line ends issue - 360 update

Jun 20, 2018

Just updated SL 360 this morning and I'm now seeing a peculiar issue.

  • If I draw a perfectly horizontal line (line shape or arrow shape), and then preview the slide, the object does not appear at all in preview (regardless of line width).
  • Additionally, if I add an animation to the line, it then it prevents any other objects from appearing in Preview after the moment that the weird line appears in the timeline.
  • If I grab the end point of the line and move it so that the line is no longer horizontal, everything works fine - even if it is just 1 degree off.  Likewise, if I draw a line that is not perfectly horizontal right from the start, it works fine.
  • Hmmm....
15 Replies
Vanessa Barnes

Same issue here since updating. All lines (that are horizontal or vertical) on slides do not appear in preview (the 45 degree angled lines do appear).

I had one slide that would not load in preview (just got the spinning wheel). This slide loaded after I removed the animation from the line. Still can't see the line though.

Chris Cole

Sorry... I left out the most important part. If it is a plain line with no End Style (arrow, round ball, diamond), everything is fine. It is only when you add an End Style to a line, then the problem occurs.

I did a little more testing...

  • With a Wipe animation, you get the effect of the line not showing and other objects later in the timeline not showing and the scrubber bar freezes (though audio will continue playing).
  • With any other animation (as far as I can tell), the line does not show but other objects do show and the scrubber behaves normally.

Something for the Articulate engineers to ponder.  :-)

Vanessa Barnes

Hi Chris, yes I've noticed lines that have been formatted (e.g. dotted), even with no end styling, will not appear in Preview if their width or height is 0.  I have submitted a case (#01419140) and Articulate are working on it. Hopefully there will be a solution soon, other than changing lines to be slightly angled (1 pixel).

Arys Obeso

Thank you Chris for starting this thread. We are also experiencing similar issues after the June 19 update.

Here are some of the issues we have seen:

1. After the June 19 update, line elements (horizontal lines, arrows, grouped elements composed of lines, and animation effects of these elements) in the courses that our development team has created and published are no longer visible in the Articulate 360 Review output. The same is true when the courses are published and viewed as Web (html5). Preview of the affected pages from the .story files show the same issues.

2. Visual elements (icons, images, objects, texts) in the pages of the courses our team has created appear to have moved by a pixel or two, and are no longer within their previous alignment when previewed. This resulted to several elements' end-points to go beyond page borders. While the quick fix from our end is to simply adjust the alignment of these elements, we are looking at hundreds of pages from more than 70 courses.

3. Visibility settings between base layers and other layers within the same page that were previously set no longer behave as expected (after the June 19 rollout), resulting to a "twitching" effect. Again, this affected hundreds of pages across multiple courses that our team has developed.

I have submitted a support case regarding these issues, and attached this thread to include your concerns as well.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi all,

Thanks for reaching out and I'm truly sorry you ran into the issues you've mentioned! Our team is actively working on a fix for this, so we'll let you know as soon as that's ready.

In the meantime, I see a few of you have opened cases so we can share some rollback instructions with you there. 

Also as Chris mentioned one of the issues was how a course with straight arrows and double-headed arrows won't display in preview or when viewing the published output in Update 17. It will make the slide freeze or show a blank slide. 

Two workarounds if you don't want to roll back to an earlier update are:

  • Save the arrow as an image then insert it into your project.
  • Under Format menu, adjust the width pixel value to 1 instead of 0

If you haven't yet started a Support case, but need the rollback instructions, let me know here and I'll send them to you individually. 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi  Vanessa and Chris,

I'm glad you found the update and don't need to roll back any longer. You'll find the Storyline release notes are updated with a mention of that fix and a few others and you can download the latest update from the Articulate 360 Desktop application.

Let us know if you need anything else!

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