Turn off triggering exit animations at timeline end?
Jul 23, 2018
Hi all,
Is there a way to have exit animations on button-triggered objects not be triggered when the timeline ends?
Please check out the attached file. In Preview mode, click one of the Trending Average cells in the table right away, and leave the triggered objects displayed while the timeline ends after the audio. You should see that the triggered objects fade out at the end of the timeline (annoying/appears buggy) and the button remains selected (just plain sloppy-looking). One cannot assume that the learner will wait for the audio to finish before clicking buttons, so I have to fix this. I have been unable to figure out how to disable exit animations when the timeline ends. Does such a setting exist?
I have already considered these workarounds, and they are less than ideal or just won’t work:
- Put triggered objects for each button on a layer, which can be set to not disappear at the end of the timeline. This would be the cleanest, best solution, except that I cannot use layers for how I’m trying to design this page. The blue highlight boxes appear behind content that must remain on the base layer, and I believe that layers, by definition, display on top of the base layer, correct? I considered making the highlight boxes be outline boxes with no fill, but I need them to stand out better than that. Also, I cannot make the highlight boxes be shaded (semi-transparent) boxes on top of the underlying objects because some of those objects are buttons, and our team no longer uses shaded boxes because they reduce color contrast (508 compliance).
- Pause the timeline before the exit animation kicks in (>0.75 seconds before the end). Learners might be confused about why the timeline is paused, when they’ll have been accustomed to seeing it go to the end up to this point. (This would be less noticeable if I could pause it immediately before the end, but I have to accommodate fade out time.)
- Extend the timeline far into the future. This won’t fly. The learner may think something is broken to see the timeline continue churning along with no audio while they try to do an interactivity.
- Remove the audio from this page, extend the timeline far into the future, and turn off the playback bar. I guess this is probably the best workaround, although learners have been hearing audio through most course pages up to this point, so they may wonder why it’s not on this one. This may be the best option though.
I hope there’s just a hidden setting somewhere. Or, maybe someone has other ideas that will work better.
Thank you in advance for your help!
Lisa
8 Replies
Hey Lisa
Great work
Someone may provide a technical way to solve this my 2 cents would be to create a rectangle shape over the buttons with 100% transparency & no outline
Create a trigger that changes the state of the rectangle from normal to hidden when the timeline ends
It may delay the clicker students but the audio is not that long
Hope that helps
See this demo file I created shows how to trigger an exit animation when you want without it exiting at the end of the timeline. The ice cream is the object to look at see how it is positioned on the timeline.
Thanks Mr. C.! That's a good workaround to consider. I could also just set the button states to Hidden at the beginning and have them become Normal at the end of the timeline.
Hi Phil. Thank you so much for sharing this example. I'm not sure I follow what's going on here. I tried to emulate positioning one of my groups of triggered objects on the timeline to end at 1.5 seconds and to be triggered to Normal at that point, as you did with your ice cream object, but it doesn't work for me and I'm not really following exactly how that's supposed to work. If I click the button for that group before 1.5 seconds, the group appears and disappears again as soon as they end on the timeline, and after that, I cannot get them to reappear by clicking the button again.
Can you please explain further? Thank you so much for your help...
The element that is animating is the the ice cream image.
If you check on the animations tab they are set to 0.5 second entrance and 0.5 second exit. the length of the image timeline is only 1 second. and it is positioned at the beginning of the timeline with its initial state set to hidden.
I am triggering a change to normal at 1 second on the timeline, so in effect i am making the object visible after its timeline ends, this way the exit animation will never fire because its timeline will not end, but if you then change to hidden using a trigger it will animate out.
Does that make sense?
Sorry there are other animations in there, but the ice cream is the main one.
Hi Phil. Attached is a new file with my slide, with the programming on the ice cream object as I see it in your SL file and as you described. I have 0.75 second fade in and out on my hidden, button-triggered objects (in the groups Exp-M1, Exp-M2, Exp-M3) and triggers for each of those objects to become normal at the cue point 1.5 second.
Unfortunately, something is still amiss. In Preview, if you click one of the Trending Average buttons before 1.5 seconds, the objects display briefly and then disappear when their timeline ends. After 1.5 seconds, you can't display any of the objects by clicking the buttons. The project does not seem to recognize that those objects exist after 1.5 seconds. In other words, the result of this programming in my project looks nothing like yours.
What you're describing makes sense for the kind of object you're animating, but my failure to replicate your example suggests we might not be comparing apples to apples. Your ice cream is an object triggered to normal by a cue point on the timeline (predictably), whereas my objects need to be triggered by a human clicking a button (unpredictably). You said, "I am triggering a change to normal at 1 second on the timeline, so in effect i am making the object visible after its timeline ends,"... but I don't want these objects to become visible at a certain point on the timeline, only when someone has triggered them.
I guess I'll continue playing around with it some more and see if I can figure out how to make it work, but I'm at a loss. If you're able to look at this new file and see where I might improve the programming, I would appreciate it. I'm truly grateful for your help.
I will have a look later, it should work as you describe, if you see in my example they are animated back in by clicking an object on the layer,
Should be simple to get working
Update: I still haven't been able to resolve this using programming magic. I had to move on, so I fixed it by removing the exit animations on those items altogether. Since they have fade-in entrance animations, the "snap out" effect really isn't that noticeable, and it seems to be the best workaround for me, considering the alternatives.
If anyone has programming magic to share that fixes this issue, please do, at least for posterity in this post. Thanks!
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