Announcing WorkAdventure v1.9
Another crazy 2 months since the release of WorkAdventure 1.8 and quite a number of things happened in our beloved universe.
As usual, the community rocked hard and we shipped an impressive number of features.
In this release, we worked hard to make WorkAdventure more customizable. For instance, we added a number of features to allow you to add custom logos (instead of the default logo from WorkAdventure) and you now have full control over the list of Wokas that are proposed in your world. In the future, we will continue to allow more customization to make your world really YOUR world. This will mean at some point allowing custom domain names in the SAAS version, etc...
We are super-thrilled to announce the new WorkAdventure 1.9, available right now!
Summary
3. Better controls over the Woka list
4. Web 3 login / NFT support (SAAS version only)
After more than one month of hard work, we are super happy to announce the release of WorkAdventure 1.10. Come with us on a journey through the new features.
Desktop app (alpha!)
Thanks to our new contributor @anbraten, version 1.9.0 will be the first to ship with a desktop application.
Just to be perfectly clear, the application is in an "alpha" state and still needs a lot of love before being "production ready". Still, we really want to thank @anbraten for the absolutely huge amount of work done here. We are releasing this as "alpha" in the true open-source spirit: release early, release often!
To the community at large, don't hesitate to take a look and provide feedback and improvements!
Voice chat indicator
When you are inside a bubble, you will now see a small conversation bubble appearing on top of the Woka that is speaking. This gives a more "dynamic" aspect to conversations.
Better controls over the Woka list
In previous versions, the default list of Wokas was hard coded in the front container. As a result, you could add new Wokas (from the admin interface) but you could not remove Wokas from the default list. A number of demands have been made to make WorkAdventure more "safe" by removing weapons and armors for instance. But removing those would have also bothered people loving to use those assets.
Starting with this release, we completely revamped the way we deal with Woka textures!
The list of textures is no more stored in the front container but sent from the Pusher. For the SAAS version, it can be 100% customized in the administration dashboard. For self-hosted versions, this means customization must now be done in the Pusher instead of the Front container. In the future, we will make it even easier for self-hosted installations to customize this list.
More importantly, this new control allows to completely remove the default woka list and replace it with a completely custom list.
Web 3 login / NFT support (SAAS version only)
Building on top of the new customized Woka list, it is now possible to use NFTs as Woka skins!
To be clear, these changes are part of the SAAS administration panel, they are not impacting at all the WorkAdventure Gitub repository.
In the future, the WorkAdventure company will explore the possibilities of web3. Yet, the WorkAdventure product (available on GitHub) will remain "web3 agnostic".
Contextual menu API
In v1.8, a new menu made its way when you click on a Woka. You can now see several actions like "View business card" or "Block this user".
In v1.9, this menu becomes scriptable! This means you can add you own actions in the menu!
Support for custom logos
It is now possible to display custom logos on the "Enter your name" screen and in the loading page.
Those custom logos can be uploaded in the "Edit" page of your world.
Choose your login method (SAAS version)
From the administration dashboard, you can now select which authentication methods are enabled for your world. Choose between classic login/password, Google, LinkedIn, Github or Metamask!
Build / tools improvements 📈
Front container packer changed from Webpack to Vite
Most libraries used by WorkAdventure were bundled from WorkAdventure (for instance Phaser), but there was 2 notable exceptions: Nes.css and Quill.js were both loaded from CDNs. Thanks to @anbraten, those libraries are now bundled inside the WorkAdventure Front server.
Front container packer changed from Webpack to Vite
Thanks to a huge pull request by @lukashass, the front container of WorkAdventure is now running on Vite instead of Webpack.
As a result, the container startup time in development is faster, and the amount of code to maintain the bundle is actually reduced. Thanks @lukashass!
New ARM64 images
The Docker images are now multi-platform. They are built for both AMD64 and ARM64!
This means you will finally be able to host WorkAdventure on your beloved Raspberry Pi :D
Smaller / Better front container image
In production, the "front" container is now based on a simple Nginx image (instead of a NodeJS+Apache one). The container is smaller and therefore faster to download.
Switching end-to-end test library from Testcafe to Playwright
In the past monthes, we added end-to-end tests using Testcafe. The library was kind of working, but would be very unstable on CI builds. Thanks to @lukashass, we have now switched to using Playwright. As a result, the tests are really more stable, they can run in a stable fashion on Github Actions machine which means we could completely remove a hack we added that made the E2E tests running on AWS. Thanks @lukashass!
Bug fixes 🛠
When right-clicking on a destination, we compute the shortest path between the current Woka position and the destination.
This shortest path could in the past cross an "exit tile", at which point you would be teleported to another map (instead of reaching your destination). This is now fixed!
An annoying bug regarding Jitsi getting locked on load on Chrome in very specific circumstances has also be fixed.
... and more!
All release details can be read from the release notes available at: https://github.com/thecodingmachine/workadventure/releases/tag/v1.9.0