Forum Discussion

LukeGeach-b3dfc's avatar
LukeGeach-b3dfc
Community Member
6 years ago

64bit and Multithread Workloads for Storyline

I just want to share something I have been sitting on for quite some time and that is my thoughts on the frankly old architexture that Storyline 360 is built on. From a back end point of view it only seams to be a marginal leap over Storyline 2 and none of the real performance issues that came in storyline 2 have been improved on in 360 / 3. Now in truth this may not be the case, it may have been re built from the ground up as some responses from Articulate have suggested but from a users perspective this seems to be simply untrue. There are a few outstanding questions asked by people on this forum dating back to 2016 regarding 64bit Support and with that Multithread workload support. Every response to these has been 'submit a feature request' of which those I have spoken too, all have submitted this request and it has fallen on deaf ears. Can we please have an actual answer on whether or not this support is coming on the development roadmap? 

To give a bit of reasoning stoyline as a 32bit app is currently limited to single thread (1 cpu core) support and 4gb of RAM. If your system has a multi core cpu (which in almost every case it will have) that is system hoursepower that is untapped and similarly if you have over 4GB of ram, and the system average according to hardware surveys is 8GB for the average user these days. It is possible for a 32bit app to use multiple threads but that does not seam to be the case here monitoring the cpu loads when using storyline.

Storyline 360 is a new product, that is already old out of the box. As developers we are using products like Blender and the Adobe Creative suite along side this product to develop our courses, all of which have been native 64 bit only apps for almost a decade and take full advantage of a system, and for those who do video editting and 3D design to create content for their courses, they will have extremely powerful computers that are being completely underutilised by Storyline. A lot of the performance issues we see on a day to day basis are due to running out of memory or being bogged down by a single cpu core due to these limitations.

This is not a feature request this is an architecture request, this is a plea to just tell us is this on the roadmap, because I and many other developers are rapidly starting to loose patience in this products inability to keep up with the pace of the people who use it in this industry.

  • Hi Everyone!

    Great news! I'm happy to share that we just released Storyline 360 (version 3.82.31354.0), which includes a new 64-bit version of Storyline 360! Harness the processing power in modern computers with 64-bit Storyline 360. Large, media-rich courses benefit from increased stability and faster performance!

    To use 64-bit Storyline 360, please update your Articulate 360 desktop app, then click the Install button next to the Storyline 360 app with the 64-bit and beta labels. The Install button will change to an Open button when the installation is complete.

    This was highly requested, so we hope it serves you in your course creation! If you run into any snags, don't hesitate to contact our team in a support case.

  • TomHeywood's avatar
    TomHeywood
    Community Member

    Sadly I think that unless Microsoft drops support for 32 bit applications in WIndows 11 we're unlikely to see something that would be as costly to implement as a 64 bit version any time soon.

    Unfortunately I think this is a side-effect of the subscription business model, where building new features is a higher priority than fixing underlying technical issues. I imagine there's been a cost-benefit analysis where they've calculated that new features will help attract new subscriptions, and likely offset any subs that are lost by users leaving for other software due to technical problems.

    If Storyline were still primarily a standalone purchase then I imagine that in order to release a new version to the market it would need to be 64bit to compete with everything else out there, but the inertia of having all the existing subscriptions for 360 means there probably isn't the appetite for making that big a change.

    • BillDane's avatar
      BillDane
      Community Member

      I think you may be on to something.  They just implemented all the nonsensical (at least to me) 3D image capability that maybe 5% of their users are ever going to use - while 100% of their users would love to see a dramatic increase in productivity and reliability a 64-bit environment would offer.

  • BillDane's avatar
    BillDane
    Community Member

    "I have been reading now so many discussions with this complaint, and it looks as if they don't give a sh*t."

    I would tend to agree. Come on Articulate, get on this!!  This should be PRIORITY ONE!!!

  • TomHeywood's avatar
    TomHeywood
    Community Member

    I imagine that Rise is now the 'priority one' unfortunately - no need to worry about redeveloping the software from scratch for a new OS version if it's all browser-based!

  • Mike's avatar
    Mike
    Community Member

    Just because a program is 32 bit running on a 64 bit system, does not mean it will crash. If that was the case we would have many more reports of crashing. I work with very large files and have zero crashing, post the Intel bug fix. 

    "Typical causes include accessing invalid memory addresses, incorrect address values in the program counter, buffer overflow, overwriting a portion of the affected program code due to an earlier bug, executing invalid machine instructions (an illegal opcode), or triggering an unhandled exception." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(computing)#:~:text=Typical%20causes%20include%20accessing%20invalid,or%20triggering%20an%20unhandled%20exception.

    I agree that not having it written in 64 bit can cause performance issues, but not crashing. I would continue to work with them to identify the actual root cause of your crashing. They did a remote desktop on my PC and confirmed it was the Intel bug. Once they fixed that, it's been smooth sailing.

  • Hey Mke,

    Would you please post a link to the intel bug fix you're referring to? 

    thx

  • Thanks Mike!  I've got a NVIDA A5000, it can handle running Premiere Pro, AE, and Cinema 4D simultaneously ... but not Articulate running alone ... it literally just stops, often without the crash report popup, just disappears ...  company IT folks say RAM issue from 32 bit restrictions on a 64-bit machine - I've got 64 GB ram, but captivate maxes at 2, for what that's worth.

    Good luck everyone!

    • Mike's avatar
      Mike
      Community Member

      Your welcome. I'd open up a ticket with their support team on your specific issue and have them do some debugging to narrow down the issue. Doesn't mean they will fix it anytime soon, but at least they will be aware, and hopefully work on fixing it in the future.