Top menu buttons stop working during tour

[AstroALee]

A student and I are developing interactive labs using the web-version of WWT. The labs are stored as tour files and contain interactive components. When the tour is open, I believe clicking on the top-menu tab for the tour messes something up and prevents the other menu tabs from functioning.

Steps to recreate the problem:

1. Go to web client version of WWT.
2. Load a tour file located on my machine. A new tab appears on the top menu. The tour tab is selected and the tour timeline appears at the top.
3. Tour loads up fine. I can click "view" or other tabs and do things like change the time, etc.
4. Click the tour tab again. The program hip cups (and in my case returns to the start of the tour). Clicking on any other tab at the top of the screen now does nothing.

Closing out the tour does not fix the problem. Reloading the tour does not fix the problem. The only way to fix is to refresh the entire page.

Again, this seems to only happen when I leave the tour tab and try to return to it. As long as I never click back on the tour tab, the other buttons work fine. On my end, this issue appears independent of browser, OS, or tour file.

Screen capture of this issue can be found here (see the video description for a walkthrough of what I am trying to do): https://youtu.be/HuQ6IPQ4I4U

[pkgw]

Hi Aaron — hmm, yeah, I can reproduce this with a generic tour file. Thanks for the detailed report! Our engineering bandwidth is always limited so I'm not sure when we'll get to this — feel free to ping here if you feel like this is languishing.

[pkgw]

A much later update ... recently I've put some effort into tour playback in a standalone application. Here's an example:

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/tour-15-of-the-brightest-stars-on-new-years-eve-video/

If the freestanding tour player might of interest to you, I can tell you more about it.

[keflavich]

@pkgw Can you tell more about this freestanding tour player? That's something I'd very much like to use.

(also I have experienced the original issue here several times)

[pkgw]

Sorry for the delay, but yes, I can! Try navigating to:

https://embed.worldwidetelescope.org/

then click on the "Play a Guided Tour" tab at the top. If you paste a tour file URL into the box (such as one from the example just above the entry, although that demo is pretty lame) it'll show a demo and give you HTML that you can copy-paste to embed the tour player in another webpage. The "Open Preview in New Window" button does what it says, and you can also use that to obtain a URL to the tour player with that tour loaded.