Reset to Initial Workarounds with Free Navigation
Sep 23, 2016
Hi Heroes,
I'm working on a pretty complex gamified course and I am having a lot of trouble deciding which setting to use. I unfortunately can't attach it here due to client confidentiality.
Let me explain the situation though: learners enter rooms, listen to a bit of audio and then must click on items. Each room has a counter that counts down how many items have been clicked. Once the counter equals zero, the learner can move on to the next room. An added complexity is that this course has some free navigation - there are two slides that learners can link to at any time to get some extra information. Learners can also revisit the rooms they've already completed.
It truthfully makes the most sense to have Storyline "automatically decide", because I want the counter to stay at zero if the room is revisited and I don't want learners to have to sit through the same audio. However, in my experience, once audio is added to a course and it is not re-set to initial, the course runs into tons of weird problems.
For the client review, I have it reset to initial, but there has to be a workaround. Besides it being annoying for the learner to rewatch the intro section of each slide, the room items all reset, which means that the counter goes into negative values! Can't have that.....
Help would be much appreciated.
9 Replies
Hi Madeleine!
What issues are you running into if you leave the slide set to Automatically Decide?
In the first place, if you have a counter that utilizes a variable, none of the settings on the slide will change it when it is revisited. Only triggers can do that. so unless you have a trigger that changes the counter when the timeline starts, you are OK. (A trigger that resets the counter when timeline starts will reset if the slide is reset to initial state, but not if the slide returns to saved state).
That's why it makes more sense to set a variable for each object and change it to true when the object is viewed, and advance if all the variables are true. Then, no matter what, whenever the user returns, everything is marked as seen. When they click to advance, they can.
As for the audio, when the action occurs that triggers it to play, I set it to pause if AudioPlayed variable is true. The variable starts as false, and is changed to true when the audio completes. Audio plays through all the way one time, and never again. (You may want to change the timing of changing the variable to played, as this way will play the audio every time, if the user doesn't let it finish.)
Hi Walt,
Thanks a lot for your message. Yes, it totally makes sense to make my counter use variables (and maybe I should have done that), but instead I opted for it to count items once they are in a visited state.... something that can sadly be reset. The reason I went this route is that my course has about 70 clickable items. That's a hell of a lot of variables (not counting all the other ones the course utilizes). I do think I've found a workaround for my needs, being that I've created a custom state of "0" that appears when learners revisit the slide (it's a fake zero that doesn't actually go anywhere).
In regards to the audio, that is a great idea. However, it's not really the audio I'm super concerned with, it's all the speech bubbles that appear. I figure all the speech bubbles should only appear once. Again, I know I can use variables, but now I have another issue.... I have a number of speech bubbles that are in a hidden state, I want them to appear one after another after the counter has reached zero. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is. It needs to be one of the the object layers (I've tried jumping to a separate layer and it just looks weird because it closes a text box and jumps, which is inconsistent with the rest of the course).
Thanks so much!
Hi Leslie,
I haven't imported the audio yet, but my employer told me she often has issues with audio playing or not playing.... and other glitchy behaviours. I've looked in the forums and this appears to happen from time to time. I've just been asked to keep it at reset to initial so I'm trying my best to work with those parameters!!! Any help would be most welcome though.
Thanks for the update Madeleine! Sounds like a custom need for sure and Walt is offering some great assistance. Hopefully others in the community will be able to pop in and assist with your design.
Hi Madeleine,
you could put the bubbles on a seperate layer, which shows when the counter is 0 and just change the starting position to let them appear at a specific time. Like bubble 1 starts when the timeline of the layer starts, bubble 2 at 2 seconds, bubble 3 at 4 seconds, .... Just grab the beginning of your bubble in the timeline and pull it to the right at the time you want it to be visible. So no need for hidden states. :)
You can also grab the end of the bubbles, if you want to hide bubble 1 when bubble 2 is visible. With this beginning and end animations works pretty well like a fade in/fade out.
Is this what you want to do?
Greetings,
Susi
It might be possible to tie the bubbles to the timeline of the audio. That way, if it isn't playing, they don't appear.
This could be done with a separate layer, or with states, or whatever system you get to work.
Thank you Susi and Walt!!! I ended up doing it on a separate layer and it seems to be working (for now!). Walt, I love the idea of tying it with the audio. I will explore this further once the audio is imported. Thanks again!!!
Glad to see you were able to get the assistance that you needed here and thanks for popping back in with an update :)
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