Help with nav buttons disappearing

Hi Blythe

I think this might be two separate points:

1.  If you set the 'When revisiting slide' field to 'Reset to initial state', does this solve the issue of the navigation buttons not showing/dropping you onto Layer 2, when returning to the slide?  This field is on the slide properties (the gear icon next to the base layer on the slide layers pane (under trigger pane on right)).

2. Re restricting navigation:  I also often use the Hidden Next button option and a 'Change state' to normal when '....' to then be able to click to continue.  There are a few different options do the change state to normal trigger.  

a. My favourite approach is to use the 'Change state to normal when state of x, y and z are visited'.  This ensures that every layer is viewed:  NB: in your example, savy learners may start by viewing box 5 first.  This will trigger the next button and let them advance without having to view layers 1-4.  My option b. below has a similar fault in that learners just need to view 5 layers but not necessarily layers 1 - 5 (ie could view 1,2,1,2,1) and then continue.  This option a. removes these limitations, but doesn't work in all cases as the objects need to be able to have a visited state.

For this to work, your trigger objects don't have a visited state, create an additional state titled visited in the states pane.  I like this as you can also change the box appearance once visited (ie put a 50% transparent box over your image so appears ghosted once visited).  With a visited state you can automatically use the above trigger.

b. when i can't use option a. I use a variable to trigger the Next button to normal.  ie 'Change state of Next button to normal when Variable (create a variable) is greater or equal to no. of layers'.  To set this up you need to:

- create a number variable - titled NextButton and set to 0.

- on each layer that needs to be visited add a trigger 'Increment the variable NextButton by 1 when timeline starts on this layer.

- on the base layer create a slide trigger: Change state of next button to normal when the variable NextButton is greater or equal to the number of layers people have to view.

This trigger works really well for more advanced control, however, as mentioned above its only limitation is that it doesn't specify between layers (ie could visit layer 1 five times and trigger)

c. if you can't use option a. and you really want to ensure each individual slide is viewed.  You can adapt option b.  In this case instead of using one variable and simply adding up to five, you would instead:

- create a different variable for each layer: in this case I would preference a true/false variable set to false;

- add a trigger to layer 1 that amends variablelayer1 to true when timeline starts, and repeat for all layers

- on the base layer add slide trigger to 'change state of next button to normal when variable of variablelayer1 equals true + variablelayer2 equals true + ....' so forth for each variable.

This trigger is full proof and very neat as it covers all object types.  The only reason I don't go straight to this option is that if you are publishing in Scorm 1.2 using a lot of variables can quickly exceed the character limit (which is only just under 5,000) on the Resume State settings reporting back to your LMS.  If publishing for web or using Tin Can, I like option c. best. 

Hope this helps. 

Regards Christine

Attached is the how to for these options