Cp6 - Something broke! A "lifesaver" best practice reminder!

[shawninvancouver]

First, I should point out a very important best practice of saving your projects often and save your Captivate projects as a new name each time.

e.g. project_01, project_02, etc. (or some other variation that makes sense to you)

Case in point…

Just a while ago, my Captivate project became corrupted for unknown reasons. I last experienced this problem in Cp4 so this is a disappointing reminder that Cp6 may also be vulnerable to file corruption.

Everything seems fine. All the slides seem perfect but this particular project now fails on my two computers.

The symptom:

Now, I can no longer run in preview mode (F4 or otherwise). When I select preview, the Captivate preview window hangs for a very long time (slide 1/37 – just a grey screen). If I attempt to click anywhere within the preview window, I will see “Preview (Not Responding)”

If I wait about 5 minutes, the preview will actually start, however, it is very unresponsive… so clicking the NEXT button (I don’t use the slidebar ** name?) requires nearly 5 minutes to view the next slide.

The only way out of this mess is to let Captivate crash.

This repeats when I restart with the same file. In other words, the project is toast.

While really, really, annoying... all is not lost! Because I change my project name with every save (I anticipated this unfortunately inevitable moment), I now going to open an older (by 1/2 h) project and continue.

- Shawn

[RodWard]

Shawn,

Sometimes the corruption is actually in the Preferences folder and you can ditch that and clear your cache to get everything working.  Worth a try for a project where you haven't saved to a different file in a long time.

[shawninvancouver]

Hello Rod,

I have experienced a pref. corruption problem back in Cp4. But when the problem travels with you between 2 different licenses and 3 different computers, it is pretty much a guarantee that it isn't a preference issue. 🙂

Actually, in my particular case, the problem appears much more sinister; see thread: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1140720?tstart=0

I have no idea what to do next. I think I need to escalate this to the Adobe engineers because the problem seems to be repeatable.

[RodWard]

Sorry Shawn, but I have to disagree with you on this one. 

The mechanism used in Cp4 for preferences is entirely different to Cp5 onwards.  And Cp5x versions were plagued by considerable issues with Preference corruption.  So my recommendation remains to search for threads on this forum about Cp5x and Cp6x Preference folders and how to kill them so that Captivate restores them on next launch to fix these types of issues.  I would bet London to a brick that, even if you DO get online with an Adobe engineer, this is one of the first things they will tell you to do.

If this problem project was NOT created from scratch in the current version of Captivate that you are using (and especially if it was originally a Cp4 project) then my guess would be that your current sluggishness could be due to one or more components that are bogging the thing down.  In particular I would try removing any Text Animations, Slidelets (very likely to cause slowness), removing and updating your Skin, Preloaders, and any other SWF animations that might not be recent.  If the issue still persists, the next things to try are quiz question slides, followed by interactive objects such as buttons and text entry boxes.  (I've never had issues with Click Boxes doing this.

I also use your technique of hiding slides as a process of elimination to try and locate the cause/s of similar issues.  So you're on the right track there.

[shawninvancouver]

Hello Rod,

I am unsure what you are disagreeing with? I fully understand the legacy of Captivate as I've been there every step. I am unsure why you brought that up.

I think you are misunderstanding or I have not explained this issue well enough.

This course was developed entirely in Cp6. I have not done a significant amount of testing throughout development... basically building new slides each day.

Anyhow, when I ran a rare test earlier today, I was shocked to notice the course was unresponsive; taking nearly five minutes before the first slide would show. Naturally I thought corruption. But through hiding slides and publishing older  saved project revisions, I noticed a disturbing trend that project responsiveness. For instance, clicking the navigation buttons went from instantaneous down to just over five seconds per click as test through the published versions.

Curiously, the following remain unaffected (responsive throughout all revisions):

- Custom TOC button (a custom/advanced conditional action - if cpCmndTOCVisible = 0 or 1....)

- Effects

Everything else has become quite unresponsive (or gradually more unresponsive through the revisions):

- BACK/NEXT buttons,

- HELP button (a Jump to Slide x action)

- Timeline events within a slide

If this was a problem with preferences, I should not be able to solve the problem by publishing earlier versions or even hiding slides in the most recent revision. Additionally, I should not see this same issue on three different systems.

But because I am willing to try anything, I cleared out the preferences and restarted Captivate and believe me, I am really disappointed to report that it did not help.

Please understand, I am not necessarily blaming Captivate... as it could very well be something I have done that has simply made responsiveness worse as I added more slides. Figuring out what that is could be a huge challenge. 😞

[RodWard]

Fair enough then.  If Preference folder is not under suspicion let's look at other potential issues.

If this is a project that originated in Cp6, you might try changing to a different theme to see if that is affecting it.

Also, you don't necessarily have to hide entire slides to test whether something on the slides might be gumming up the works.  I often just drag some elements off the stage into the scrap area to see if they are causing issues.  (Just deselecting Visible in Output box still leaves the object in the movie but dragging it off into the scrap area outside the stage means it doesn't get published with the movie.)

I do this with widgets, SWF animations, and anything non-standard that I might have added to the movie (including any video files). 

I can appreciate that this issue is frustrating, but there's usually some logical reason for it and you just have to chase down all the possibilities.

[shawninvancouver]

I reduced the lack of responsiveness from just over 5 seconds per nav button press down to 2.5 seconds by eliminating 9 Smart Shape buttons (in the form of a menu) and changing them to bullets. I noticed that this particular slide was making the course slower.

Now the learners will have to go through this content in a linear fashion (or use the TOC).

Question is, why were these Smart Shape/buttons causing about 1/2 the problem?

[RodWard]

You had not mentioned previously that this was a branched project with a menu slide.

If you were on Cp5 or 5.5 I would have said that this latency was due to the fact that when you jump to a slide much later in the project then Captivate has to render all the slides between the one you jumped from all the way to the target slide.  However, with the new architecture in Cp6 I thought that was all a thing of the past.  Perhaps not.

Does the latency seem at all less if you jump from the menu slide to another slide that is fairly close to it in the line?  E.g. if your menu slide is slide 3, and you jump to slide 5 or 7, is it at all noticeably quicker than jumping to slide 50 or 70?

[shawninvancouver]

Hello Rob,

Thank you for your assistance.

Bear with me, I am replying from my phone.

I wondered about this being a branching problem after removing that optional menu.

Unfortunately no, the delay remains consistent no matter how many times I jump through course and bring up same slides multiple times.

If it is some sort of branching problem, that might explain the gradual slowing responsiveness through the versions. Each slide (based upon a template) has one branch (for the help button) in addition to other manditory branches throughout course.

If this is still a problem, this is very bad news for people building courses similar to me.

Thanks

[RodWard]

What's this about a Help button? Where is the Help slide that this button points to? If it is currently near the back of the project, try moving that help slide to an earlier spot near the first slides and see if that makes it run faster.