The rail on the Control page holds the sections that control what players experience in the room — the screens they see and the audio they hear — plus the one-tap Quick Actions. The live Timeline log sits in the column beside the objectives. This guide covers each of them.
The Displays section
A display is a screen players see — a TV, monitor, or browser tab showing the countdown, hints, and media. Open the Displays section in the rail to see every display for the game and its current status.
Each display shows whether it is Online or Offline, what it is currently showing, and how many browser tabs are connected to it. Alongside that:
- Refresh — reload the display, useful if it looks stuck or out of date.
- Clear — clear whatever is currently showing on the display.
- Skip — skip a video that is playing on that screen.
- Click the Online / Offline pill itself to open that display in a new browser tab — handy for a spare screen or a quick check.
An offline display shows the note Waiting for display to connect… instead.
Offline displays need attention
If a display shows Offline, players are not seeing it. Check that the screen and its bridge (a Raspberry Pi or Windows Bridge) are powered and connected. See Raspberry Pi and Windows Bridge for connection help.
Audio
Audio lives inside the display cards — each screen owns the sound it plays. Click a display card to fold it open and you get that screen’s volume sliders, split into channels so you can balance them independently:
- Playback — audio from videos and media clips.
- Alerts — the attention sound that plays before a hint or on demand.
- Ambient — background music or atmosphere.
- Speech (TTS) — spoken hints delivered by text to speech.
ARC puts the channels that matter for that screen up front and tucks the rest under Other audio, so a display that never plays ambient music isn’t cluttered with an ambient slider.
If something is playing right now, an Audio Track row appears under the Playback slider with its name, a progress bar, and buttons to pause, resume, or stop it. A track set to repeat is marked Looping.
Some channels have a volume lock set in the Editor. A locked channel means staff can lower or mute it but not raise it above that level — useful for keeping ambient music or alerts within a comfortable range. An unlocked channel can be adjusted freely.
Ambient music while a hint plays
What ambient audio does when a hint plays is chosen per game in the Editor: lower the ambient volume, pause it until the hint finishes, or keep it playing untouched.
The Devices section
The Devices section holds one card per prop or piece of hardware a builder has chosen to put in front of staff, with the device’s name at the top of its card. It only appears when the game has devices set up this way.
A colored stripe down the left edge of each card tells you whether ARC can reach that device — green for online, red for offline, grey for unknown. Hover the device’s name for the reason in plain words, such as “Offline — its connection is down.” or “Unknown — it hasn’t reported yet.”
Unknown is an honest answer
Some devices genuinely cannot report whether they are online. A grey stripe means ARC does not know, not that something is broken.
Under the name are the controls themselves — buttons, on/off switches, sliders, color pickers — laid out however the builder arranged them. A card can also carry read-only rows that just show a live value, so you can watch a sensor without a button to press.
Any control can be set to need a confirmation: the first press arms it and reads Confirm?, and a second press within a few seconds actually fires it.
Quick Actions
Quick Actions are one-tap buttons in the rail that run a scene or automation — for example, releasing a maglock, resetting the lights, or playing a sound. A quick action can also open a control panel. Managers and builders set them up in the Editor; on the Control page you simply press them.
A Quick Action button can be labeled and colored to suit the action, and related buttons can be gathered under a heading. Some buttons require a confirmation — you press them twice — so a high-impact action like opening the exit cannot fire from a single accidental tap. A button can also be limited to certain game states, and it tells you when it has already run this game.
Use Quick Actions for the things you do every game
If you find yourself doing the same manual step every session, ask a builder to add it as a Quick Action. It is faster and harder to get wrong than digging through panels mid-game.
The Timeline
The Timeline is the live activity log for the session. It records what happened and when, so you always have a running history of the game:
- Hints sent.
- Objectives completed and bypassed.
- Displays going online and offline.
- Help requests.
- Timer events.
By default the Timeline shows the player-facing story of the game. Turn on the Troubleshooting toggle to also see what fired behind the scenes — automations, device changes, and scene runs — folded into the timeline. This is the first place to look when something in the room behaved unexpectedly.
At the foot of the panel a counter tracks hints for the session, such as Hints: 3 / 5, and tells you when you have hit the game’s limit. Once a session is over, the same record is kept as a session timeline you can reopen later.
Where to go next
- The Control Page — how the dock, column, and rail fit together.
- Hints and Objectives — what appears on the displays and how hints are sent.
- Resetting a Room — return the room to its starting state.