Announcing WorkAdventure v1.10

Announcing WorkAdventure v1.10

Conversation lock!

You can now lock a conversation bubble by clicking on the small lock icon. When a conversation is locked, nobody can enter the conversation anymore (but anyone can leave the conversation, as usual by walking away)

Completely redesigned Woka selection screen and Woka customization screen

New design, better, smoother experience, in particular on mobile!

Availability indicators

Next to your Woka name, you will now see a small "dot" indicator with 3 possible colors:

• green: You are online on WorkAdventure

• orange: You are away (WorkAdventure tab is not displayed, maybe hidden behind another tab...)

• red: You are in a "silent" zone

Right now, there is no way to control this availability indicator manually. We are still thinking about the best UX for managing those statuses. If you have ideas, don't hesitate to open a GitHub issue or come and talk to us on Discord.

Configurable "away mode" settings

When WorkAdventure is hidden behind another tab or when the window is closed, it switches automatically in "away mode". So far, by default, in "away mode", the camera was shut down, and the microphone was kept open. This way, you could answer people coming to see you easily, but they could not spy on you.

While this default settings worked reasonably well, some users prefer a stronger privacy (camera AND microphone muted while away), and other users prefer to keep everything open.

Well, good news! The brand new "away mode settings" allow you to fine-tune the behaviour of WorkAdventure when the "away mode" is triggered.

Read properties from Tiled objects

So far, if you wanted to define interactive zones in map, the standard procedure was:

• create a layer in Tiled

• add properties on this layer (like openWebsite, openJitsi, silent, etc...)

This approach works well, but it has one down-side. It creates a lot of layers that are mostly empty. And performance-wise, those empty layers are making Tiled maps bigger and are using a lot of Javascript memory in the browser.

So we looked for a better way. Starting with v1.10, you can now use Tiled objects (squares defined on an "object" layer) and put any of the properties you would normally have been putting on a layer itself.

Note: the scripting API methods to edit the properties of those Tiled objects will be added in v1.11. If you need to edit properties from the scripting API, you can stick with layer properties for now.

Auto-login link now possible from the admin side

Previously, when using an auto-login link, the link structure was: "https://play.workadventu.re/register/[some token]/". This is now changed to: "https://play.workadventu.re/...?token=[some token]". As a result, one can target any room with a auto-login link (previously, connection had to happen on the default room of the world).

Better voice chat indicators

Version 1.9 added voice chat indicators when you are in a bubble.

But so far, you could only see the voice chat indicators from the people you were in a bubble with. In v1.10, you now see the voice chat indicators of everyone currently in a conversation (even if you are not part of the conversation yourself). And voice chat indicators are also enabled when you are in a Jitsi room (with a slight twist: the indicator is above the "active speaker" in the Jitsi room).

Chinese translations

Thanks to @ZacharyJia, WorkAdventure is now translated in Chinese!

Prefixing of Jitsi room names

Previously, the name of a Jitsi room (as specified in the "openJitsi" property) was prefixed with:

• the instance of the room for URLs starting with "/_/[instance]/[map]"

• the org/world for URLs starting with "/@/[org]/[world]/[room]"

Both approaches have issues. In particular, it means that on 2 different maps, you could share the same Jitsi meeting. This was both a feature... and bothering most of the time.

To solve this, Jitsi meetings are now prepended with a "hash" of the room URL. So there is no risk to suddenly share a Jitsi room with people that are in another WorkAdventure room.

But because in some rare circumstances, we actually WANT to have a Jitsi room to talk to people on another map (for instance to implement a "phone booth"), WorkAdventure now comes with a new jitsiNoPrefix tag that enables you to remove the prepended hash.

Better error screens

We improved the error screens and the error workflows. The new error screens are now more explicit and can display retry buttons/countdown or redirect buttons.

Workflows have also been improved. For instance, if you are not logged and trying to log into a map reserved for logged users, you are now automatically redirected to the login screen instead of an error screen.

Updated AdminAPI

The connection to the admin protocol (the Admin API) has been improved a lot. This also means that custom admins written for v1.9 will need to be modified.

As part of those changes:

• the /api/map endpoint now requires less information

• error messages now need to be specified as JSON

So far, the Admin API was never really documented (as it was only used in the SAAS version). But as the community is starting to implement their own admins for custom cases, a proper documentation is underway. Also, the SAAS version of WorkAdventure will allow in the future to also hit an external API (so you can have both the power of a custom Admin API and a hosted version).

View the complete changelog

You can view the complete release notes here and here