Trigger Warning - Triggers disappearing

Sep 23, 2022

Hi everyone. Another long-winded rant.
I have had a torrid time lately with Storyline misbehaving in the most random ways possible but after doing a refresh of my virtual Windows 10 environment and then doing a complete uninstall, and reinstall of Storyline, I managed to get a few of my recent issues sorted, which is great.

But yesterday was... insane, being honest.

I am getting so <watches language> ... frustrated ... <sigh> with this "software". 

So, my challenge was to try and make Drag & Drops accessible via the keyboard and I managed to find Sally Wiedenbeck's awesome tutorial. But, my stupid brain was not working and I was running into some weird issues like storyline wasn't monitoring the change of states on the Drop Targets so it wasn't recording the activity as being done, and also the client wants the user to have two attempts so there had to be conditional states to allow for a Try Again layer, plus, like obviously, I then had to recreate an Invalid Answer layer to activate if the user clicked on the Submit button, if they hadn't attempted any of the interactions (either via Drag or Keyboard), so, yeah... super easy. Not a problem. I love variables and Triggers and can do this.

But, IMHO historically I have found Storyline's ability to perform actions based on object states to be both awesome and super flaky, because basically something like "NOT EQUAL to NORMAL state" doesn't allow for subtle "IF THAT THEN THIS" options.

So I found myself creating layers of triggers to try and monitor whatever was going on (or not as the case may be).

Which is where I realised I was going mad because as I was creating triggers they kept disappearing on me. I am aware that changing the "when" variable shifts it to wherever the specified condition/trigger appears in the Triggers Panel and it involves a bit of scrolling up or down to find the highlighted trigger. But sometimes, no matter where I looked I could not find the trigger.

This leads me to ask for a Feature Request: Allow for a Recently Added menu option for sorting variables within the panel. And/or the ability to maybe colour code certain triggers to allow for identification of similar triggers within a long list.

But, yeah, to make a long story longer I finally noticed that the triggers were actually disappearing in front of my very eyes, which I managed to record. Here's the Zapruder Tapes:



Am I going mad, or does that show that not only is the copy and pasted variable displaying as something unintended but the original it was copied from has disappeared?

 

1 Reply
Luciana Piazza

Hi Diarmaid, 

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. I understand your frustration and I am so sorry to hear you are having difficulty with the states of objects and variables and triggers associated with creating the content in Sally's tutorial.

In order to better assist you, I have some additional clarifying questions:

  • Does the same issue happen when importing your project into a new project?
  • We recommend saving your .story file locally. Are you currently saving locally on your computer?

I'd like to have our team take a look at your project to investigate further. I have created a support case on your behalf. 

We'd be happy to hear your thoughts on sorting variables within a Feature Request. You can track what we are currently working on in our Feature Roadmap

I hope this helps and that you have a good start to your week!