Issue with Slide Layer triggers in HTML5 Output

May 02, 2016

I noticed some unwanted behavior in HTML5 output. It seems that all triggers are loaded for all slide layers at the start of the slide as opposed to when that layer is shown, as in the flash version.

So for instance we are creating software simulations in storyline where the user see's a screenshot of a menu, each layer has a trigger on the up key to move up in the menu, and on the down key to move down. This creates a basic simulation in the flash publish, but in the html5 it fires ALL the layers triggers when one of the keys are pressed, so only two layers become accessible.

I included a basic storyline file to illustrate the issue. In the sample file the numbers 1-5 are shown on seperate slide layers. Pressing up on and slide layer moves to the next number, pressing down moves to the previous. This works fine in flash, but in HTML5 it will break and only show 1 and 4.

We did come up with a workaround, adding a sceneNum variable and adding a condition to each trigger to only fire when that scene is active, but that has issues as well because the keyboard event is still propagating when the timeline start fires for the next slide layer, so changing the sceneNum at timeline start was not an option we had to do it at .25 seconds to stop propagation.

Now our problem is that we have many slides that use this treatment, and we need to add hundreds of conditions to triggers, resulting in hours of additional work that would have been avoided if the publishes simply behaved as expected, and as they did in preview mode.

4 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for sharing your file here - and I'm taking a look at it. I did want to ask where you were testing the HTML5 output - as you'll want to confirm you're testing it in one of the intended environments as detailed here. Just let me know where you are testing it so I can ensure to test in the same set up as well. 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Ok - I confirmed seeing the same thing, and noticed we had a similar issue reported to our QA team, but it seemed in that issue it wasn't specific to the HTML5 output. In the issue reported, two of the workarounds were to use different key press triggers for each layer (which I suspect would not work based on your set up) or look at creating these as slides vs. layers after the second click where it seems to get stuck. Another idea was to use a variable to track which layer you were on and advance to the new layers based on that variable. 

I'm going to continue looking at this to see if any of those workarounds would assist, but wanted to share here so that you could investigate in the meantime as well. 

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