Hey Zwifters, the time has come! We’ve begun releasing our Guest World feature. This will be rolled out over several days, with Windows and Mac live already, and Android, AppleTV, and iOS following over the coming days.
With this change Watopia will now always be available and the old calendar becomes a “Guest World” calendar. The Guest World is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the 2nd world available to use in addition to Watopia, and it will change from day to day just like the world did before.
With plenty of road to ride on Watopia all the time, our future guest worlds and events will have a little more freedom to try new things. In the meantime we’ll also to continue to build out Watopia with more variety, as we think it can become an even better place to ride and run this year.
A few other notable changes in this update include:
Increased tolerance of bluetooth packet dropouts on running footpads
Screenshots now can optionally include the on-screen HUD on PC and Mac (iOS/AppleTV already had this feature). You can toggle the HUD per shot at the end of your session on the save screen.
Improved realtime event ranking with regards to people who join late
BETA: Windows bluetooth control of smart trainers improved. Please give it a try if you have a windows 10 laptop.
Lots of little bug fixes and enhancements
Known issue in this release:
Route distances shown in the route selection menu or on the event HUD may be slightly short. The routes and events should still function properly and be the correct distances. We’ll deploy a fix as soon as possible.
We have left Watopia on the calendar for a little longer to accommodate the Zwifters who don’t have the update yet. Watopia will be removed soon as it will no longer be necessary.
Meetups can only be scheduled on the Guest World at this time. An update to Zwift Companion will be released next week which will allow meetups to be on Watopia+Guest World, again to accommodate Zwifters who don’t yet have this game update.
As usual we’re all ears when it comes to feedback about changes or a new issue you may have discovered, just respond to this thread. Or if there is something new you’d like to see, head on over to Feature Requests to post your idea.
I do think this will work reasonably well for now. I can “world hack” to Richmond and have the choice of Watopia, Richmond or map-of-the-day (which may be Richmond too, of course).
But the guest world is still on a schedule. If I really want to ride New York today, but the schedule says London, I still have to world hack. As more worlds come along (I’ll be astonished if there’s not a 2019 World’s course based in Yorkshire), the problem becomes exacerbated.
I still prefer the idea of a full world choice. Given the UI they have here, I think it would be trivial to add a tile for each world along with the number of current riders.
That lets the rider decide whether they want to go and ride in a busy New York today, a deserted Richmond, or a middling-populated London for example.
I’m not bothered about the airport myself, Daren, but I do agree full world switching with an indication of their current rider density would be ideal. However, I still don’t see the new setup on my iPad yet, so I guess an app update must be on the way - hope Apple don’t take too long to approve it!
Well, no it’s not the end of the world. Bit I kinda liked the idea of joining Watopia and riding through a terminal to one of the world destinations. It could look a bit like the Jungle Circuit gate, with the number representing the population or something.
The main downsides are of course the extra time involved (from development and user) and the little bit of incongruous GPS data to throw away before uploading to Strava.
So I’ve no doubt the current implementation is better overall. But it’s a bit boring by comparison. =)
In one of the ‘known issues’ it is stated that meetups can only be planned in the guest worlds. I planned a meetup for Saturday before the update and it still seems to be Watopia. Is this going to fail?
Great to hear the HUD bug has been squashed and it’s back in our screenshots!
As I’m not at home to test, does this mean we still get two versions saved to disk? i.e. with HUD and a _clean version. If I’ve taken a lot of screenshots, it would be annoying to have to go through each one at the end to decide whether I want the HUD or not. So does that only apply to the version being uploaded to Strava?
(While we’re on the subject, I find the screenshot carousel pretty hard to use on a PC. It might work on a touchscreen, but using it with a mouse is very frustrating. Same applies with the carousels in the kit selection dialogs.)
Both screenshots (clean and HUD) will be saved to disk. The selector just lets you choose what you want uploaded.
I agree on the screenshot selector and the jersey selector. We’ve changed the jersey selector for our next big release, but the screenshot selector may stay this way for a bit until we have time to tune it for desktop computer use.
Great update, Jon and team! All these new features are really improving the product!
But… something odd in this release that Little Snitch 4.3 (5250) on macOS Mojave does not like. It repeatedly terminates the ZwiftApp process when trying to hand off the OAuth token. This is the first release of Zwift that has triggered this.
The code signatures look good, so I’m not sure why it’s tossing.
I’m still investigating on this end, and have reached out to the team at Objective Development (makers of Little Snitch) to see if there’s something in this version that is causing this.
I’ve been choosing worlds with the prefs hack for a long time now. I’m JUST lazy enough that I haven’t written a powershell script to do it but for the Zwift team it would be trivial to just allow the selection of ANY world rather than a choice of two.
I’ve been liking this on ATV, but the only way to get HUD-free versions of your shots is to upload them to Strava (or, I suppose, other linked services) and you’re limited to just 5 shots per upload. I’d prefer if they were available alongside the regular screenshots on my device. They’d be easier to access (no digging in the source on Strava) and no more limit.
