Storyline 2 freezing when I try to Publish

Oct 09, 2014

Hi,

I have now noticed that when I go to publish, the Publish window greys out and it just hangs. I can press the button to cancel and it asks me if I am sure, pressing Yes, just continues on hanging.

If I kill Storyline in the Task Manager, relaunch the program, and immediately publish it will work. I then make a few changes and it then hangs again.

All files are on a local drive and it was working fine until today.

any suggestions would be grateful.

190 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Sjoerd,

I see that Karla assisted you with the reinstall and repair of Storyline - so I'm happy that solved your issue with Powerpoint. In regards to your continued difficulty publishing, have you been able to narrow down when it happens or any certain steps or conditions that allow it to happen? You'll want to confirm that you're adhering to these guidelines for working on your project files and publishing. 

Trevor White-Miller

Sorry Will, but I have the problem and only use a single monitor. You are however on the right lines in trying to find a common cause. Articulate are only responding on a person by person basis which has so far not uncovered that common cause. I suggested a number of comments ago that Articulate needs to be surveying everyone reporting this issue to try and discover the cause assuming it is not the software.  

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Trevor, 

Just to clarify, our team is continuing to investigate this issue and the best way to do so is through a case so that we can take a look at files, system settings, etc. Anything that we're able to reproduce is than reported to our QA team for further investigation - and so far with the publishing issues in this thread, I don't see anything that has been reported. Our support engineers are in regular communication as well - so if they've spotted something that is consistent across users, but not yet reproducible by our team - they'll share that with our QA team as well. 

Sjoerd de Vries

Hi Ashley,

Karla helped me reinstalling everything, but finally it was MS Powerpoint which needed to be reinstalled. That's off topic, but now I have a real clean machine and I asked Jayem to re-open my case for the publishing error. I had a case last year, but due to other projects I hardly worked with Storyline. Today sometimes the publishing did not work, but the problems are less severe. Most of the time the file is saved and restarting is quick.

I agree with you that submitting a case is the way to go.

I appreciate it that we can have an open discussion on your site that is monitored by you.

 

 

EJ LeBlanc

I'm still experiencing the same issue, here, as well. Cannot publish without freezing. Been talking to Jonathan from tech support about this issue. Can you guys at Articulate gather the wagons and brainstorm about this issue? One more thing: It's only one of the modules that I'm working on that is affected by this. I am able to publish from other modules just fine.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi EJ,

I just reached out to Jayem and Jonathan directly to touch base on this issue, but please know that we're in communication and trying to track down any commonalities that we're seeing in regards to the cases being submitted so that we can share with our Quality Assurance team. 

I see in Jonathans' most recent communication he was able to publish your one file under a number of different conditions. I'm sure he'll be in touch in regards to your most recent email shortly. 

Trevor White-Miller

Morning Ashley. Thanks for explaining your process. The issue for me is that you don't seem to be able to reproduce the issue with any of our case files and I assume Articulate have never seen it within your own development versions or internal release testing. I have experienced this issue with every SL2 file I have ever made/published however it only occurs the first time I change a publish setting then publish. So once it has occurred the file seems OK and therefore you would not be able to reproduce the error with my files. I note Will also reported changing publish settings as a prior step to one of his freezing incidents.

18 different people have now reported this issue. I provide LMS/ content delivery support for a number of clients. If I had 18 people reporting the same issue and was unable to reproduce the error within the content or the LMS I would be gathering information about the individual learners computers/setup etc to try and pinpoint the local error. 

I'm sure the communication between the different Articulate teams is excellent in the same way your outward facing communication is excellent. However I just feel there is an opportunity to gather lots more data on this issue.  

I have learned to live with this issue for the time being, I save my working files every few minutes and after any major slide change so the impact is minimal and always before doing anything related to publishing. My concern is I'm not sure these freezes are not causing the variable/trigger corruptions I'm seeing in the html5 versions once published which once occurred in the master file can't be removed. The support case for that issue never found the cause.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Trevor,

I'm trying to find your case that is associated with this publishing issue - and I can't find it (maybe do you have the case number?). Since you can regularly replicate this issue, but sharing the files with us doesn't allow us to see it what I'd like to have you do next is conduct a screen recording of this behavior using Screenr. You can reply to your existing case with that, start a new case, or share it here. If we're able to see that behavior consistently that'll be a great place to start with our QA team. You'll want to include information in the screencast showing the publish location, any changes you've made to the publish settings and include specifics of your system information as well (OS, hardware, etc.). 

Also, for anyone else following along with this thread - please feel free to go through the same steps.

EJ and Sjoerd, I know our support engineers have requested some additional information from you and they're following this thread as well - so please continue to work with them on those additional requests.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi all,

I just wanted to reach out to you all here as after some additional information was shared earlier via a case, we've been able to dig into this deeper and got some additional questions from our Quality Assurance team and need a bit more information from all of you about when this occurs. 

1. When you publish, are you including HTML5 and/or AMP output? 

2. Does this occur regardless of the publishing target? i.e. web vs. LMS? 

3. Are you working within a VM environment, such as Parallels or VMWare? If so, are you on a Mac or Windows system?

Trevor, when you're able to share the screen recording, please let us know - as our team is looking to compare it with the one previously shared by Will here. You can link it here or include it in your case and just let me know so I can ensure it gets routed to our QA team. 

 

Sjoerd de Vries

1. When I publish I have HTML5 on and AMP off. Sometimes the issue occurs after changing these settings. But not always.

2. I am not sure, but I publish mainly for LMS. I think it's also freezing with web. It's unpredictable on my system

3. Working on Windows 7 only, no VM.

Before publishing I save the file. If it does not respond I close it and restart it. Publishing works fine then.

Kevin Thompson

1. I almost always publish with HTML5 and AMP on.

2. Almost always publish for the Web.

3. Yes to the VM:  Parallels 9 with Win7 on a Mac.

I'm currently circumventing the problem by saving the file, closing Storyline, re-opening the project, then publishing. I've gotten quick at this. The problem never occurs after following that sequence.  :-/

EJ LeBlanc

We found out what the problem was on our end today. Basically I made some master slides, made some content slides with the layout of those master slides, and decided I needed to change those master slides after the fact. I deleted some of those master slides.

The problem was, apparently, that Storyline was still looking for those Master slides referenced by two of the slides I didn't think to reset the layout for.

To fix the problem, I had to go to the affected slides, assign the layout to master slides still present, and reset those slides.

Thanks for your support. Hope this helps someone else, too.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Kevin, Sjoerd and Trevor, 

Thanks for sharing that information here and I'm going to pass along to our QA team. 

EJ,

Thanks for the update and it sounds like that may have been file specific and expected if the masters were deleted but still being referred to. 

Malcolm,

If you're able to provide additional information here such as the answers to the questions I posed, please let us know. 

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