The latest developer journal from the folks at Pirates of the Burning Seas looks at the addition of Role Play Rooms to the game.

Today I bring to you: Role Play Rooms! We’ve been listening a lot to our role-player community recently, and they have been asking for some spaces that they can use purely for RP events. As a result, in 1.16, you will have your very own locales to hang out in and talk the talk, or dance the dance. Look for one in your nation’s capital!

We decided to look for existing spaces that we could re-use for this purpose, as creating new rooms takes a lot of time, but we didn’t want the new RP spaces to look identical to existing rooms in the game. The challenge was working out how to make them look different without changing any of the room geometry or re-doing the lighting. Either of those tasks would increase the size of the patch significantly, which is something we try to avoid. Luckily for us, there is a neat feature in our game editor that allows us to swap out one texture for another while leaving the underlying room intact.

Read more here.