Hi everyone,
Thank you so much for your patience with this update! This is far and away our biggest update ever. We've gotten so much done in the last few months, and we can't wait for you to see it.
Here are some of the key features included in this update:
One thing we've been wanting to do for a very long time is to start adding various minigames into LAN Party. We decided to use chess as a testing ground to build the framework for a minigame system, and when that went so well we decided to add Texas Hold'em as well!
Both of these games can be played with friends or with bots, and Texas Hold'em supports up to 8 players per table. You can have several chess boards or poker tables in the room at once, so you can have multiple games being played simultaneously.
We're interested in adding more games in the near future, so let us know what you'd like to see!
Since Ready Player Me shut down in February, we've been looking for a new avatar system to integrate into LAN Party, and we believe VRoid is a perfect fit. VRoid has a massive library of avatars with fully rigged physics and facial expressions, and we've given you full control over your VRoid avatar's physics and facial settings in the new VRoid menu. If you want to use a VRoid avatar, just click the link in the VRoid section of the Marketplace to authorize with your VRoid account. It may say that our application is "untrusted" at the moment since we still need full approval from the VRoid team, which we can only get once VRoid integration is in the live build. Now that it is, we should hopefully be getting approval rather soon, and much more of the VRoid avatar library will be available in LAN Party!
We've also implemented an entirely new streaming backend. Our previous system was solid, but suffered from performance issues and didn't have a lot of options. We even heard from several players who would have their game crash anytime they tried to stream.
Our new system is significantly more performant and does not have the crashing issue the previous system had. It also supports a variety of video codex and optional hardware encoding.
For quality of life, we've added an "In-Stream" menu, where you can switch your stream source or any of your streaming settings without having to kill your stream and start a new one. We've also added a "Hide Everything" streaming mode, that hides everything 3D in LAN Party and minimizes our GPU footprint in case you need the extra power to stream a resource-intensive game.
We've made several improvements to our room designer system to make it much more fluid and easy to use. We've introduced asset duplication, as well as multiselect for moving, rotating, scaling, duplicating, or deleting groups of assets. We've also added more granular control over object colliders to make it easy to shape the collider perfectly to the asset and make walkable slopes and inclines.
We've also added a new "Bundle" system for assets. Let's say you have a gaming setup (table, chair, PC, monitors, mouse, keyboard, etc.) in one of your rooms and you want to be able to make more of them without having to build them piece by piece each time. Now, you can multiselect all of the assets in your gaming setup and click "Create Bundle" to store this group of assets as a bundle. Now, you can recreate that gaming setup in any of your rooms with a single click!
If you click on another user's avatar or profile picture, a "player card" will pop up in the center of the screen. For here, you will have access to player-specific local volume sliders so you can change how loud that player's mic and streams are for you. You can also locally mute that player or hide their streams, text messages, and avatar. If you are a room admin or owner, you can globally mute that players mic and block them from streaming or using text chat for all other players in the room, as well as kick them from the room.
Due to popular demand, we've added fully customizable skyboxes! We have dozens of fully configurable presets to choose from, and you can even upload your own images. This can all be done by hitting the "Skybox" button on the top right of the screen in room designer.
We've also added an option to make your walls, ceiling, or floor completely transparent. Just select the "transparent" texture with your wall, ceiling, or floor selected.
We are already putting the finishing touches on Mega-Update Pt. 2 and are planning to release it very shortly. Some of the major features we are in final testing for include:
A room jukebox system with both flat and spatial audio
Interior walls that can have doorways and windows cut into them
A lightweight asset mesh collider system for perfect hitboxes
Database-controlled multiplayer, meaning no more host migrations, fewer collaborative room design desyncs, and much quicker loading times
A new asset importing system that cuts avatar import time by over 90%
The ability to make your rooms publicly accessible
As always, thank you so much for supporting us! Stay tuned for Pt. 2!
Chess minigame
Poker minigame
New streaming system with improved performance and support for multiple codecs and hardware acceleration
In-stream menu for changing stream source and settings mid-stream
Hide Everything streaming mode for maximizing performance while streaming resource intensive games
VRoid avatar integration and VRoid avatar configuration menu
Full skybox configuration with several skybox presets
Bundle system for creating a duplicating groups of assets
Player cards with advanced player-specific sliders and controls
Players can now blacklist other players from all of their rooms
Humanoid avatars can now crouch
Avatar head-turning is now networked
Enhanced collider configuration in the asset importer
Asset duplication
Asset multiselect for moving, rotating, scaling, duplicating, and deleting
Windowed streams are now resizable
The option to make walls, ceilings, and floors transparent
Orthographic camera views in asset importer are now pannable
Orthographic camera views in asset and avatar importers now show exact asset scale in metric or imperial
Current avatar is now used in seating preview in asset importer
Players can now place overlapping assets
Improved the time it takes the Rooms menu to load on launch
Significantly reduced delay when deleting a room
Significantly improved Steam friends list loading time
Screen asset with multiple screen components will now display stream on all screen components
Disabled advanced asset placement mode toggle while player is moving camera
Player nameplates are no longer visible while in blueprint mode
ESC can no longer hide cursor while the player is not in a room