Earlier this year, we released the HOOPS Communicator 3D Sandbox, a useful tool for testing or prototyping code snippets or to share issues with our support and consulting team. We have now extended the functionality of the 3D Sandbox with real time collaboration, making it even more useful for HOOPS Communicator developers.
To use this feature simply click on the collaborate button, pick a username and you are in a collaborative session. If you are working on a previously saved snippet with a unique snippet id, you will be placed in a private room for that snippet, otherwise you will be in the main room. From there you can copy & paste the room link to get other users to join.
Most interactions with HOOPS Communicator as well as any edits to the code will be synced across clients. In addition, you can send chat messages to everyone in the room. At any time, a user can lock a session with the “lock control” button, in which case only this user can interact with the model until control is released.
Collaboration support is robust but not foolproof and does not fully support “late joiners” to a room so its advisable to rerun the snippet when a new user joins or when the session seems out of sync. Also, snippets with custom UI elements will most likely not sync correctly as only a subset of the HOOPS Communicator API is synchronized and no attempt is made to sync custom UI interactions. As mentioned in the original blog-post, we are still planning to add video calls and screen-sharing in the next few months.
Finally, just a quick reminder that you can upload any scs files and even your own custom js libraries simply by dragging & dropping them on the viewer window. After the upload is complete those files will then be available to anyone in the session, making it really easy to collaborate on your custom models. Also, don’t forget that you can save a snippet with the click of a button, which makes it available permanently with a unique url.
If you have any questions or comments or found a bug, please don’t hesitate to post them here in the forum.
