On screen buttons disappear
Oct 23, 2014
I'm working on a course and we have a custom GUI so are not using the Storyline Player. Instead, we have our own Next and Back buttons. They aren't anything fancy - just a graphic button with a hover state and they go to the next or previous slide.
We had the buttons at the Master slide level and were finding that they would disappear when revisiting some slides. I change some settings and moved the buttons to each individual page rather than the master, but it is still happening. Sometimes it's fine, and other times one of the buttons doesn't display when we revisit the page. Has anyone else had this issue and found a solution?
16 Replies
It seems to work correctly and consistently only if I set the page properties to Reset to initial state when revisiting. Since some of the pages are questions, we'd like them to not have to answer them again, but the buttons disappear if I don't set it to reset.
Hi Kelley,
Are there triggers set to hide the buttons or change their state based on slide conditions or based on the user answering the question? Are they navigated to a layer after answering, and maybe the buttons are hidden on the layer?
Without seeing what you've got set up, it's hard to know for certain what elements are contributing to this behavior. Are you able to share your .story file here with us to take a look at?
Hi Kelley,
Are there triggers set to hide the buttons or change their state based on slide conditions or based on the user answering the question? Are they navigated to a layer after answering, and maybe the buttons are hidden on the layer?
Without seeing what you've got set up, it's hard to know for certain what elements are contributing to this behavior. Are you able to share your .story file here with us to take a look at?
I'd have to ask the client if it would be okay to share it.
To answer your questions, the buttons are not hidden on the layer and it happens inconsistently. I can go back once and the back button is gone, then I can go back again and the back button is there but the next button is gone. Sometimes both disappear, sometimes both are there. The only condition associated with the buttons is to not have them jump to the next page or show the hover state if they are in a disabled state.
Are either of the buttons not set to "show until the end" on the timeline?
No - they are all set to show until the end of the timeline. They were initially on the master slide and set to show until the end of the slide with no fades. They work perfectly on most slides but not all the time. I took them off the master slide and put them on each slide individually, but it still happens intermittently unless I set the slides where there is an issue to Reset to Initial. It seems to only happen on the slides where there are layers, a question, etc, but it doesn't happen on all of them and it doesn't happen the same way every time. I have attached a PDF with some screen shots. I had to remove all of the client info, but it should give an idea of what happens,
Have you tried removing the triggers that are controlling states and leaving just triggers that control navigation for those buttons? The states should automatically occur without additional trigger logic. If you have and are still having problems, if you upload a sample containing just 2 slides, I can take a quick peek at it.
Hi Kelley
someone else had this issue with custom prev / next buttons. They had created a trigger on the buttons for the hover state. SL has a built in hover state so you don't need a trigger...could that be the issue?
Here's an example that seems to work. The first slide has a radio button and the next button is disabled (grey). When you click the radio button the next button changes to selected (orange). Clicking it takes you to slide 2. Same deal here. Clicking back shows the button correct in the correct state and moving ahead the buttons work on slide 2.
The reason the triggers for hover are there is because we have a condition. On some pages, the buttons are set to display in their Disabled state, so we have a trigger set up to show the hover (called Over) state if the button is not in the Disabled State.
Here's the file with a few pages. If I set the pages to Reset to Initial, it resolves the problem. I didn't set up the custom GUI so I don't have all of the graphic elements/states as .png files to play around with. I removed the audio and the content pages are blank, but you can see the buttons appear and disappear, especially on the slide with the layers, when you go back and forth.
Hi Kelley. I removed all of the unnecessary triggers (those controlling the various states). I added a default state of hover (instead of custom over state) to each button. I set all slides to resume saved state instead of reset. I added a blank slide at the end so you can see that when the (page 30) slide comes up with the disable next button, that the state doesn't change and the user can't move forward without the need for triggers to control that - it's built into the disabled state, just like hover is built into the hover state.
Thanks! I'll play around with it tomorrow. I usually use hover instead of the custom Over state, but since I hadn't set up the GUI, I left it as-is. That said, I'm surprised that using the triggers causes that type of issue.
I appreciate your help!
You're 5 minutes ahead of me Stephanie...just did the same thing
Hi Kelley -
There is also a built-in Disabled state. When disabled, an object won't receive events (clicks or hovers)
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Glad that the community was able to help you out here Kelley!
Mister Learning, I can delete your post for you - although there isn't a need to delete a post, unless you'd no longer like the content to be available here.
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