Lightbox - Pause/Play Oddness

May 21, 2012

Hello all,

Hope you can shed some light (pun!) on this for me. 

The Goal:

Student must view some information before proceeding to view the slide for the first time. 

Preferred Solution: 

  1. Trigger launches Lightbox when Slide Timeline begins; if variable "viewed" == false
  2. Lightbox pauses slide (including audio) when launched (built-in behavior) 
  3. Trigger on Lightbox slide sets "viewed" to true to prevent launch when slide replayed
  4. User closes Lightbox.
  5. Slide plays

For various reasons this cannot be done! I have tried several methods without success, one locks up the player!

Attempts:

Trigger on slide start. - Will not pause audio and does not resume. 

Move audio to start .5 seconds into slide. - Does not resume.

Trigger when an object's timeline starts. Pauses AND resumes! Crashes player :-/

I am attaching my story file and will post a screenr with examples and more details. 

Thanks for the help,

James

16 Replies
onEnterFrame (James Kingsley)

What we ended up doing is a bit tricky and not perfect.

  1. We built a fake lightbox on a slide layer and set it to pause the main timeline.
  2. Added a button to show the fake lightbox layer.
  3. Create another layer we called "pause". This layer covers the slide, pauses the main timeline, and has a duplicate of the button.
  4. Set a trigger to show the pause layer when the buttons timeline starts. 

The end result the student is:

  1. Slide starts.
  2. Slide pauses when it gets to the button.
  3. Student clicks button and reads text in "lightbox"
  4. Student closes lightbox and the timeline resumes.

The drawbacks of this approach are that the user has to click a button and that our fake lightbox doesn't cover the player controls like a real lightbox would. :-(

Graham North

Hi

Inspired by your issue I tried to recreate it and like you found the problems you identified.  I did however find a possible solution.

I added a shape to the base slide (off screen) and set it with the shortest possible duration on the timeline (0.25s).  Then added the trigger to launch the lightbox to the begining of the shapes timeline and the show pause layer to the timeline end.

And arranged the timeline as below

The result seemed to be what you were trying to achieve, although in testing the HTML5 only played the audio the first time through in Safari. (Other browsers falling back to Flash performed without problems).

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro

Hi,

Finally having a chance to play with all of this. I'm able to perfectly recreate all the problems from the post by James in May. But after playing with the solution for quite some time, I'm not "getting it."

onEnterFrame (James Kingsley) said:

What we ended up doing is a bit tricky and not perfect.

  1. We built a fake lightbox on a slide layer and set it to pause the main timeline.
  2. Added a button to show the fake lightbox layer.
  3. Create another layer we called "pause". This layer covers the slide, pauses the main timeline, and has a duplicate of the button.
  4. Set a trigger to show the pause layer when the buttons timeline starts. 
  • I have a Start Slide with a base layer with some audio and animations.
  • Does the fake lightbox layer go on this slide (that's where I have it now)?
    ----I've set the properties to pause the base layer.
    ----Does this layer have a shape covering the base layer? Does it contain the content the Learner is supposed to read?
  • In step 2, I assume the button to show the fake layer is sitting on the base layer.
    ---When/how does it show the base layer? With a Learner click? With a timeline start of the button or the layer?
  • In step 3, I've added a shape to cover the slide layer and I've paused the layer.
    ---For the duplicate button, should I be coping the button from step 2 onto this pause layer?
    --And so the button triggers to show the layer it is sitting on...the pause layer?

Sorry to be so dense. I would really like to understand this since I ran into a situation where I could've used it.

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