Troubleshooting
9 questions
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You can connect to WorkAdventure and move your character, but when you get close to another user, you cannot speak with them? Or you cannot speak or hear people in a meeting room?
All these problems can occur when we cannot establish a video / audio connection. In technical jargon, we call those “WebRTC” connections. In a bubble, WorkAdventure tries to connect users directly to each other over UDP; when that is not possible, the streams go through relay servers. WebRTC connections can fail due to a wide number of issues but most of the time, this is due to a network that is too restricted because of firewalls or other protections installed by the network administrator.
Direct your network administrator to the Preparing your network page to help them adapt the settings of the network to WorkAdventure.
In the meantime, if you are using a VPN, try turning it off. You can also connect your laptop to your phone’s 4G/5G hotspot: a mobile connection is usually less restricted than an office network.
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If your company firewall is configured to block outgoing video calls (in particular outgoing UDP traffic), you will have to ask your network administrator to modify the configuration to allow WorkAdventure streams through.
The addresses and ports to open are listed in the “Preparing your network” article of our documentation.
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WorkAdventure is unable to function properly on some kinds of VPNs, campus networks, or corporate networks. Audio and video need a direct route to the internet, and proxies or packet inspection on the network can block them. If you’re in such a situation, you can try:
- disabling your VPN,
- asking your network administrator to unblock WorkAdventure,
- contacting us.
To unblock WorkAdventure on a personal or corporate firewall, please read the “Preparing your network” article.
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If your microphone changes every time you join your virtual office, the browser or the system is picking another available audio device for you.
On Mac this usually happens when an iPhone is nearby and Chrome sees it as an external microphone. Chrome may then treat it as the default device and use it instead of the Mac’s built-in microphone.
Set the microphone in WorkAdventure. Open the microphone settings, click the chevron, and choose the device you want. WorkAdventure remembers it and selects it again at every session, whenever it is available.
Set it in Chrome as well. Go to Settings, Privacy and security, Site settings, then Microphone, and select your Mac’s internal microphone explicitly — for example Internal Microphone or MacBook Microphone.
Check macOS too, in System Settings, then Sound, then Input: the built-in microphone should be the main input source there as well.
If the wrong microphone is still used, quit Chrome completely, reopen it and reconnect to your virtual office. This often helps reset the audio device detection.
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If the camera is not always the right one when you join your virtual office, Chrome is probably detecting several cameras and picking the one it considers the priority device. On Mac this can happen when an iPhone is offered as a camera alongside the computer’s built-in one; an external webcam or a monitor with a camera does the same, and the choice can change from one session to the next.
Set the camera in WorkAdventure. Open the camera settings, click the chevron, and choose the device you want. WorkAdventure selects it again at every session, whenever it is available.
Set it in Chrome as well. Go to Settings, Privacy and security, Site settings, then Camera, and choose your Mac’s built-in camera as the default.
Check the permission for your space: click the icon to the left of your virtual office URL and make sure camera access is allowed.
Once you have changed this, close the tab or the browser completely and reconnect to your virtual office.
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Open the menu, go to Settings, and you will find two separate controls:
- “Video quality” — for your camera.
- “Screen sharing quality” — for what you share from your screen.
Each has three positions:
Setting What it does Low The least bandwidth and the lightest codecs. Use it on a weak connection, an older machine, or a laptop on battery. Recommended The default. Balanced quality and bandwidth; a screen share is captured at 1080p. High The most detail within the budget; a screen share is captured at 1440p. Use it for code, spreadsheets and dense slides. They are separate on purpose: sharing a 1440p screen of code while your webcam thumbnail stays modest is usually exactly what you want.
Just below, “If network bandwidth is limited” decides what gives way when a stream has to be squeezed:
- “Keep text readable” — keeps the resolution and drops frames. The right choice for documents, slides and code.
- “Keep smooth animations” — keeps the frame rate and lowers the resolution. The right choice when you are sharing a video or anything that moves.
- “Keep framerate and resolution balanced” — no preference.
A change of setting applies to the next stream rather than the one already running, so stop and restart a screen share to see it take effect.
You do not have to manage this by hand in normal use: WorkAdventure chooses a video codec based on what your machine can actually encode, and steps down on its own when it cannot keep up. The setting is there for when you want to overrule it. How that works, in detail.
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If WorkAdventure drops after a few minutes in a background tab, your browser has most likely deactivated the tab to reclaim memory. Chrome calls this Memory Saver, Microsoft Edge calls it sleeping tabs. A deactivated tab keeps its title and its favicon, but it is no longer running: the connection to your virtual space is closed, and the page reloads from scratch the next time you click it.
Both browsers let you exempt the sites that need to keep running, and WorkAdventure is one of them.
Google Chrome
- Open Settings ▸ Performance.
- To the right of Always keep these sites active, select Add.
- Choose your WorkAdventure tab from the list of open tabs, or enter the address of your space (play.workadventu.re, or your own domain if you use a custom domain name or host WorkAdventure yourself), and select Add.
A site on that list is never deactivated, whichever Memory Saver mode is selected. If your team runs Chrome on Maximum memory savings (Settings ▸ Performance), tabs become inactive after a much shorter time than on the default setting, so that is worth checking at the same time.
Microsoft Edge
- Open Settings ▸ System and performance ▸ Performance.
- Under Always keep these sites active, select Add site.
- Enter the address of your space and select Add.
If it still disconnects
Neither browser deactivates a tab that is playing audio or video, sharing a screen, or in a call, so tab sleeping only affects people who leave their avatar on the map without being in a conversation. If you are disconnected while you are in a bubble or a meeting room, something else is going on: it is worth checking your network and firewall. Testing from another network (for instance using your 4G/5G phone as a hotspot) can help identify whether the problem is your network or your computer.
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Choppy or stuttering video means frames are being dropped somewhere between the camera and the screen. Three places are possible, and they are easy to tell apart.
Open Settings and enable “Display video quality statistics”. Each video then shows its resolution, bitrate and a
Limited by:line:bandwidth— the network cannot carry the stream. Check your connection, and prefer a wired one or a closer access point. Lowering “Video quality” and “Screen sharing quality” to Low reduces what you are asking of it.cpu— the computer cannot encode fast enough. This is the common one on laptops, and it gets much worse with several people in a bubble: in a peer-to-peer conversation your machine encodes your camera once per person you are talking to. Close other applications, stop the screen share if you have one running, or set the quality to Low.- Nothing shown, but the video is still jerky — the problem is more likely on the receiving side. A viewer whose machine cannot decode fast enough sees stutter that nobody else sees.
Two things WorkAdventure does about it by itself: it lowers the frame rate and the resolution of small tiles rather than sending full quality into a thumbnail, and when your encoders cannot keep up in a group conversation it moves the bubble onto our media server, so your machine encodes once instead of once per participant. Both happen without asking you.
If it persists on a machine that ought to cope, the browser matters. That automatic relief relies on the browser telling us the encoder is struggling, which Chrome and Edge do and Firefox does not — on Firefox, lowering the quality setting by hand is the fix.
The full explanation of how this works is in this article.
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