Rec Room AMA 10
YouTube video by Rec Room Inc
Introduction to AMA #10[]
(00:00 in ^ItalianAlley)
HairyManLegs: Hey! How's it going, guys? My name is Harry and I'm here with ...
Radiant Blur: Hey, everybody! I'm Radiant Blur, back for another AMA.
HairyManLegs: Yeah, we're here to answer your community questions and I really appreciate you being back here again. If you guys don't know, Radiant Blur is one of the cofounders of Rec Room and we're so happy to have him back. And how's your day, by the way?
Radiant Blur: Oh I'm doing excellent. [...] Looking forward to hearing what people are curious about as far as UGC [User-Generated Content] and creative tools go.
HairyManLegs: Epecially a lot of burning questions I've been seeing. Radiant, I hopefully help you with your question there. Are you ready for the first couple of questions here?
Radiant Blur: Yeah!
Dev Tools Outside of Rec Room[]
(00:40 in ^ItalianAlley)
HairyManLegs: All right; let's jump right into, guys! All right, our first question comes from richarmeleon: "Why not just release dev tools to use outside the game like how VRChat lets us use Unity? It could be more optimized and feature-ful. You can easily mark those rooms as outside sourced so people know to prepare for potential performance issues. And it's not like moderation would be any different, still hold people accountable to the code of conduct and one bad room upload can be a ban. Not like you can't also misbehave with maker pen."
Radiant Blur: Yeah; okay. This is a really important question, and it's one that we get often. So, happy to talk about it again. I think it's a good question to ask. So, our stance on it is: Unity is an awesome development tool - we love to use it to build Rec Room, but the answer to: "Would we give a version of it to our players to build Rec Room content?" really goes all the way up to our mission statement for Rec Room: an online universe where you can create and play games with friends. So, to us, creation is as much a central part of Rec Room culture as playing is. And, so, to ensure that we can nurture that culture of creativity, we're working really hard to ensure that players on all of our platforms can build directly in Rec Room, and that they can do it together. So, that's our plan for the foreseeable future.
Crescendo and Rec Royale Props in Palette[]
(01:56 in ^ItalianAlley)
HairyManLegs: All right; our next question comes from TheTerraBlade42: "Will we actually get Crescendo items in the props menu? I know a lot more props were added recently but the whip and blunderbuss were forgotten." Kmc853 asks: "Can we have Rec Royale items in the maker pen?"
Radiant Blur: I have good news here. So, for one: it's awesome to see that you're all enjoying all the new props we added in our last update. Now that we have palette search [...], we've broken the seal on getting a whole bunch more of the props that we use in our games into the game. So, that's exciting to see; and right now we actually have an artist who's leading a project to bring a bunch of our quest props into the palette; so, you guys can use them. It takes quite a bit of time to add LODs [Levels of Detail] and back-faces to a bunch of those props. So, she is getting through this [...] as she can, but she has to kind of choose how to .. For CBM [Crescendo of the Blood Moon] specifically, I used a blunderbuss; it's ready to go; so, I should expect that would come out soon. The whip is more technically challenging because we really want to give you the locomotion capabilities that come along with it.
HairyManLegs: Okay.
Radiant Blur: We're currently looking into that one. We hope to get it in. There won't be a ton from Rec Royale in the next big drop, but I do know that she's getting all the rocks from Rec Royale into there; so, that's a good one. I think people have had to work around the lack of nice rocks. We'll get our favorite ones into the palette for you to use. All that said, it's not too late for you to get any burning last requests for which props you'd like to see in the palette. So, if you have something you really want to see, she can still spend time on some [...]. So, let us know on reddit or discord.
HairyManLegs: Yeah, please let us know perhaps, because we're really excited about the whip and everything with the locomotion. I didn't think about that. So, that requires a lot of time. So, thank you for your question.
AI/NPCs/Enemies in Custom Rooms[]
(03:48 in ^iosPoolParty)
HairyManLegs: FreestylinGoblin asks: "When will we see AI [Artificial Intelligence] in custom rooms? And also, Eddy_has_a_teddy asked: "Quest enemies in custom rooms would be great, we could make our own quest."
