More Efficient LAyers, Markers or States?

May 15, 2014

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Hi All

I’m building what is becoming a rather large course (+400 slides). It includes branching and a lot of technical information that I’m trying to keep interesting by presenting in a “search and discover” fashion. Users can browse the slide pages and click to reveal more, in the form of short video’s, graphs or brief write-ups. My question is in building this, is there any difference in how much coding is running in the background and hence the efficiency/ speed of execution (i.e. no delays in display or long uploads of the slides) if I use layers verses markers verses object states?

I would especially refer to changing states as brilliantly presented by calcuttr (https://player.vimeo.com/video/149188565) since it requires NO triggers or layers. Some of my slides have +20 layers and double that in triggers since each layer needs two;  one to open & one to close. Add to that variables to track the progress and it starts to get “thick”. Simpler, intuitively seems like the better choice or am I being naive?

Lastly, the final product is going to be loaded (God willing) onto our Moodle LMS. My concern is ultimately the final ‘user experience’. I’ve broken up the course (scenes) into individual Chapters or Modules published as separate storyline ‘courses’ so that we can track progress and hopefully at the same time speed up the viewing into manageable chunks. Perhaps the other question is will each slide page load individually from the platform or does the entire course load at once?

Any insights would be most greatly appreciated. After all Storyline is a great product with an even greater community!

Cheers

4 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Stephan,

I'll defer to our users on what they've found is the best option in terms of using layers vs. objects vs. markers - as I suspect it's fairly user specific more in terms of how you like to set things up and work on your Storyline files. I did want to point out that Storyline will preload your content as described here to make playback as smooth as possible. 

Stephan Sinka

Thank-you Ashley, I do appreciate the preload content information links, it helps me better understand Storyline's processes,. But I still wonder if there is any merit to having no triggers and no layers ( as when you use Object states to reveal information) beyond personal preference and ease of build.  Is there really less going on because I don't see the triggers or the layers? Behind the scenes insight would be crucial to answering this . I suspect the program doesn't care if there are 4 lines of code or 40, but it would still be great to hear the developer's thoughts on this! Always better to ask ahead then to find out after issues pop up.

Cheers

S

Jerson  Campos

Hey Stephan,

I've used states in a similar way and I haven't noticed any differences on the user side, but I have noticed a serious when I'm developing the different states. Storyline will slow down considerably when I start adding images and other items to the state of an object. It may just be my PC but i just wanted to share my experience.

Stephan Sinka

Thanks Jerson for your reply! I wonder if anyone else has experienced this type of slow down?

I did come across another issue in using states; as I added a ‘selected’ state to an object (B) and then embellished it with content (as you would a layer). Another object( A) (previously built up with content in its selected state) bleeds thru onto the slide of object B ( selected state of B). It is not visible when I edit the states but only when I preview the slide. I have tried moving the object (A) to the background but then it is no longer selectable. This puts a serious damper on using states of objects instead of layers to view content. I did ensure that while editing the states the “dim background objects’ was checked off (active) but still no resolve. I find it odd that when editing the objects ‘selected’ state, what you see AIN’T what you get on the preview. I’ve tried adding both objects ( A+B) to a button set but that creates an additional problem in that one of the objects always has to be selected (content visible).  I have created a ‘visited’ state and that is what I want the participant to revert to after viewing the content of the ‘selected’ state. The lung icon (= object B) should not be visible in this preview as I have selected  the Swallowing icon (object A). The black image and description line up exact with what was shown on the states panel (as seen in 'selected' state) but NOT the lung icon. It shows up opn preview only!

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