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phetsims / resistance-in-a-wire

"Resistance in a Wire" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/resistance-in-a-wire
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Legends Of Learning Mute Doesn't Work #194

Closed JRomero0613 closed 5 years ago

JRomero0613 commented 5 years ago

For https://github.com/phetsims/QA/issues/219 when testing the functionality of the LOL harness with this sim I discovered that the mute button LOL provides (right next to start/pause/resume and end game buttons) does not mute the sound of the sim. @jbphet and I were discussing this and the possibility of adding in functionality where when the LOL mute button is hit it also activates the mute button in the sim, similar to how the pause functionality works now. Assigning to @samreid and @ariel-phet to discuss and possibly move to a more relevant repo. I have also tested with John Travoltage to make sure this is not a sim specific issue and it seems to occur with all sims that have sound.

phet-steele commented 5 years ago

I just wanted to point out that this isn't a "bug" or "issue" per se. It has always been the intention that we only support play/pause in LoL, and nothing else (I'm having trouble finding this in writing, but I am 100% sure this is what I've been told).

Since it has never been expected that the mute sound button should work, and since I understand that this github issue is asking about the possibility of adding this feature, I'm changing the labels of this issue to reflect that.

samreid commented 5 years ago

It has always been the intention that we only support play/pause in LoL, and nothing else

That's my understanding too, but maybe we should discuss with @jbphet how much effort it would be to add this for Vibe and Tambo?

JRomero0613 commented 5 years ago

I was also under the impression that we did not support the mute functionality, however with our work with sonification and sound cues looking to increase this might be a function that teachers appreciate if they use the legends of learning harness.

jbphet commented 5 years ago

@samreid said

maybe we should discuss with @jbphet how much effort it would be to add this for Vibe and Tambo?

Supporting it in Tambo would, I think, be pretty straightforward from PhET's standpoint. There is a sim-wide property that controls whether or not sound is enabled, and I imagine that it could be hooked up much like the current simActiveProperty. So, code-wise, not hard at all. Getting Legends of Learning to update to a newer version of the code that we provided them for their framework is another matter. I don't know anything about how that would work, how responsive they are, and whether they would appreciate it enough to make it worth the effort.

samreid commented 5 years ago

Getting Legends of Learning to update to a newer version of the code that we provided them for their framework is another matter

This would be more so that new simulations we publish from master would have this support--I don't think we would want to maintenance release existing sims for this.

arouinfar commented 5 years ago

I made a test playlist in LoL to see what things would look like in context. I'm not super familiar with how to use LoL, but I couldn't find a global mute button in the teacher or student views. I'm not convinced that the mute button in the LoL testing harness maps to a real control in the LoL user interface. While I think @JRomero0613 raised an excellent question, it seems like we can continue to ignore the mute button in the LoL testing harness.

Here's the teacher's view:

screen shot 2018-11-13 at 10 16 38 am

This is what the student would see. The sound on/off button in the sim behaves normally.

screen shot 2018-11-13 at 10 16 29 am
ariel-phet commented 5 years ago

@arouinfar can you bring this up at status meeting this week? Although I am generally in agreement that we can ignore, might be worth asking @kathy-phet

samreid commented 5 years ago

What if @arouinfar reaches out to LoL, something like:

We noticed there is a mute control in the harness but nothing like that in the teacher or student interface. Is there another control I missed, or another way for clients to leverage that? Or do you have plans to add support for this in the future?

arouinfar commented 5 years ago

My one and only contact at LoL is not a dev, and would not be the appropriate person for this question. Let's bring it up with @kathy-phet and see if she has a more appropriate contact.

arouinfar commented 5 years ago

@jbphet @samreid I'm reassigning to you to decide how you'd like to move forward.

jbphet commented 5 years ago

Hey @samreid - I don't think I'm going to have time for this in the near future. I also don't have any contacts at Legends of Learning. I think we should pass on implementing this for now, and be ready to do it if and when they ask for it.

jbphet commented 5 years ago

And by the way @samreid, I'm okay with closing this if you are. We can always open a more general issue about muting and LoL if we get a request to implement it.

samreid commented 5 years ago

I tested John Travoltage in the LOL harness with ?legendsOfLearning. I put a breakpoint in the LegendsOfLearningSupport message listener and found that it receives a message for start/pause, but not for mute/unmute. Also, the console indicates a postMessage for start/pause but not for mute

image

It looks like Legends of Learning provides its own audio engine: image

From the documentation: https://docs.legendsoflearning.com/unity/concepts/audio.html

To allow the Legends of Learning platform to control audio using classroom controls, we require that sound effects be passed through the API.

And the JS API for playing sounds is here: https://docs.legendsoflearning.com/vanilla-javascript-api/api.html

(a) do nothing and do not support audio muting (or other future audio control) for LOL (b) request that LOL provide postMessage commands like mute/unmute so we can support that with our own sound engine. (c) rewrite our audio so that it can optionally play over the LOL API. This would likely restrict our flexibility of sounds we can play (especially dynamic sounds).

It hasn't seemed important to support mute/unmute previously, so perhaps (a) is an acceptable solution. @jbphet sound OK? Want to close this issue?

jbphet commented 5 years ago

@samreid - I am fine with closing this issue, but I don't think it should be my call. I don't know much about how the sims are used by LoL, whether this feature is likely to matter to them, and if it has been discussed with them. It is my strongly held opinion that it isn't worth the time and effort to implement this until there is some clear direction with respect to those questions. So sure, close it if you like and we can reopen if and when we get a request to implement, or pass it off to someone who is better positioned to make a call. I'm fine with either.

samreid commented 5 years ago

Sounds good, let's escalate to @ariel-phet.

ariel-phet commented 5 years ago

I think until LoL makes this sort of request to us, we don't have do do anything major here. Ideally we will deal with this in Tambo, to be figured out in https://github.com/phetsims/tambo/issues/57 so in future sim releases this will not be an issue. Closing

kathy-phet commented 5 years ago

Added meeting: status label because I just want to know a bit more about this issue so I understand the current state for when I interact with LOL.