For many years, we assumed we knew the limits of how much stuff you can put into a room before bad player outcomes occurred, such as higher crash rates, poor load times etc. In summer of 2023, we allowed creators to opt into a beta program which allowed them to clone rooms with higher ink limits – this was externally known as “limitsV2”. We treated this like a natural experiment allowing creators to access a greater ink limit with the hopes of learning a few things:- Do creators definitively want more ink? If yes, how much more do they need to make their vision come to life?
- If a creator takes advantage of more ink, what happens to our internal systems and player experience? Are players suffering from poor experiences like more crashes on their device?
We have our answers. The results were clear: creators wanted more ink. However, not as much ink as we anticipated. From what we can tell, most creators took advantage of a small increase, while only a handful of creators really stretched far beyond the past limit.At the same time, all of the data we analyzed told us that increasing ink limits, even by just a little, resulted in a poor player experience.So, effective immediately, 5/28/24, we are disabling cloning of any room with limitsV2. This means, if you have a room with LimitsV2 enabled, it is still fully functional. However, you will not be able to create a new 1.0 Room with LimitsV2 enabled.If you have an idea of a project that you want to complete in Rooms 1.0 using higher limits, go for it, we aren’t stopping you. However, for the next project, if you want higher ink – you will need to adopt Rooms 2.0. So what now?
We’ve spent the last few years developing a better room creation architecture called Rooms 2.0. Rooms 2.0 is a more stable foundation for creating larger, more complex experiences. Rooms 2.0 has been in Alpha for the past few months, and the results are very promising. We’ve known that the infrastructure for Rooms 1.0 would never be able to handle significantly more objects in the room. Therefore, if creators are telling us they want more headroom for their creations – learning to build in Rooms 2.0 is the way to go.
Why can’t Rec Room increase the ink limit for 1.0 Rooms?We ran extensive analysis over the past year looking at legacy rooms that used higher ink amounts, and have confirmed that our current ink limit (50k) is the optimal point at which we can prevent bad player outcomes like high crash rates, lower responsiveness, degraded quality etc.Put more succinctly, Rooms 1.0 isn’t going anywhere, but we won’t be investing more time in improving it. Rooms 2.0 is the path forward for bigger, better creation as it was designed specifically to handle more content, more efficiently.
Does Rooms 2.0 have an ink limit?No. You can put as many objects as you desire into your room. Of course, at extreme scales, you will likely degrade the player experience, but we’ve seen limited evidence of creators taking it to levels that would concern us.
Does Rooms 2.0 have a Cv2 chip limit?
Yes. Logic is still very expensive to render / run at scale. We are actively working on making it cheaper to run logic in rooms, and plan to revisit the Cv2 chip limit as we make headway here.
Is it possible to convert my Rooms 1.0 into Rooms 2.0?We are developing a suite of migration tools that will allow you to convert inventions and entire rooms easily from Rooms 1.0 → Rooms 2.0. The first of these is already live, and as a creator, you can package the content of your 1.0 Room into an invention and bring it over to a 2.0 Room.We acknowledge migration is not easy, especially after you’ve spent countless hours building your amazing creations. We will be focused on making the migration process as easy as possible. Does this change the kind of content I should build as a creator?Possibly. You will have two options to build with by the end of 2024, a Rooms 1.0 experience that is limited by ink or a Rooms 2.0 experience that is not.If you are someone who was relying on increased limits in Rooms 1.0, and were constantly frustrated with trying to understand how to drive down crashes for your players – this is a good change. You should be able to move to Rooms 2.0 and see better player outcomes thanks to the more powerful and efficient foundation this room template provides.