Show layer / button upon returning to a slide.
Apr 09, 2021
Hi all, trying out SL to see what I can do in-house before taking an agency route and have hit a roadbloack.Any insight as to best practice or how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.
I have a menu slide with an animation for the entrance of images/triggers to learning pathways. The slide is set to resume upon revisiting so that the animation may be skipped.
There are three images, each one set as a trigger to link to a different learning pathway, all of which then return back to the menu at their conclusion. Once all three learning pathways have been completed, I would like a button to appear for users to test their knowledge.
What would be the neatest way to achieve this.
I have tried various 'actions': show layer, resume timeline
and
various 'whens': user clicks, timeline ends, timeline reaches, state changes, condition changes etc etc. But always have issues with the desired button appearing when not all of the conditions are met, despite checking that is what I believe to have programmed, or not happening at all.
If every interaction takes people away from a slide, and then they return to a resumed state, is the issue that there is no 'when' allowing for the 'action' to occur?
1 Reply
If every interaction takes people away from a slide, and then they return to a resumed state, is the issue that there is no 'when' allowing for the 'action' to occur?
Yes. Best practice seems to be to set the menu slide to reset to initial state on revisit. That causes a restart of the timeline, which can be used as the "when" for triggers. Because variables are immune to being changed when a slide is reset you would have one (usually T/F) for each section to be visited. Each section would use the action that returns it to the menu slide to set its variable to indicated it had been visited. (This trigger must be in the trigger list before the trigger to jump to the menu slide, or it won't be executed,) When the menu slide is restarted, you can optionally check a variable and if it is True, change the state of the corresponding image to indicate that section is visited. (Note: if you want to do that, don't use the Visited, or any other built-in state. Creating triggers to mimic the built-in functions interferes with their super powers. Create a custom state.) Then you would need a trigger to make the button appear when the timeline starts if all of the section variables are true.
All works well, but it will cause you a problem if you want to show the animation the first time the slide is visited, and skip it every time thereafter. I would create a AnimationShown T/F variable. Create a trigger to show the animation when the timeline starts if the variable is False, and another to set it to True when the animation ends.
Check the mixed Navigation in the sample at this post:
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/free-sample-restricted-and-free-random-navigation-using-variables-and-triggers
It has four buttons that take the learner to different slides, and when they are all visited, a button appears that can have any trigger on it you want. In the restricted navigation, the four buttons appear in order, only after the previous one is visited.