Although I love using Scenarios in my Rise courses, I noticed that they heavily add to the final course file size (in my case + 120 MB). Of course, this results in long upload times to the LMS and potentially also affects the learners when consuming the course.
Are there any best practices on building a Scenario in a way that it doesn't require so much space? Which factors are the ones that add most (new scene, just in general many steps,..)?
Any experiences or tips on this are highly appreciated!
Whenever you include a character in a scenario all of their pose images get bundled into the published output, not just the ones you use. As these images are high resolution – needlessly so for the use case, in my opinion – each one weighs in at over 1MB, and each character has ~25 poses, so you're looking at around 30MB per character.
Presumably end users won't need to download the unused images as they aren't displayed in the scenario itself; I haven't checked to see if it does any background caching or anything like that. As such they should only be taking up a bit of hosting space, which typically won't be a big deal.
In terms of what you can do, you could optimise the published output yourself. For example, if you open up the zip and navigate to scormcontent then look in assets you'll see all of the images used in your course. You could then:
Delete any of the character poses you don't use. (Could be annoying to keep track of this.)
Resize, and replace, the pose image files you do use; make sure the randomised file name is retained exactly. Here's a comparison where I've halved the dimensions, for example, which still looks fine in the scenario block itself but reduces the file size by 80%.
As you'd need to do the above every time you publish the course I'd generally suggest you don't bother. However, those workarounds might be useful if you're receiving specific complaints or the module is likely to be viewed by people with limited internet connections.
Please can I put in a feature request so that only the character poses used in the scenario are exported in the SCORM file. I have a scenario that uses 3 poses and it looks like 17 poses are appearing in the SCORM. I'd also be interested to hear about the reasoning for including all the extra images in the SCORM file when they are never used. If it's too difficult to code the export of only the used poses, maybe have a 'lite' version of each character that just has, say, 6 of the most commonly used poses could be an easy way to offer a less bloated alternative?
I appreciate Sam's workaround above can address this issue but it's not practical.
As a side note I currently replace all the videos in my SCORM files after publication due to the default video encoding that Rise applies (which bloats video file sizes). Customers are very mindful of large SCORM files causing performance issues on their LMS and many will request SCORMs be under a certain file size that they determine to be acceptable for their systems. I think that Rise is a great tool, but could be even better if these published SCORM file size issues could be resolved.
Hi, Peter! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this feature. We always appreciate hearing how we can improve our products! I have documented your request and we'll let you know here if we make changes that will help!
6 Replies
Whenever you include a character in a scenario all of their pose images get bundled into the published output, not just the ones you use. As these images are high resolution – needlessly so for the use case, in my opinion – each one weighs in at over 1MB, and each character has ~25 poses, so you're looking at around 30MB per character.
Presumably end users won't need to download the unused images as they aren't displayed in the scenario itself; I haven't checked to see if it does any background caching or anything like that. As such they should only be taking up a bit of hosting space, which typically won't be a big deal.
In terms of what you can do, you could optimise the published output yourself. For example, if you open up the zip and navigate to
scormcontentthen look inassetsyou'll see all of the images used in your course. You could then:As you'd need to do the above every time you publish the course I'd generally suggest you don't bother. However, those workarounds might be useful if you're receiving specific complaints or the module is likely to be viewed by people with limited internet connections.
Thanks for this detailed explanation, Sam! :)
Hi.
Please can I put in a feature request so that only the character poses used in the scenario are exported in the SCORM file. I have a scenario that uses 3 poses and it looks like 17 poses are appearing in the SCORM. I'd also be interested to hear about the reasoning for including all the extra images in the SCORM file when they are never used. If it's too difficult to code the export of only the used poses, maybe have a 'lite' version of each character that just has, say, 6 of the most commonly used poses could be an easy way to offer a less bloated alternative?
I appreciate Sam's workaround above can address this issue but it's not practical.
As a side note I currently replace all the videos in my SCORM files after publication due to the default video encoding that Rise applies (which bloats video file sizes). Customers are very mindful of large SCORM files causing performance issues on their LMS and many will request SCORMs be under a certain file size that they determine to be acceptable for their systems. I think that Rise is a great tool, but could be even better if these published SCORM file size issues could be resolved.
Regards,
Peter
Hi, Peter! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this feature. We always appreciate hearing how we can improve our products! I have documented your request and we'll let you know here if we make changes that will help!
bump
Genius solution!!! My file size was reduced by 2/3.