Radiant Blur: All right. Yes. This is a really exciting one. So, before I dive in, real quick: we recently had a creator Q&A on the topic of AI last week. So, if you haven't caught up, there's a whole bunch of good details in there. We covered a lot about our short-term plans and also our long-term plans; but to recap that here briefly: we definitely want to get to a world where you can make all your own AIs from the ground up and define their behaviors and animate them and all that good stuff; but that said, it's gonna take a few foundational steps to get there along the way. So, knowing that that's the full vision, and it's down the road a bit, we want to get a functional version of a basic AI into your hands as soon as possible. So, the first thing we plan to release is the ability for you to take the bots that we have in our rooms and spawn them in your rooms; and then do some basic encounter scripting with them. So, if you want to make something that feels like your own quests, that'll happen pretty soon. So, you should start cooking up your ideas for what you would want to do for a quest there. We're working on phase 1. Once that's out, and you guys are using it, we're gonna respond to your feedback and improve those tools as you use them in your rooms, but then we're gonna immediately start building some more dynamic scripting capabilities, so you can get on to doing awesome stuff like horde modes or tower defense games or whatever else you come up with. So, yeah, in terms of: when can you expect to get AI in your rooms? We're planning to ship the first basic version in roughly two months. It could be a bit sooner than that; it could take a little longer - depending on what we learn as we build, but we're really working hard to make it happen ASAP; so, stay tuned.
HairyManLegs: Stay tuned for that guys. It's really exciting stuff. Thank you, Radiant Blur, for laying out that message. Yeah, I can't wait to see everyone's rooms when they get a hold of that. That sounds awesome.
Plant Textures and Animated Textures[]
(05:47 in ^WarOfTheLions)
HairyManLegs: All right, TheRealStump asks three questions: "1. Can we get low poly plants like the sprite grass/bushes/trees in Rec Royale and the park? It would be great to be able to texture maps with low ink terrain stuff. 2. Can we implement animated textures with the maker pen? The waterfall texture would be awesome to use." And his 3rd question is: "Are there any plans on improving the audio tools and chips?"
Radiant Blur: Yeah, no problem. So, that's three great question there. I go through in order. So, the first one on the note of plants and maybe painting trees and bushes and things like that. This is a big design and art one for us, and we really do care about it. So, I went and talked with our art director on this one, and we are definitely already looking into ways to make the trees that we use and the bushes that we use available to you - and recolorable and place them in your scene; but another thing that we talk about a lot on the UGC [User-Generated Content] team is the importance of letting UGC creators get similar or the same outcomes that we get. So, in our maps, we have a lot of these big organic outdoor large-scale environments through terrain, and there's a lot of challenges to giving creators the terrain systems that we use, and our intent is to unlock those same outcomes. So, we really care about you having the ability to make big large outdoor-scale organic terrain stuff. We don't have all the design thinking in line yet of just how it would work and how it works with our art capabilities; but we really care about it. And, you know, AI is is what we're doing right now; I think terrain and terrain-like things are likely to come up pretty soon after that. And then for the animated textures question: that's our art director about. And there's a lot of awesome ideas for animated textures. Probably water is the first area where we would take that really seriously. We all really want to add a water texture into the game. No immediate plans - we're still in the active investigation phases. Then on the audio one: that one is near and dear to my heart because I'm super passionate about audio I love. And totally agreed that relative to a lot of our other functionality and the tool set, audio hasn't had a lot of innovation in a long time. So, I think there's - as they pointed out - plenty of opportunities for us to make it better. I think the best thing you can do is just get very targeted requests on ways that it's falling short. So, great, great points there on 30 seconds is a really tough limitation. Other places that we can improve audio: I think one thing we wanted to do with our moods system is give you the ability to specify, like, ambient audio in your moods that's more than just a 3d sound source. So, agreed that it's lagging behind. We want to improve it. It'll take some time unfortunately.
More Textures and Animated Textures[]
(08:41 in ^WarOfTheLions)
HairyManLegs: Snox_RR asks: "Can we have more textures like leaves, fur, or scale (like fish scales). And can we expect to have some moving textures (like water, grass, ember) in the future?" 24ngettys asked: "Could you possibly add a liquid material? It would make for a nice waterfall or lava."
Radiant Blur: I mentioned in the previous one that the art team is currently looking into how would we do a moving texture and give that to users. I hope that that happens soon, but no plans yet, unfortunately. The texture ideas here are really fun. I hadn't thought of, like, a fish scale. We use that on our stuffed fish - it looks like a scale, I think. And fur - that's a fun [...]. Oh, other good news though on the static textures front: we are going to be releasing three new textures that we used in the sunset drive-in: a sparkly vinyl, the texture from the rubber tile floor and the diner, and we're hoping to make gravel work as well, and - oh my goodness - the sparkly vinyl is already my favorite material in the game.
