Guide: How to streamline Rec Room for arcades

projectmatrixvr

This is great Peter! Thanks for sharing!

projectmatrixvr

Having a bit of trouble with paintball. Everytime I try to save a private room the "team battle" mode still plays as capture the flag. Tried messing with it to find solutions but no matter what I do it stays as capture the flag.

thevrclub

projectmatrixvr

You change it between team battle or capture the flag on the scoreboard before the match. I don’t think you can force one or the other

Nearbyplanetvr

Im sorry if this sounds stupid, I am new to Rec Room and I want to set this up in my Arcade so it's easier but I cannot for the life of me find the Sandbox machine. I created the private lounge liek you explained and I figure you must need the Sandbox Machine to create doors but It's not showing up for me.

ActionVR

Nearbyplanetvr

Doesn't sound stupid at all. Most if not all tutorials show how to use the sandbox machine, but at some point, Rec Room switched over to the maker pen and there aren't alot of tutorials on how to use it. The create a door function is in the maker pen. It can be accessed from any room by going to the menu and opening the backpack. The pen is in the backpack. Once you have the pen, there are several menu options, one of which is the door. Here is a good resource on how to create the doors using the pen. Let me know if you need more. ~ Jenn

KeithJ

Nearbyplanetvr

i too fought with this forever, until @Spectrum_Waylon figured it out and made a community room for both our arcades to share. The sandbox thing was so throwing me off....lol.

thevrclub

ActionVR

Oh yeah the sandbox machine is gone since an update late last year. You can just reach over your shoulder to grab the maker pen which has all the item spawn options in it now.

NickSucik319828

ActionVR Is there a way to disable the Maker Pen? Kids keep pulling it out during paintball/laser tag

KeithJ

Amazing! We avoided this because of the account requirement and what not but with this setup and the launch arguments for account/room selection is awesome. So much easier for our guests to just jump in and get going in a private session. Thanks so much for putting this out here.

thevrclub

No worries you're welcome Keith.

I've just updated the tutorial so that it works with Springboard's new CDS update, the only notable change is step 5 for creating a custom game entry.

thevrclub

FYI I checked today and private custom rooms for quests are back! They can now be assigned to the doors in your private lounge again :slight_smile:

Update: you can't assign permissions or publish custom quest room for some reason. I email Rec Room support and they published my rooms for me, so looks like you'll have to do that to get the quest rooms working

tgistrikezonevr

So have you had an issue with the game rooms not working? Every time I save the room as a private copy, the game in the room has issues. Like the bowling room I made won't have any pins, or disc golf has no disc when you start the game. I can make the private copy of the game room, but as soon as I hit save, pieces go missing and make the room unusable.

thevrclub

tgistrikezonevr

Yeah @tgistrikezonevr it is a bug in Rec Room. All you can do is try re-creating the room again, and also send the devs (Against Gravity) a bug report to their support email. They are pretty quick to respond but I expect it’s not a high priority for them to fix, so the more feedback they get from arcade owners needing features like this the better!

Scotthan

@thevrclub .. Peter thanks so much for taking the time to put this together. I've almost got it completely setup.

A couple of questions for you or anyone ....

Is there any way to disable entry into the "Main" Rec Room .. the lobby where everyone is hanging out? Can I simply delete it from my Private Lounge? I haven't tried yet. But is there a way to keep them from going to it from the Watch interface? I've already changed the settings where they have to touch the watch.

How can I keep people from sending friend requests? When I was in the main lobby testing, I got some friend requests, I'd like to keep that from happening too.

Thanks! -Scott

thevrclub

Scotthan

@Scotthan You can't disable the entry to the public areas or the wristwatch menu unfortunately, however you can place doors directly in front of the Rec Center doors to literally block access. I've done the same thing with the game rooms in paintball and laser tag so that instead of going to the Rec Center they return to the private lounge. Also no you can't disable friend requests, and in addition you'll find that people in your arcade will block each other without realising it all the time, but I don't think it affects the game in any major way

Scotthan

thevrclub

Ahhh perfect, makes sense, just put a door in front of the door. Thanks again for your work on figuring this out. Do you mind providing the powershell script the developers provided you? I use PowerShell in my day job and I actually use it to power off all my machines remotely at the same time.

thevrclub

Not sure if the devs provided me with a powershell script, it was ages ago... but I wouldn't know how it works anyway.

By the way be sure to use the maker pen to "freeze" the custom doors you place so people can't pick them up and move them

Scotthan

thevrclub

ahhh freeze, good tip, I saw the option to uncheck the box where you can "Grab" the object. I guess accomplishes the same thing. But probably best to freeze, now that I'm thinking about it, I guess another object could hit it ... doh.

Scotthan

FYI for anyone trying to set this up. The Rec Room Support team helped me and I'm assuming would love to help you to. If you have all your station accounts in Rec Room setup, simply send them an email. They have a room created with subrooms for the games and it and it's awesome. They even have the main RecCenter door behind you when you enter, so it's hard to see. I ended up moving that door and building a big boulder in front of it :-)

Anyway, here's the ticket I submitted to support and then response I got ......

I'm creating a custom lobby for my VR Arcade. I've got that part working great. All stations can connect to my private lobby room that I've setup and made everyone co-owners. I changed the properties in Steam so every station goes directly to the Lounge area.

Now i'm trying to create Doors to private games. The first one I'm trying is Paintball. I've got a private paintball room created, I create a door with the creator marker. I then edit the settings to go to my new private Paintball room - it finds the room and shows it connected, but when I save the room, then go back in the door says "Not Active!"

What am I doing wrong? Also is there a way to "pin" the door to the wall, or do the doors just stand there? I changed the door settings so you can't grab it. Is that the proper way?

Very new to this and I've only gotten this far from watching YouTube and other online tutorials.

The account names are (REDACTED JUST IN CASE) through . (REDACTED JUST IN CASE) .... email for them is (REDACTED JUST IN CASE) ... etc.

Lounge room is ^(REDACTED JUST IN CASE)

Paintball room is ^(REDACTED JUST IN CASE)

Thanks for the help

Scott

Response from RecRoom Support .....

Hi there

It seems you have done everything correctly however for linking doors to other rooms it requires you to publish the room first. Usually if you want to have a hub you would need to utilize "subrooms" which are part of the same main room but the doors can link to different instances of the game. We actually have a template for VR Arcades specifically where all the work has been done already for you, and most of our games are available in one place. =] We have gone ahead and created a room for your arcade called ^REDACTED. This room is unlisted but each of your VR arcade accounts have been granted owner access so they should see it on their watch when they go to "my rooms". Hope that helps you out!

Cheers

AG Support Team

Hope that helps others, that's a lot of heavy lifting they did.

thevrclub

Scotthan

Wow that was super nice of them to do the hard parts for you! :+1:

I hope they fix the bug soon where items disappear when starting a game in a private room (apart from paintball, lasertag, and quests).

By the way, there was a method to fix the Not Active! sign on the doors which was mentioned in my tutorial, by inviting your other accounts as co-owners of your private rooms and accepting the invite on each account.

Scotthan

thevrclub

[quote="thevrclub, post:25, topic:349"] By the way, there was a method to fix the Not Active! sign on the doors which was mentioned in my tutorial, by inviting your other accounts as co-owners of your private rooms and accepting the invite on each account. [/quote]

Yes, I forgot to mention that was the step I missed and you had covered it. Was a total mistake on my part from lack of sleep and trying to cram too much into one day.

You should ping them for their setup. It's a really nice big outdoor area.