Publishing captivate project (HTML5) with playback bar disabled prevents project from playing

Report · Jan 08, 2021

Hey Captivate community,

I have run in to a strange issue with captive that I can't quite explain so I wanted to see if anyone else has seen this before.

I have been recently publishing software simulation over the last week. I noticed that I can preview fine, and observe the preview from an export fine. However double clicking the index.html file from the exported project isn't working. It will load in my browser (Chrome) and when I click the play button a loading image comes up and then when the project finally loads most of the data is missing. Only the smart shapes remain and I can not advance beyond the first slide.

Here is what this looks like.

(FYI, these are tiny files no more than 5 - 10 Mb at most.)
What is even more crazy to me is that it seems like the issue is occuing when I disable the playback bar from the Skin Editor. I figuered this out by testing the project with all the buttons simply hidden and with the bar diabled. Disabling the playback bar seems to be the problem but I am not sure why. Have any of you every come across this issue before? Any advice on this is very welcome.

Report · Jan 08, 2021

Local playing a project will not always be successful except immediately after publishing when you are invited to view the output.

Upload the published folder to a webserver to see if it works.

BTW: if this is a non-responsive project the only Preview method to be used should be F11, Preview HTML in Browser. Can you preview that way? The other preview methods are SWF-based.

Report · Jan 08, 2021

Hey thanks Lilybiri,

We have uploaded these to a web server in the past and they have always worked. It was only in the last week or so when I tired running it locally from the index file in the exported project that I started seeing this issue. So you might be on to something there.

This project is reposnive; we're doing simulations from our mobile app at the moment. All the preview funcitonality in Captivate works fine, it just seems that this started happening when I was testing it from local host on my machine. But I'll try your idea and upload it to our Web server and see if we get the same results.

Appreciate the advice!

Report · Jan 08, 2021

Make sure the web server allows JSON files as well. Captivate now uses JSON to render PNG images.

Report · Jan 09, 2021

Since it has worked from the server, I suspect it does support JSON because the need for that feature is there since quite a while. It may be just some used objects/interactions which are not possible to run locally.

Report · Jan 12, 2021

Update: I loaded both version to our Web Server and they both worked just fine. So I am leaning more to there being an issue with my browser rather than Captivate. But for now it seems like this issue with previewing might just be a red harring. If I nail it down I'll let you guys know.

Report · Jan 12, 2021

It is not consistent, but Learning Interactions or some videos can be a problem for Preview HTML, but will work fine when uploaded to a webserver. I don't think it is the browser, but some specific content.