Spinning Hotspot Marker

Oct 23, 2014

I just created a Hotspot quiz slide in Storyline 2 and asked my supervisor to come take a look.  She panicked when she saw the spinning black-and-white marker, because she thought the computer was panicking.

Can I change that marker to something - anything - else?

18 Replies
Stephanie Harnett

Not that I know of but you could manually create the quiz slide by placing in hotspots with off stage objects that select right or wrong answers based on what the user is clicking in the slide. In this fashion, when they click on a hotspot, a particular object can appear instead of the black and white marker. In my attached example, the Koala's right eye is the right choice and you can see how the eye changes when I click on the hotspot (right or left eye). Possibilities are limitless here - both SL1 and SL2.

Ry Landry

Might be a little late, but I kept getting this result from Google, so I figure I can't be the only one. You can replace the hotspot_marker.swf that is in story_content folder after it is published with one of your design. Align any animation to you design to the upper left corner so it centers correctly when the learner selects a drop point.

 

Brett Rockwood

Hi Ry,

Thanks for this info. It's a great tip. I'm having trouble getting the alignment to work as you mention. I've just created a simple circle in Illustrator and exported it as a SWF and swapped it out as you describe. This works great, except I can't get the alignment to center where the user clicks. I'm not an Illustrator pro (by any stretch of the imagination) but  wonder if you could explain how that works. I've tried pulling the content to the top left of the artboard but that doesn't seem to have any affect. There are no animations to this.

See my image. 

Ry Landry

I just tried using Illustrator and exporting to swf and got the same behavior you did unfortunately. Must be something with how Adobe handles the export, I even tried moving things around and always got the same result.

I had created my marker directly in Flash. Really easy to do if you are just using a static image.

Also as a side note, this doesn't replace the original marker in the html5 output, its buried in the coding somewhere. I would be nice if the developers could point out where the animation for the hotspot_marker.swf orginates from. 

Stefan Heyninck

I've created a static pointy hotspot_marker.swf to replace the default.
Please notice that the file must be named exactly like this in order to work.

In my organization we use a lot of hotspot questions where users have to click on highly detailed maps. I couldn't afford to use the default indicator. The center of that spinning thing doesn't represent where the user clicked as the real answer location is always to the top left of it.

It is a pain in the *ss however to use a custom marker, since you have to replace the default .swf in the output folder every time you publish a story...I'm thinking of adding a feature request to have a set of different hotspot indicators build-in. Given the fact that all my effort still provides no solution for HTML5 output.

I've also included two pictures that demonstrate the location of the hotspot indicator in relation to a user's click.

EDIT:
Right click an attachment and click "Save Target As..." to save a copy.
Feel free to use my custom marker.
We could use this topic for custom marker sharing? :P

 

Jay Yearley

Replacing the hotspot_marker.swf works fine with the Flash version of the course, though it reverts back to the spinning icon for the HTML5 version.

It looks like others also looked into this previously, so there's no solution for now.  Would such a thing be considered a feature request? Might put in a request if so.

Stefan Heyninck

Jay,

Articulate checks if a requested feature would help a significant share of it's customers. So a new feature is more likely to be developed when there is more demand for it. A request to fill a niche demand is not likely to be considered.

If you go through the process of filing a request you'll find an interesting reading on how these requests are treated...perhaps a staff member could link you to it directly.

There is also a list of outstanding requests somewhere.

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