HairyManLegs: Oh, gosh it is really cool guys.
Old Rec Centers[]
(09:51 in ^2016LockerRoom)
HairyManLegs: All right; our next question comes from nt3bax: "Any possibilities of getting an old Rec Center as a room template?"
Radiant Blur: A ton has changed since that room was live. It's unlikely we'd spend the time to go back and retrofit and fix up a bunch of stuff in that room just to share it as a base room. I know what you mean though. I'm a generally very nostalgic person. So many good memories of hanging out in the old Rec Center - meeting up for the earliest demos we gave to people. I think the first paintball fight we ever had in Rec Room was in that Rec Center. For me it was the first place I ever really felt a sense of community in VR. I have just a lot of really fond memories attached to it. So, I totally get it. I feel like if I could just go back, I'd like to carve my initials in ...
HairyManLegs: Yeah, that would be awesome.
Radiant Blur: Fun fact: this actually wasn't the first Rec Center, we ever had. This is the second one. The first one was maybe a quarter of the size of this one. It's just lockers and a little booth with towels and a ping-pong table. [Presumably, Radiant Blur is referring to the Rec Center depicted in this video.]
HairyManLegs: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen that before. Yeah, this is very nostalgic for me especially. This is my first Rec Center.
Unity Engine Update and More Shapes[]
(11:02 in ^2016LockerRoom)
HairyManLegs: So, 1stHipster asks: "Engine update? And when will we get base shapes with the maker pen? The ones we have can sometimes be a pain."
Radiant Blur: Oh yeah, good one. Okay, so, two parts to that one. On the first, engine update: we really don't have an ETA [Estimated Time of Arrival] for that. Sorry. We are looking into versions to update, but it's just not gonna happen anytime soon. The second part, I think I can speak to better, which is: more shapes in the maker pen. So, if you look at palette search and how that gave us the latitude to dump a whole bunch more of our props into the palette, I think it creates a similar opportunity for simple shapes. Nobody's working on it right now, so I don't have a date; but, yeah, a project to add in some more basic shapes to work with would really fit well between major releases, like the next big activity and the AI work we're doing. Stuff that comes to mind for me is things like a pyramid or a sliced pyramid or as in quarter spheres. There's definitely a point where the shape starts to get complex enough that we would look at doing things like dynamic shapes - steps and arches and things of that nature; but I think before we go that far, there's another place(?) where we just give you some more shapes to work with. Are there any shapes in particular that you would really like? We can always consider them as simple shapes or more complex ones, but it really helps to know what you're looking for and what you're struggling to build.
Go-Karts[]
HairyManLegs: All right, so, this is a traditional AMA question here we got from Meta0_. He asked: "I'm so sorry but where is go-karts?" Where is it, Radiant Blur?
Radiant Blur: That's great. So, I know this one's a bit of a running joke, but, honestly, we brought it upon ourselves and we totally deserve it; so that's fair; but on a serious note - I did want to come through this a little bit - we do really want to add vehicles; to really make vehicles into Rec Room. Just like our current efforts with AI, we believe vehicles are a huge undertaking and potentially a really big way to enrich the whole Rec Room ecosystem. So, we would expect to tackle it with a high degree of focus and make it part of a big activity that we ship; but we wouldn't start on that until at least once we're clear of the AI work we're doing right now and we're standing on a really solid foundation for AI; but that's another big category that we would want.
HairyManLegs: That sounds really awesome. Especially having users create their own vehicles in their own rooms. I mean the possibilities are pretty endless, you know.
Radiant Blur: There's a lot of ways that creators are finding to approximate experiences and that's awesome. We hope to take it another step - to give more building blocks to work with to do [...] vehicles and various parameters for how they behave and pieces to put together to create vehicles.
HairyManLegs: Especially some of the maps I've been to, like ^BattleCruiserDown, where you control, like, this spaceship or so. It's, like, it blew me away. So, having the ease of that into your room, I think that would be so amazing.
More Ink and Unity Update[]
HairyManLegs: cobyboi asked: "Will we ever get more ink? Also the Unity engine update would be so good - like really, really good."
