Captivate 9: Branching project crashes and becomes unresponsive in preview or publish

[Hannah Quinton]

Hi,

I have a captivate 9 project, with branching enabled. Whenever I have gone to preview or publish this project it crashes, on random slides.

The branching is created using advanced actions of 'jump to...' and I have attempted publishing in HTML5, SWF and both.

I have even enabled scalability or not, tested on different browsers and tried a load of different fixes!

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Hannah

[RodWard]

There is a list of debugging techniques here:

http://www.infosemantics.com.au/adobe-captivate-troubleshooting/basic-troubleshooting-techniques

I suggest using number two to start with.  Hide slides and republish.

[Hannah Quinton]

Hi Rod,

Thanks for that. Unfortunately, the project is 88 slides in length, it is taking a long time to troubleshoot!

However, I took your advice to give a little bit more information, just in case someone knows the problem...

Captivate version 9 with the patch (PC) version 9.0.0.230

Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox are all having the same problems. It just crashes randomly, on different slides each time.

Flash Player 19,0,0,245 installed

Hosted on an LMS, Docebo with SCORM 2004.

I have published in HTML5 and SWF and both. All produce the same results.

We use Captivate a LOT and all our other projects are working fine, we are unable to work out why this one seems to be crashing.

[RodWard]

It should only take a few minutes to confirm via process of elimination whether or not the issue is due to some slide corruption.

Start by just hiding one half of the slides, then republish, upload and test.  If the issue disappears, your problem is somewhere in that half of the project.  If it remains, hide the other half and test.  Etc.Once you find the half, hide half of THAT half etc.

It should be possible this way to narrow down the location of the trouble quite quickly.

[Hannah Quinton]

Hi Rod,

Thank you for all your help. We took your approach and di hide slides, but it was randomly changing each time we tried to narrow it down.

It is now working, but strangely the actual fix turned out to be... unticking "branch aware".

This means I have to do a LOT of rework and advanced actions, but I am so confused why branching was causing all our problems!

Any ideas?

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

You never mentioned Branch Aware before, so I did not realise that was involved.

I've come across several issues where Branch Aware conflicted with other Captivate settings such as Submit All and other quizzing options.

If Branch Aware WAS involved in this issue and turning it off had benefits, then I would say your actual issue is somewhere in your quizzing slides, or possibly with the Pre-Test if you have one.

[Hannah Quinton]

Hi Rod,

Apologies if I was unclear!

I think the "branch aware" was the cause of the problems, I think the way we were using it to aid our scoring was actually conflicting with the advanced actions we were using.

We have ended up now scraping the inbuilt quiz question slides and opting for advanced actions for the reporting too.

Thanks for all your help though

[RodWard]

Be careful.  You cannot send scores to an LMS with Advanced Actions because all quiz result system variables are read-only.

[Hannah Quinton]

Hi Rod,

Thank you for the warning!

However, we have actually found a way with our LMS by using smart-shapes as buttons and ticking the "Include in Quiz" and "Add to Total" boxes. This reports the score to our LMS well. There is no breakdown of questions like you would get with the 'captivate way' but unfortunately partial scoring is not flexible enough to achieve what we need it to!

[RodWard]

OK.  I see what you mean, but just to clarify...Using a SCORED Smart Shape button is not really "using Advanced Actions for the reporting".  Captivate simply picks up the scored button as an interactive object and reports its score to the quiz, in much the same way as it would a quiz question. 

As I mentioned before, System Variables for quizzing cannot be altered by Advanced Actions.

However, if what you have set up with these button satisfies your requirements, then that's all that really matters.