Export project as .OAM file - Is this possible

Apr 29, 2019

OK this one is for all those gurus out there that are familiar with Storyline and Captivate.

I have a number of projects that were originally created in Adobe Captivate....no honestly, I'm not on the wrong forum!!!.... These Captivate projects also had embedded interactive .swf files. After doing some research, I decided that, due to the impending lack of support of Flash in web browsers, the easiest way for me to allow the client to continue to utilise the courses, of which there are a relatively large number, was to rebuild the .swf animations in HTML5. The original animations used a lot of ActionScript and trying to do a straight conversion in Adobe Animate failed due to the large amount of additional JavaScript that was required to make the interactions work. Also, I am not a programmer. I did, however, manage to recreate the animations in Storyline 3 (a fantastic bit of software....you back on board now???). Stay with me on this.....

Now, I understand that an OAM file is an animated widget created by Adobe Edge Animate, a program that uses HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript technologies to create animated web content. It contains shapes, images, and other content, as well as a timeline for playing the animation.

So here's my problem: Since the original courses were developed in Captivate and I only need to change the animations, it makes sense for me to continue working in Captivate to do the updates, rather than rebuilding the whole project from scratch in Storyline. (the client isn't prepared to pay for that bit either!!!). However, to get the new animations created in Storyline into Captivate, they have to be in .oam file formate. I could try building them in Adobe Animate, but I have no experience of using this package or javaScript programming. I know that if the html 5 storyline project lives on a server, I can import into Captivate as a Web Object, but (a), these courses need to run as standalones on local PCs, detached from a server and (b) scaling the Web Objects in Captivate to fit, requires a lot of work in Storyline to get it to the correct sized display. So, is there a way to export .oam file formats from Storyline? (I suspect the answer to this is no since it is an Adobe file format). Failing that, is there a way to convert a storyline published html5 project into .oam? I tried importing the HTML5 animation as a zipped project file, but it didn't seem to give a display. I'm also open to any other suggestions that the gurus out there may be able to come up with, short of having to rewrite the whole lot in Storyline which, as much as I would be happy to do, wouldn't be acceptable, cost wise, to the client.

Thanks in advance

4 Replies
Michael Anderson

If you get the aspect ratio set in your Storyline project, set the course to fill the screen, use the chromeless player, publish, and then insert as a web object in Captivate, what is the result? You should be able to import the locally published Storyline folder into Captivate by re-naming Storyline's story.html to index.html, assuming Captivate looks for that file like Storyline does for web objects. Then everything would run locally.

Chris Clift

Hi Michael and thanks for the reply. I was able to get it to work by copy and pasting the address the appeared in the browser for the animation into the web object address bar, so it followed the form 'file:///C:/............./story_html5.html'. Captivate seemed able to work out what to do without me having to point to story.html or rename it to index.html. I did undertake a small test and if it were pointed to story.html instead of story_html5.html, it still worked. I'm guessing this is just because story.html is a pointer file that points to story_html5.html. I'm a little unclear as to whether there is any risk involved in bypassing story.html and going straight to story_html5.html.

The only issue I have had so far is that the animation did not appear within the content of the page when viewed in IE ver 11, otherwise it worked in Firefox, Chrome and Edge. Still need to resolve this!!

Thanks for the tip on chromeless players, that was useful.

Not sure what will happen when I try I try relative addressing rather than absolute addressing since this course will be copied onto CD for distribution, but since absolute works, I'm hopeful relative addressing shouldn't be a problem, but will need to experiment a bit more.

Michael Anderson

Support might be able to tell you if pointing to the story_html5 file is okay or not, I'm not sure.

Usually, when I preview local content in IE11, I see a "Allow Blocked Content" popup button that I have to click in order for IE to display the page. Maybe check the browser console to see if any errors are coming up there.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Chris,

You're right - our story.html file is a pointer to direct individuals to the story_flash.html or story_html5.html file based on the device and browser they're using to view the course. If you don't need Flash output and haven't included it as a part of your publishing process the story.html and the story_html5.html would be going to the same location. So there shouldn't be any harm in pointing to one over the other. 

The one concern I have, is are you publishing the Storyline course for web? Often, courses that are published for web or LMS could run into security restrictions of browsers when played back locally. I can't say how this will behave if you're ultimately bringing it into a Captivate course as a web object, but I wanted to point it out in case you start to notice any odd behavior! 

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