Does Captivate 8 HTML5 actually preload content?

[WebDev0105]

I ask because even though I have the preloader settings checked, I continually see the "Loading..." GIF on various slides when running my project. The second time I run it, I do not see the "Loading..." GIF. This makes me question whether HTML5 output is preloaded at all.

I am using Captivate 8 publishing a 66 slide software simulation to HTML5 (not responsive). In the Preferences, have the "Preloader %" set to 100%.

In IE 11, I clear my browser cache and then launch the sim from a web server. I see the preloader animated GIF display for a while, thinking that this is when it is preloading all of the images. Once the first slide loads, i stop and view the files in my cache. I only see the slide content files (png) that are used on the first slide. No other slide images are there.

So what exactly does "Preloader %: 100" do for an HTML5 publish?

If it is not actually preloading images, is there a workaround?

Thanks in advance!

[TLCMediaDesign]

The html5 output has all of the course information in the CPM.js file, which can get quite large. All of that file needs to load and images are preloaded through the CPXHRLoader.js file.

When each slide is encountered the page is rerendered with the new assets. Depending on what is on the slide you can see the loader icon again while the page is being built.

Video, audio, widgets or learning interactions, web objects, HTML5 animations are not preloaded.

[WebDev0105]

Thanks for the reply!

The CPM.js file I have is 800KB. I can understand that that file needs to completely load before the movie can play. I assume that's what's loading while I am watching the default assets/htmlimages/loader.gif spin when I launch the movie.

But I cannot find evidence that any image files are preloaded at all. Looking at index.html, the only uses of the cpXHRJSLoader library (contained in CPXHRLoader.js) are for the project's css and js files. The comment in the JS and on the source GitHub site say this library is a CSS and JS loader.

The loading icon I continually see when moving from slide to slide is dr/loading.gif - a different animated GIF than the initial preloader. My sim is pretty simplistic - most slides are a background image and a single, short text caption (rendered as a PNG). The interactive versions have either a click box or a text entry field. Pretty minimal in terms of objects.

So I'm inclined to believe that the Preloader setting does not actually apply to an HTML5 publish; that it only relates to SWFs. I may do more testing, but so far, I'm disappointed.

[TLCMediaDesign]

All of the images are now in JSON files which are getting preloaded. The images to have to render from code, but this would be a miniscule amount of time.

You may have some other issue happening if you are consistently seeing the loader gif.

I have seen it occasionally with audio and much more frequently with Demos loading. I have seen it more in Chrome than IE also.

[R_H__]

Does anyone know if it is possible to specify media to be preloaded? We would really like our courses to preload certain videos, is it possible to add these somewhere to be preloaded along with the CPM.js and JSON files?

Thanks.

[TLCMediaDesign]

Not really possible to preload a video and have it be in the cache.

You might want to check this out though.

GitHub - watsondg/video-cache: Preload a set of videos and keep them in memory to avoid reloading th...

You would be taxing the bandwidth if you are downloading videos at the same time other parts of the project are loading.

[R_H__]

Thanks for the info TLC.

I don't think our issue is related to preloading now, but this was still useful to know.