The changes in v59 represent a few months of work (the longest time between releases yet!) The most notable change in v59 is a UI rewrite.
In this update, we broadly consider two major use cases: (1) a “user in VR”, potentially a novice, who expects basic functionality for navigation and interaction and (2) a “builder outside VR”, a creative person looking to create immersive web experiences using Janus who expects a user experience similar to traditional graphics software (e.g. Maya/3DSMax/Blender/Unity/Unreal).
In the version 59 update, we take some major steps for addressing these two fundamental use cases. And there are also a pile of other specific features and additions we've made, many of which are major-release worthy on their own!
More documentation to come, describing all the new functionality in more detail (we are also doing a lot of updates to the site to add new documentation and keep things current).
Major highlights:
- New GUI!
- Social pane
- Navigation pane
- Code editor pane
- Assets pane
- Room object pane
- Properties pane
- New settings window
- Easy/intuitive access to common operations via Ellipsis "..." menu (Save and save screenshots, Settings, Bookmarks/Workspaces, etc.)
- “AssetRecording” Asset type (room-wide recordings are now possible - and drag and droppable even!)
- “rotation” and “rotation_order” attributes (Eulerian rotation support, this has been asked for forever!)
- JML Importer (import entire Janus environments into a space)
- New and improved Drag and Drop functionality (from browsers or explorer, portals, …)
- Improvements to Ghost userid/chat
- Private websurface manager (~ [tilde] to add, shift+~ to remove, ESC to hide)
- VR controls simplification
- FPS improvement for “equi” render mode
- New JS Vector functions (copy, scale, add)
- OSVR integration
- Initial Enflux integration
- “party_mode” room attribute (can declare in the room markup whether it should be a "private" space or not - we use this attribute for some of our own meeting rooms)