StackOverflow when multi-selecting with a dropdown.

Experiments

• On Screens, we have released an experiment which improves the Place feature in several ways:
• The object will now be maintained on the player Y axis when moved up and down.
• There's now a yellow outline indicating if the object is overlapping with other collisions in the world while being placed.
• Updates to the visual appearance of room cards across the pages of the Watch to show a "new" tag for rooms first published in the last month.
• Starting an experiment that adds a new "Best Popular Match" card to the Rooms Search page to allow players to go to a room related to their search that is most likely to have other players to play with.
• Some players will now be able to find events in the play menu!
• Experiment to add a new feedback survey at the end of Party Voice Calls.
• Adding a banner to shoes/bottoms tabs for experiment and design feedback.
• We are going to launch an experiment with Nintendo Switch™ performance improvements that decrease your loading times. If all goes well, everyone will get the improvements!

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