Quick Notes
For experienced OLab3 authors
Overview
For those who are quite experienced with OpenLabyrinth v3, here are a few quick notes to get you started so you can poke around in the OLab4 interface.
Basic Navigation: Player <--> Designer
The Player and the Designer are not well integrated yet. In OLab4.6, this will be improved.
The Player is kinda the boss, controls user access etc. The Designer will be the kid sister, doing what it is told (and arguing frequently).
https://player.olab4.net/ -- takes you to the Player. If you have the right permissions, this is where you would also perform maintenance and admin stuff like add other users etc.
https://designer.olab4.net/ -- takes you to the Designer, where you can edit maps etc. There is not yet a nice clean link between the two.
The URL scheme is similar between the Player and the Designer. You can cheat and jump straight to the map that you want to play or edit by adding the map number to the URL.
Working with the Player
Things should be fairly similar to OLab3. There is a cleaner list of playable maps, with better search and descriptions. You can search by name or map number.
The map number in the URL works more or less as things did for OLab3.
Working with the Designer
There is a list of editable Maps. Again, you can search by map name or number.
As a Superuser, you will be able to open and edit any of the maps.
We'd prefer that you do not mess with the ones marked as “Demo… something” in the title as they are examples we are building as how-to’s etc. Also please avoid messing with numbered cases: these are our prime examples.
If you are not a Superuser but just an Author, you will only have access to your own maps or to templates. If you are just a Learner, you will not be able to edit any maps. You will only be able to play certain maps.
Setting up your editing workspace
There are a couple of odd things that will make your life easier when editing and testing cases in OLab4.5:
Use a different web browser for the Player and the Designer e.g. Chrome and Firefox
If you have just saved some changes to your case in the Designer, in order to see them in action, you will need to Logout and then Login again in the Player (yes, even when it is launched in a different browser).
On that note, it is a good habit to Logout from the Player every time. Do not just close that window.
Welcome to the joys of cached browser data. For a more detailed explanation about this, check out Cached browser data here in the Help guide.
Create a Map
You can create your own Maps – start with Create Manually, or Create from Template. The latter allows you to start with some easy design models. There are only a few templates so far.
The Designer has been simplified a lot. As many users always commented, the OLab3 authoring interface was really messy. It should now be somewhat cleaner. We have used a similar concept-map design – you can add Links and Nodes as before.
You can add things like Questions and Files or images using the Object Picker.
Have a little poke around and give us feedback on what you find.
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