Problems about supporting a storyline file of 700+ slides
Dec 05, 2020
Hi everyone,
My team has been developing an e-learning RPG game of more than 700 slides (~550 MB) at the time of export. There are several problems we have encountered and would like to ask for help if there are any solutions to them.
1. On each time of file saving, changes of 5-10 actions take up to 5 attempts of saving to successfully save the file. If more changes are made, file saving is nearly never successful.
2. When the export is uploaded to an LMS (Blackboard in our case), there will be episodes of sudden whiteout and failure of the courseware. The user always has to reboot to resume .
3. While users can save their progress in the courseware on LMS, it has been found that users can only save up to around 100 slides visited. In our RPG, there are 5 levels of game progress and the users consistently can only save up to level 1 (around 100 slides). When users revisit after accidental failure, they can only start from level 1 although they might have reached level 5 in last attempt.
4. Some random corruptions of pictures inserted to the files.
The major concerns of our team are 2. and 3. as these will put the users off using the courseware. We are planning to to split the courseware into 2 SCORMs with a sacrifice of inter-slide connections between the 2 parts. May we ask for any solutions to the above issues before we proceed to our plan of file splitting? It will be of great help also if progress saving on LMS can meet the demand of our 5-level RPG game. Thank you very much.
3 Replies
Hello, Yat Nam!
I appreciate you walking us through what's going on. I'm happy to review all four concerns with you:
Unresponsive Saving: The larger a file is, the longer it may take to save. I recommend breaking the game up into smaller segments to help improve its overall performance.
➥ Tom Kuhlmann's article about How Long Should My E-Learning Course Be? has several great tips.
Sporadic Content Failure: Like the bullet above, the larger a file is, the longer it may take to load. It could also cause the course to crash.
Incorrect Bookmarking: The course is likely exceeding suspend data limits.
➥ When that happens, here's how to correct it.
Corruption: Corrupt items typically won't preview. If certain scenes or slides don't preview, try removing objects until they can.
➥ More ways to resolve corruption: Tips to Reduce Your Risk of File Corruption
I know all this may feel tedious, especially with 700+ slides, so we're here to help! You can share the project file with our Engineers for review using this private case link.
Thank you very much for your reply. I have reached the engineer for help. Thank you!
700+ slides course sounds really impressive, but you (well, I and everyone out there also) need to keep in mind that this is e-learning authoring program, not some game-engine :) We all can have some magnificent projects in mind, but the program was designed to build rather simple to mid-advanced courses. Yours is probably too complicated to handle by the software AND lmses ;)
As for bookmarking, it'd for sure data suspend limitations. If you have many states or variables, this will go bigger and bigger with every slide.
If that's not the problem, I'd suggest you to split the course into smaller modules (levels of the game). With a bit help of software engineer, you can transfer data from one module to another, and in effect keep the learner progress, levels, or whatever nice thing you came up with. You just need to write information to LMS and then retrieve it in another lesson.