Captivate 8 crashes before preview loads

Report · Oct 21, 2015

Calling all Captivate experts !!!

In need of an urgent solution!

When previewing or publishing my captivate 8 responsive project the program crashes at 65%

Possible cause: My project was created on dropbox along with all of the assets.

When the program started to crash I cloned the project folder on my local machine and relinked all of the assets locally (offline).

This solution worked briefly but now the problem is back and dont know how to fix if as there are no errors.

Any help would be appreciated !!!!

Steve.

Report · Oct 21, 2015

When you say:

"My project was created on dropbox along with all of the assets. When the program started to crash I cloned the project folder on my local machine and relinked all of the assets locally (offline)."

Are you saying:

The CPTX file was stored in dropbox while you were authoring?

The HTML/SWF assets were published to dropbox directly from Captivate?

The HTML/SWF assets were published to your local drive, then uploaded to DropBox for testing?

Unless you are authoring, publishing and previewing the published files from a local drive, you are causing yourself extra work. Captivate will eventually corrupt your source file, causing you to loose hours of work, and start a complete rebuild of the file on the local drive.

STOP WORK NOW, close Captivate, move the files to a local drive (NOT a network drive) to the authoring machine, then reopen the application, check your application preferences to ensure the working folder and the CACHE folder are 1) local folders, and 2) not overlapping paths; and THEN open the working file. Your publishing path should also be local, and outside the paths for the working folder, and CACHE folder.

Report · Oct 21, 2015

Hi have highlighted your text below.

The CPTX file was stored in dropbox while you were authoring? YES

The HTML/SWF assets were published to dropbox directly from Captivate? YES

The HTML/SWF assets were published to your local drive, then uploaded to DropBox for testing? NO X

Thanks for the advice regarding local paths not overlapping and where the other paths should point. I thought dropbox would be a suitable option for collaborating in-house with my asset creator but has caused more problems than its worth. I will change the settings and test the project now using your suggestions, many thanks will post back if it solves my issues.

Report · Oct 22, 2015

Hi I followed the advice from previous post but still not working. I relinked all of the paths to the correct local locations and relinked all of the assets in the project to the correct local paths. When i preview the project it gets stuck on the loading screen (see 2nd image below) and when I reopen the project all of the assets are unlinked once again ! (see 1st image below) The assets are pointing to the old dropbox location even after I have deleted dropbox from my machine and relinked them locally.

Any help would be great!

Report · Oct 22, 2015

Everything is on Dropbox? Probably this is causing corruption, as is mentioned in one of the answers. Captivate doesn't like an environment that is not local.

Report · Oct 22, 2015

Thanks but ive moved everything to my local machine, relinked all assets and still getting problems so dropbox is not the culprit at this point.

Report · Oct 22, 2015

It looks to me like you can click 'Update Resource Paths' here.

Then Click Browse, and select the folder where the files are stored locally.

Captivate should recognize the files relative to this new path and re-link. I would suggest that you immediately save as to the local drive to create a new Captivate file.

Report · Oct 22, 2015

Thanks but ive relinked all the files and still getting a loading screen on preview.

Report · Oct 22, 2015

Currently im getting a loading screen on preview and no further.

Has anyone ever encountered this problem before?

Urgent that i solve this issue a.s.a.p so any further help would be great

Report · Oct 22, 2015

Try uploading your content to a web server and test from there.

Do you still get the loading screen?

Report · Oct 23, 2015

Yes still seeing a loading screen after uploading to server. Going to reinstall the program to see does that solve the problem but still open to advice and possible solutions! Thanks

Report · Oct 23, 2015

Just reinstalled the program and created a new responsive project then copied and pasted the old slides into the new project. All worked ok for 2hours until i started adding more advanced actions and shared actions now captivate crashes at 64% when trying a web preview.

My thinking is that the advanced actions that are coming over with the copied slides are now causing the crash but cant be sure.

Very frustrating problem, expert advice would be greatly appreciated!

Report · Oct 23, 2015

Hi there,

Is the crash consistently happens every time during preview? If yes, then can you please share the project with us so that we can investigate the issue at our end. Please upload it to a shared work space and send us the link at nsukumar@adobe.com

Thanks,

Nimmy Sukumaran.

Report · Oct 23, 2015

Thanks Nimmy that email has gone to you now.

Report · Oct 23, 2015

Take a copy of the project and experiment on it by removing Advanced Actions one at a time before republishing each time. See if you can isolate which actions are causing the issue.

Report · Oct 24, 2015

Thanks RodWard will give that a try!

Report · Oct 26, 2015

PROBLEM SOLVED:

Adobe have looked at the project file and think it might have been a problem with a playbar in the project that had been customised a bit.

So when I reinstalled captivate I then reverted back to the default playbar and disabled the playbar, the project now previews properly again and seems to be working fine.

Thanks for all of the replies and advice,

Much appreciated.