Pan Simulator's Mega Update Is Out!

It's here.

As many people, including myself, believe, Christmas is some of the best times for Pan Simulator yet. Once again, Pan Simulator's massive update is here!

And there are a LOT of changes to go over! Let's dive right in, shall we?

Before We Start

I just want to say thank you. I'll be fully transparent here, I've been heavily inactive in Pan Simulator for a while now. I'm very sorry about that. I've been focusing on school and everything else in my life. And I'm being fully honest, I did not feel very motivated to work on Pan Simulator when I did have the precious free time. For those who care to know the specifics at where I am currently at, as you all know, I'm in high school, and I've been focusing a lot on everything related to that. 2024 is going to be a huge year, and I am going to take the Driver's Knowledge Test in January (Please wish me luck on that!)

A video will be published soon that will visually showcase all of the updates made today.

Christmas Frenzy

I kind of went on a frenzy with the Christmas decorations. First off, the snow is back, but with a cool, realistic twist.

If you enter the Pets building in the city (where you will find my baby boy, Troy, with a Santa hat) the Pyramid in the Desert area, or the igloo in the Snow area, it will actually stop snowing until you go back outside!

Additionally, all buildings in the Starter, Snow, Desert, and City areas have Christmas lights on them. One of the trees in the Starter Area has also been turned into a Christmas tree!

Font Changes

As you can see in the image above, the font on the Door has been changed. All of the doors have had their fonts changed, and they all look much better!

Settings Adjustments

I made two major adjustments to the Settings

The first major change is that the Text to Emoji setting has been fully removed (the true reason will be explained below 👀)

But as for the reasons that aren't the main reasons, there was a major bug with this setting. For those who remember, if you used the whisper function built into all games on Roblox (unless they have their own custom chat system) it would display to EVERYONE with this setting. This is also not considering the 2,000+ lines of code the system took. Alas, it is now gone. But the functionality hasn't been removed entirely...

Migrating Pan Simulator to TextChatService

This is a HUGE change that I've considered making since earlier this year. After updating all the code to replace the LegacyChatService in favor of TextChatService, I rolled out TextChatService to Pan Simulator!

For those who aren't Roblox developers, let me explain in a nutshell:

The default Roblox chat that everyone knows and loves is LegacyChatService. It was actually deprecated according to the Roblox Documentation, and all new experiences published by default use TextChatService, which is a much more modern and clean Chat, as shown to the left (image from Roblox Devforum Announcement)

As a result, the chat looks much cleaner, feels faster, and is overall much better! In addition, the text to emoji functionality is added automatically, and many cool updates are being made with it that have led me to migrate Pan Simulator to this new version. One of them that is now in-game is Automatic Language Translation, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Whatever players say in the chat in different languages will now automatically be converted to their own native language, which will make communicating with people of different languages so much easier.

New Loading Screen And Logo

I believe everyone is familiar with the Pan Simulator loading screen on the right (I captured this screenshot during maintenance as a final wave of goodbye to it) that contains the Pan Simulator logo that is (or should I say, was) commonly used.

However, that has now been replaced with a far more modern, and cleaner, loading screen, displayed on the left.

Let me explain the notable changes. Firstly, the logo has been changed to a new one, a much better one created by RoFishy (massive shoutout to him)

The loading bar has also been changed, and it looks far better. The "Loading" text also no longer shows how many assets are being loaded in, and I did this to fix a bug. In rare occasions, although this occurred mostly on slower mobile devices, the game would never make it past the loading screen. This bug has now been found and fixed.

Many Other Improvements!

In addition to all of the changes above, I also made many smaller enhancements and improvements to fix bugs and improve performance!

NEW GAME?!?!

Yes! The Pan Simulator PVP game is nearing completion, and I expect a release date for next week! Stay tuned for that!

Thank You All!

Seriously, I just want to say thank you so much to every single one of you in the Pan Simulator Community. Your support has meant the absolute world to me, and I absolutely cannot thank each of you enough. I love you all!

And Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you spend the day with the ones you love :)

And for those who don't celebrate, I hope you all enjoy the day off, and take the time to spend it with loved ones

Until next year!

- Ralphie0511 🎄