Slide view black screen

Hi Gregg,

I'm sorry to hear about this odd behavior - and I'd like to have you go through all the steps detailed in this article as that's a more detailed repair to remove any problematic files with Storyline. You'll also want to confirm that you're working with all local files as described here and if it seems that the file itself is problematic you can try importing it into a new file as described here. 

I saw you posted in that other thread as well - did you check into the the slide backgrounds as mentioned in that thread as well? 

The fact that I installed Storyline 2 for the first time on another machine and immediately duplicated the issue makes me doubt a corrupted install.

The fact that the issue was replicated on every project I opened (and I should note that I have not touched background styles on any of the projects in question) makes me doubt that slide backgrounds are an issue, either.

It must be understood that I am not seeing a black slide in the slide view, I am seeing a completely black space where my slide should be. No matter how much I scroll around or resize the viewing area of the actual slide, it is all black.

Hi Gregg,

Do you have a sample file you could share with us? 

I think you are intuiting what I also realized last night.

I realized that the one commonality between the install on my main computer, and the fresh install on the second laptop, was that I immediately opened the project on which I first encountered trouble. Once I opened that file, the trouble occurred from then on.

I cannot fathom what would cause such a profound corruption. The content I was working on was quite simple. The project contained nothing unusual.

This morning, I reinstalled Storyline 2 on my main machine and opened a new project. No trouble. I opened another existing project. No trouble. I did not dare open the problem project. However, I am attaching it here. Watch out.

Hi Gregg,

Thanks for sharing the file here and the warning about opening it - ominous for Halloween. :-)

I had a colleague take a look at this in an environment to which he couldn't do much damage to SL2 based on your warning, and he concluded the file seems to have elements of corruption.  Rotating the rectangle shape with the wood texture crashed SL2 multiple times for him, but he wasn't ever able to reproduce the black UI as you mentioned and SL2 was not irreparably damaged after simply closing and reopening it. Also, importing the file into a new one fixes the corruption. 

So you'll want to begin by going through the detailed repair steps here and then look at importing the existing file into a new project as described here. You'll also want to follow these general guidelines for working with Storyline 2 files. 

Thanks for researching.

Interesting little bug. I'll have to be sure not to rotate any rectangles for the immediate future.

Thanks for being awesome.

Happy we could help Gregg and please keep us posted if you run across the situation again. Screenshots or screen recordings may be helpful to diagnose this one if it reappears! 

I should probably post this in a new discussion, but...

Frankly, as I continue to work, I begin to believe that a possible reason I encountered the black screen as a result of the rotating rectangle bug is because of problems with importing Storyline 1 projects into Storyline 2.

I used a Storyline 1 project as a sort of template, importing it into Storyline 2 and making new projects from it there  (the project in this discussion was one of those).

I am now noting that, fairly often, when I reopen one of those projects I am getting an alert that the project was recovered (though there was no crash with the project) and I find that what has been recovered is some earlier version saved some time before, not the latest save. Sometimes declining to save and closing the project, then opening it again, produces the latest save and most recent version. Sometimes.

I believe my current choices right now are:

a) go back to using Storyline 1 (with the number of projects I have right now that is the quickest choice)
b) don't import any more Storyline 1 projects but create from scratch where necessary.

I'm beginning to think there are some fundamental problems with Storyline 2.

Hi Gregg,

What do you have set in regards to the autorecovery settings? I'd begin by looking there in regards to how often you're conducting that save, and then where those files are being saved in comparison to your main .story files that you manually save. You'll want to ensure all copies are being saved locally and following along with these guidelines, which not adhered to are common reasons of corruption as we experienced in your earlier project. 

I know that there have been a few threads with users having difficulty upgrading files from SL1 to SL2 and our team is looking into those issues currently. We're happy to take a look at one of your files that has cause some unusual behavior once upgraded - and we'll want to see the SL1 file and the upgraded SL2 file. You can send those both along to our support engineers here. 

Gregg, my Storyline 2 crashes every single day. It's driving me nuts. I am also guessing its because I imported a Storyline 1 file and continued working. My Storyline 1 never ever crashed - and I have also considered moving back until Storyline 2 stabilises. Problem is, I have over-invested in this current project (time wise spent becoming familiar with SL2) and I am guessing that there is no backwards compatibility. So I have to endure this pain and complete the project in SL2 asap.

As a developer of science and engineering learning materials, I am also disappointed that we still only have add, subtract, multiply and divide variable operations. I did put in a feature request two years ago but I'm guessing I will have to wait until SL3 is released.

How many other users are experiencing the same or similar problems?

Hi Alphonso,

Have you been in touch with our support team? I didn't see a case about this issue - and we'd of course like to help look into what's happening and how we can assist. 

Have you already gone through the repair steps documented here? If after conducting the repair Storyline continues to crash, you'll want to pull the crash logs as described here and send along to our support team. 

I have been experiencing this porblem today. I compelted the steps outline above and I still continue to experience the problem.  There is one particular .story file with a particular slide that seems to trigger it. Not sure what to do after the above mentioned.

Hi Tony,

If you're seeing this issue with one particular file, and one slide that you think it causing it - that may be an issue of corruption with the file/slide. You'll want to confirm that you're following along with the guidelines here for working on your project files. 

I'd also look into the elements on that one slide, and see if you could recreate  it in a new file and then combine it with your other slides by importing them all into a project.

Thank you. Unfortunately I cannot click on that slide without the screen going black. I can view slides previous to this one, but as soon as I click on it ...black for the entire project ..... It was a completed course that I was going back to review. It had been working fine before. Another odd thing is when I close storyline to reopen it, the Scenes pane remains on my desktop monitor and I can't close it. I have to shut my system down and restart it. This happened every time.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Tony

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Hi Tony,

Have you already tried importing out the project into a new project? Even just the non-troublesome slides? Are you seeing the odd behavior with Storyline across all your projects? If so, and you've already conducted the full repair steps documented here we'll want to have you connect with our support team to do some further troubleshooting.