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Converting Complex Flash Interactive Animations to HTML5

Community Beginner ,
Apr 09, 2019 Apr 09, 2019

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With the demise of Flash, I have been tasked with finding a way to convert a reasonably large number of complex interactive flash animations, built with a lot of action script and ran as SWF files embedded into published SWF Captivate projects, into a purely HTML5 format. Clearly, I can't just export the project as MTML5 since the swf elements would be incompatible. I have tried importing them into Adobe Animate, but the conversion process goes wrong and breaks the animations so that, for example, screens that would be seen when the user clicks on a button (and there are quite a lot of them) just cycle around without any way to stop them. I am not a programmer and never learnt ActionScript and as yet I have not learnt how to use Adobe Animate, although I am willing to give it a go, IF I can be sure that the effort of learning the package will result in my being able to get all the animations working and hopefully won't have to rebuild them from scratch. OR, is there any other easy method of converting interactive Flash Animations to HTML5?

Thanks

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2019 Apr 09, 2019

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If your animations were NOT interactive, the cheapest and fastest way to convert them to something usable in HTML5 would have been to simply record them as a Video Demo in Captivate as they played in the web browser.

However, since your animations are interactive that's not going to work because you would lose all interactivity.  There is no 'easy way' that I am aware of to convert SWF interactions into HTML5 interactions.

If these were created quite a while ago in earlier versions of Captivate then you may find that you can replicate quite a lot of the interactivity in default Captivate functionality.

If it is so complex that you need something like Animate to pull off the same functionality then that's probably going to mean completely rebuilding the animations from scratch.

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Hi Rod, been following your posts for some time, thanks for getting back to me and for your input. I figured your response was going to be the case. Guess I'm going to have to take a couple of crash courses in Animate and JavaScript.....thank heavens for Lynda.com.

Thanks again

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Exchanging data between a HTML animation and Captivate has become easier with JS than it used to be in SWF times. That may be the positive side. Animate CC may sometimes be overkill, I still use Edge Animate (which is discontinued in favor of Animate) a lot for a quick animation….

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Hi Lilybiri

I tried looking for an older version of Animate Edge on Adobe CC, but the feature to 'Show Older Apps' appears to have been removed from the preferences in 'Creative Cloud' so not sure where I can download a 'safe' version from.

Thanks

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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LATEST

There is still a petition running to keep development of Edge Animate, which had a lot of fans. To no avail....

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Getting an HTML5 animation to play inside Captivate is not that difficult thanks to the fact that Captivate supports Web Objects.  An OAM file is really only a renamed zip file.  You can change the OAM back to ZIP and then extract it to see how the animation was put together.

However, where things get complex is trying to make the animations seamlessly interactive like other Captivate interactive objects. And what would require some REALLY good programming on your part will be to turn those interactive animations into something that Captivate would accept as a valid scorable object that could then be reported to a SCORM LMS.

Almost anything is possible with good code (and enough time).

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Hi Rod

Appreciate your comments, unformtunately time is one of those things that clients don' seem to understand we need if we need to do something correctly, even if you explain to them the complexities of the issue....such is life!!!

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Yes after 15 years in this job I am well aware of how clients can be somewhat unreasonable about expectations.

The underlying point I was trying to make is that you should never OVER promise.  If you do then you will get yourself into a real can of worms trying to deliver.

Software companies do this all the time and software projects have a bad reputation for being on time and on budget as a result.  But an e-learning project is NOT all that dissimilar to a software project.

So the golden rule is promise what you KNOW you can deliver, and then deliver MORE than what you promised.  That's what I have found to be the best way to satisfy my clients.

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 10, 2019 Apr 10, 2019

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Good advice Always best to tell them as it is, not as they see it!

Thanks again Rod

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