Storyline360 Extremely Slow Saving/Opening

This problem is persistent in every version of Storyline. Nothing has improved, and it will not improve until your team makes use of 64-bit computing and releases a modern application. We are using decades-old programming and it shows. We need a major update. We pay a LOT of money annually to use 360, and frankly, the fact we do not have realtime playback and editing capability is shameful. The save and load times are abysmal if you ever need to do a large course with a lot of feedback, video, and timeline features. Quite simply, if you want to do it with any sort of speed, you cannot use Storyline. I clicked the save button on a file over 5 minutes ago and it still has not saved. The blue line in the right corner hasn't even started moving, but eventually, it will. I learned the hard way that Storyline is not locked up, but just ridiculously slow.

In fact, I started writing this 8 minutes ago, right as I clicked save, and Storyline is JUST NOW starting the actual saving process. That's just whacked. I am on a local SSD, Core i7 Dell XPS with 16gb ram. Nothing I am using is in the cloud, and it still took a full 10 minutes to save a project. Yes, it's a big project, but that's just not acceptable.

I love the other apps but Rise can only take you so far if you need to make a truly interactive learning experience. I could have created this 2-hour course I'm working on in Captivate in a third of the time it is taking in Storyline, but I choose Storyline because the features are much more robust. However, I don't know if I can keep giving up triple my time just to have a little bit better end-user experience on my courses.

I really hope your team is working to address this. Our organization may just need to go back to Adobe Captivate. I love Storyline and what I can do with it, but it takes 2 full minutes before a flipping preview will play on the stage sometimes, and often, saving takes 10 or more minutes. Any of us that have multiple courses to produce cannot work with this long before we give up and move to software that is at a minimum keeping up with modern computing power. The fact you do not have a 64-bit product for Storyline makes zero sense to me. Mac OSx Catalina now requires 64-bit software, and soon - Windows will follow suit. If your team does not answer, Storyline will be gone. Please tell us you are working on this!

I really do apologize for the rant, I am just under a deadline and super frustrated with this lack of speed.

Thanks!

I have lost over 3 weeks of work because of these issues.  It took a record 35 minutes to upload a save a few days ago.  This is a TERRIBLE user experience.  I do love all the features but it is taking me three times as long to create content and I am getting in trouble at work for it.  Clearly you are aware of these issues and doing nothing about it.  I think I am switching to Captivate because my literal job is on the line!  I am writing this while generating a preview... and low and behold... 13 minutes and counting and this is due today.... Thanks Storyline for giving me an unbearable amount of stress.  This is just getting worse and worse.

I am experiencing this as well.  It's always been a bit slow, but lately it's just unbearably slow.   It takes a long time to open, and every time I save, it takes at least 10 minutes if not more.  I save often because it also crashes more frequently than it used to.  I'm in a vicious loop.   Since I got tired of losing hours worth of work due to not saving often enough , I have started to save more often, BUT now it takes 10+ minutes  to save every time and I always save before I preview because sometimes previewing triggers it to crash!  Previewing also takes forever and often just results in a black screen and I have to try it again.

I read Michaels post (above) from a few years ago.  The three items that were suggested , I checked and am doing.  SL is up to date.  My PC should not have an issue - I have good processor, plenty of disk space, a good graphics card, etc.  I was a bit low on RAM because I have a lot of large programs and files on my local drive.  Thinking that might be the cause, I moved 90% of that to an external drive and uninstalled programs I don't use often. This freed up some RAM, but it has not improved the lag time in SL360.  

The eLearning courses I'm creating these days are more robust than in years past.  More videos, branching, media, etc. so the projects are large, but agree with Michaels post, that should not be an issue these days and isn't with other authoring tools.  Like him, I like Articulate products better  than some of the other tools out there, but if this keeps up I am going to have no choice but to find a different tool.   

I'm wondering if you can share what the solution was, if there was one?   Is this fixable?  Or am I doomed to return to Captivate?  Or something else?  

Hi there, Colin. Check out these best practices for your user:

1. Work with media files and resources on your local drive (your C: drive). Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, including file corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior.
2. You should also make sure the directory path to your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters. 
3. Avoid using special characters, accents or symbols in your file names.

We're happy to work more closely with you and your user if they are still experiencing extreme slowness. You can start that process here!

Hi Michael,

I appreciate you reaching out and sharing your experience. Performance issues are certainly ones we want to be aware of and help folks with.

I've opened up a support case on your behalf so you can work directly with one of our support engineers to see if we can get to the bottom of this for you.

You should be hearing from someone via e-mail soon.

Hi Nina, 

I'm sorry to hear about your experience with the application. I'd like to ask a few questions to help clarify your experience: 

• Are you working locally when making changes to your project file and publishing it?
•  Is this happening to all of your project files or just some? If all files are affected, try doing a repair of your Storyline 360 installation to see if this helps. 

If you're working locally, I'd also like to test if I will be able to replicate the behavior that you're experiencing on my personal Storyline 360 installation. Would you be willing to upload a copy of your project file here or in private by opening a support case? I'll delete your project file as soon as I am done testing it. 

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for checking in on this! I would avoid using characters like asterisks, brackets, or punctuation.

I hope this helps!

Hi Tommy,

Thank you for reaching out and sharing your feedback! I've opened a support case on your behalf to assist you further. You will be hearing from one of my teammates soon via email.

Has there been a common fix for this issue that I could have my team try? It is detrimental to my workflow each time I save an edit.