CP9 - Drag&Drop - problems with timing the submit button and with show/hide objects

[corujaedu]

Hello everybody!

My name is Christian and I work in a small education Start Up.

We have a really small team (a duo) trying to make an adaptive quiz with this tool, but we're finding a lot of obstacles with it.

The more obscure ones, are in Drag & Drop (D&D) slides (I fail to interpret D&D as anything other than Dungeons & Dragons, but let's try again).

1) Sometimes, in a specific slide, we have a problem in which no other object, aside the submit / confirm button, is displayed. We already checked the hidden property, both on the properties sidebar, and the timeline bottom bar. All the objects are inside the stage. The only way to continue the project is by clicking on the submit button, recording a fail on that slide (only 1 attempt). How can we be sure that all objects in the slide will be displayed when executing the published SCORM package?

2) The usual behavior we observe on D&D slides is that the submit button appears immediately upon entering the slide. But sometimes, it fails to load until after a random number of seconds. Anyone encountered something like this before? I think the answer will be:

¯\(ツ)/¯

EXTRA INFO:

We have 3 responsive projects, each targeting a school year, with near 360 slides. Each slide has a question, asked by an audio file, each answer (right or wrong) leads to a different slide.

Because we work with child in the range of 5-10 years, not all of them can read, so we use buttons for each answer choice, that plays an audio file when clicked.

The final size of the project file, goes to something like 370MB, considering some videos, images and all the audio files. Can this size be the reason of all of the odd behaviors we detected? Or is this tool simply filled with all sorts bugs?

Thanks in advance. Great community here!

[Lilybiri]

I don't know how well you know the ins and outs of the timeline, nor of the D&D slides. Your question just makes me suspect that maybe you are missing some features?

Captivate's Timelines (master slide/normal slide cptx) demystified - Captivate blog

Pausing Captivate's Timeline - Captivate blog

Drag&Drop tips - Captivate blog

Drag&Drop in 2016 with Captivate 9 - Captivate blog

A responsive project with a (published?) size of 370MB is bit 'insane' to me: how will a mobile device manage such a project? If you want to use courses of that size, you should keep to normal projects, that have to be watched on desktop/laptops. Mobile devices, especially phones are not capable of offering a satisfactory User experience with huge files like that. Either you have to split up the course in smaller chunks, or find a way to stream the videos, or to store them outside of Captivate.

[corujaedu]

... but I did read all those links in the past!

All D&D slides are set to pause after 60 sec, which sometimes get ignored and the timeline continues to play, exiting the slide.

We did found a workaround this: set the button to repeat the questions to pause after x seconds and when clicked, execute an Advanced Action that pauses the slide, stop any playing audio and then plays the question audio - in that order.

The problem is that it only works when that button does shows - but sometimes no button shows...

Oh, I failed to mention that we do not actually work with 'Button objects', we use 'Smart Shape objects' as those have more options of background, etc.

We'll try to break the project into smaller chunks, but that will have a great cost in our back-end solution, as all the logics behind the project gets reworked.

If that doesn't work, I'll try streaming the files, with javascript, but I think the bigger problem will still be the size of the project (not only in file size, but in number of slides).

I'll update this post whenever I gather more results!

Thanks for the advices!

[Lilybiri]

Do you use Object actions? Pause will be overridden if those actions don't honor the pause, there is an option to uncheck 'Continue Playing the Project' in CP9, if the object actions are simple actions, no advanced actions.

Size of the project could be the big problem indeed