Hey creators! We’re looking to learn what kind of games you would want to make using Rec Room Studio but have maybe hit limits or need more tools to do so. This feedback will help us to identify pain points you are feeling with the current tools. We would love to hear specific examples around Physics, UI Creation and Animation but are open to other examples.
Please use the following template in your reply:
What is a type of game or room you’ve tried to create in RRStudio but run into issues doing so?
What tools and/or features do you need to accomplish this?
What is a pain point you feel with RRStudio right now?
How do the limitations of Rec Room Studio compare to using the full power of Unity? Are there features or capabilities missing that you rely on when using Unity?
We might follow up to ask for further context so make sure to check your notifications in the coming days
In our room LaserTrail there are a couple tools missing that we need to make the room fully what we want it to be.
UI element instantiation is a big one, being able to instantiate UI buttons for a cosmetic selection UI and interacting with properties of said instantiated UI elements would be super helpful. Currently the way you’d do this is by having a bunch of disabled UI elements, and then enabling them one by one. Which doesn’t allow for a lot of modularity.
Another is player animations, currently we have firing and reloading animations for weapons. The problem is that we have a moving weapon in a completely still player hand, which not only looks like it’s not intended (which it isn’t) but also looks bad (clipping through the hand mostly).
Custom avatars (similar to the Bonky costume in MITM), which I know is coming soon, is super super important for us. Being able to change out the avatar model or equip a deforming costume to players would be nice. One of the main reasons other than having the players look like they fit in the environment, is to have a way for players to tell which team they are on. One of the ways we plan to do this once it becomes possible is to equip the costume to all players, and swap out the emissive colors depending on the team.
Much like the custom avatars, altering the player Nametag or replacing it altogether would also be super helpful. We want to have our nametags match with other UI in our room and have animated UI elements like the KO skull in RROs. This is technically already possible, but there are some flaws. Mainly with fast movements and unneeded circuitry. We have a dashing system in our room, and when you dash, due to the nature of how you have to set the custom nametag up, will lag behind you a bit when moving really fast. It’s also (in my opinion) wasted circuit resources on something that could be done a lot better if we had the tools to do so.
I super agree, I’m have the same issue with cosmetic UI’s and it’s honestly road blocking one of my projects because I don’t wanna put so much work into something that could be so much smaller.
AwakenFields is an open-world RPG game that requires many systems to function; here are a few things I have had issues with while working in Rec Room Studio.
The Circuit Editor needs many improvements
I want to use entirely rec room studio so I don’t have to mess up my workflow, but my biggest gripe right now is with the circuit editor, which has several issues.
Whenever you make a single change in large scenes with circuits, unity will take about three seconds to reload the entire scene, quickly adding to wasted time while working with circuits. Please reduce or altogether remove these reloads.
Circuits at different Z depths are entirely invisible in the circuit editor, and there needs to be a way to reset the depths of the circuits to align them all to a single plane
All configurable options ingame need to be available in the circuit editor; I want to be able to edit data tables, function definitions, and add or remove events from event definitions, but right now, it is currently impossible to do that as the features have not been implemented
“If I can configure or change it in-game, I should be able to change it in Studio”
This extends to being able to configure components and their object boards too
Environment lighting needs to be dynamic
AwakenFields was originally going to have a day and night cycle system, but it was scrapped for the following reasons.
Shadows on lower-end devices didn’t update promptly and only updated when you moved away from an area you were standing in
“Ambient Light” is baked, so when it became night, the ambient lighting was like it was noon at daytime; I need an option to be able to rebake this
The “Rec Room Studio Skybox” and also Moods in general altogether are wholly broken; I was going to use them after the procedural skybox didn’t want to work, but the “sun direction” component won’t even move the sun’s disk (but will move the directional light)
Overall, it didn’t look good, and there was no way to make it look good without some janky method that also didn’t look as great.
Made a post about this before but i think we really need full control over user input.
I am working on a game where it would be insanely convenient to have more player input oppurtunities rather than just trigger and some of the locomotion buttons.
If rec room games should become more interactive this is one of the only things holding creators back from making more interactive games
The main thing I’ve been yearning for with studio is more access to physics components.
The wheel collider is the main physics components I want because it’ll open a lot of room for all kinds of custom vehicles. At present the main 2 things that are preventing me from using it are
Somewhere along the road there is something preventing from the wheels getting good traction. I noticed this while trying to get the wheels to spin. Not sure if it’s caused by the Studio Object physics or something else.
Studio Objects don’t have a mass setting. I was able to work around this by attaching a very dense cube but that lead to the car being off-balance. A mass config would make this much easier.
Another thing that’s gonna be needed in the long term if the plan is for studio to be able to support larger projects is some kind of support for asset streaming. Probably won’t happen for a while though.
Some bonus things that I would like to have but don’t need need support for is various tools for prettier graphics. I’ve ordered them by how difficult I think they would be to add.
Basic post processing on quest and other lower end platforms. Just this addition alone would greatly improve graphics for VR players at what I understand to be a reasonable performance cost.
Light cookies. I think they would require a render pipeline upgrade so they’re a bit harder but would be a very nice tool along with anything else the upgrade would bring.
Support for volumetrics. They’re very pretty but very expensive so I understand if this is off the table.
I have a couple things I would love to see added to studio.
New shader bases, like Fresnel or some sort of sandbox shader graph to make custom shaders within the capable limits of rec room, this would let me and many others create much more appealing VFX while using less space for extra particle systems or meshes.
Another thing me and Bongus noticed is that the RecRoom shader does not suport Vertex Alphas, we were planning on using them for a large part of ^LaserTrail but couldn’t when we realized it wasn’t supported, having this feature would allow basically a second input for an alpha and many more opportunity to create better effects With RRS.
@blitzRR This too 100%. A sandboxed, limited Shader Graph would be amazing. Impose limits to comply with platform policies, and grant creators more creative freedom. Same could go for the VFX graph and C# scripting.
I’m curious as to what would be preventing that from happening if everything is run through a sandboxed environment and validation process to make sure UGC related to the above complies with platform polices. Maybe someone on the RRS or TAS teams could provide any insight to this?
One problem with me is that I use a playstation, and the only computer I have is a Chromebook OS, so I cannot use RR Studio, so if you could make it compatible with chrome OS, that would be great!