Radiant Blur: I already touched on the Unity update: no ETA today; but on the ink subject: in short, yes, you will definitely get more ink over time. Each time we revisit a feature area or refine an existing feature, we're looking for all the ways we could build smarter and pass more ink savings onto creators. So, an example of this you saw recently were the changes we made with gadget visibility and the new invisible collision feature. The visibility is an automatic ink savings that gets passed on; and then invisible collision is a way that you can opt-in to save ink on collision by replacing a bunch of complex colliders with a single box. The next big boost we're striving for on the ink savings front is within the next iteration of circuits that we have under way. We have really high hopes to save a ton of ink with that - the next version of circuits. We'll see how it works out.
Haptics Control[]
(15:18 in ^Warships-PVP)
HairyManLegs: forbym asked: "Are there any plans to offer more control over vibration of controllers (for example, similar to the SFX chip but for haptic effects)?"
Radiant Blur: Yeah, just transparency here: no immediate plans, unfortunately. Haptics is a really cool immersive feature, but relative to some of the other features we want to stand up in the next year or two, it's unlikely to make it to the top. As we build out a more complete UGC tools landscape - where you have things like AI and vehicles and highly responsive circuits - then I hope we earned the opportunity to start focusing on more of the polish and quality features and really round out the development features, like haptics. There's a lot of stuff in that category. I'm really passionate about a lot of it. So, I'll take this as motivation to work really hard to ensure that we get the big foundational pieces into place and in good shape.
Inputs and Outputs for Weapons[]
(16:14 in ^Warships-PVP)
HairyManLegs: JayOnRR asked: "Will mines ever have an output when they explode to send a signal/an input to detonate the mine manually? I want to make a mine that when it explodes, not only damages players, but also pushes them off using an impulse volume. This is only possible if I add plate and a trigger zone above the mine, which doesn't look good."
Radiant Blur: ... isn't really sufficient to make the idea real. You'll notice that we don't have inputs and outputs on any of our weapons. I spoke with the dev who implemented mines on this one; and the good news is that we're making really good progress on our next iteration of circuits. And part of rolling that out: we'll be able to go through a bunch of our tools and weapons and look at what are the input and output hooks and scripting hooks we could add on to the tools. So, this is a perfect example - a very clear example to keep in mind when we do that. So, thanks for the inspiration. Unfortunately, we're not going to be adding it in.
Room Playlists[]
(17:10 in ^Warships-PVP)
HairyManLegs: And our last question comes from forbym. He asked: "Any news about room playlists that were mentioned in the AMA #8?"
Radiant Blur: Okay, yes, we do have a bunch of news on this front; so, thanks for the question. This week is our last week of feature work and bug fixing on playlists; so, we'll be integrating them and planning to ship them very soon. The immediate changes you'll notice - if you're just a player - Laser Tag, even Disc Golf will become playlists. The experience of going to these rooms and playing them should feel nearly identical to the way it does today; but once we're actually using playlists and these activities are playlists then we'll be able to feature community rooms in those activities. The first thing we plan to do is to open up the community door in Stunt Runner and feature a bunch of the awesome #community Stunt Runner maps that people have made.
HairyManLegs: Yes; all right!
Radiant Blur: Just random people going into Stunt Runner will now encounter a bunch of cool #community maps. Well, and then we want to get the "Paintball map building challenge" going; and we plan to hold a #community Wednesday's regularly where we feature the best of the #community Paintball maps for a day in regular paintball rotation. So, as we start to get those great maps coming in - all that should start happening in the next few weeks. So, stay tuned, and I hope people out there start planning on what awesome Paintball maps they want to make.
HairyManLegs: Yeah, I can't wait to see that, guys. Especially, the community's, like, really, like, expanding on being creative when it comes to making rooms. So, yeah, we can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
Wrapping Up[]
(18:43 in ^Warships-PVP)
Radiant Blur: Thanks so much everyone for your great questions. These are really good ones this time around. I always enjoy talking to individuals around the team to get a bunch more context and do a thorough job answering your questions. Just as a reminder: we're cranking on AI we're going to push to get a basic version out into your hands soon; so keep your requests coming - the more you can tell us what features you're hoping for in the future, the better that makes our development process. Yeah, can't wait to do another one. Thanks, Harry.
HairyManLegs: I just want to say: thank you again so much for Radiant Blur to come out here and do an AMA for the community. Hopefully, that answered your questions, and if you guys are wanting to have more questions make sure to post them on reddit soon when we post them again. So, yeah, thank you so much, Radiant Blur, and thank you guys for watching the AMA, and we'll catch you guys much later. Please leave a like, comment and subscribe for everything Rec Room. I'm Harry. That's Radiant Blur, and we'll catch you guys in the next AMA. Bye, guys!
Radiant Blur: Bye!