I am in the process of publishing around 100 Captivate projects which came from a software vendor – I have never seen them before. At some point I hear that many learners will not be able to listen to the narration and will need to read the captions. Realizing that the courses have Closed-Caption text, I suggest setting the courses to display the captions by default. This will avoid the challenge of educating learners about the feature while ensuring it gets used. But Captivate Skin Editor doesn’t have a setting to display CC by default. I Google around and find a Flash animation that is supposed to provide the functionality. I try it and it doesn’t work. Time to crank up the custom actions and build a script! A minute later and I have the captions displaying – yay!

Since narration begins on the second slide I think “this looks more polished and professional if I raise the CC bar when the narrator starts talking.” Testing reveals that this change prevents the CC from appearing when returning to where I left off in the course.  Switch it back to slide one and the CC is back. Captivate always loads Slide one before resuming at a bookmarked slide.

Probably 99% of what I am doing is repetition – publish one couse after another. I suppose I could train a monkey and leave the gig. A trainer assigned to “do eLearning” may have shrugged when automatic CC display didn’t appear to be an option. But because of broad experience with Captivate and other tools, I was able to poke around for less than 20 minutes and come up with a significant improvement to the content.

Experience is valued in the abstract, but rarely makes tangible appearances where a client can say “That’s what I am paying for!” A lot of the value of experience is negative: not doing things that didn’t work before. Not wasting time. No one gets to see that, including the experienced practitioner. There are many habits and patterns that have become automatic through experience – not celebrated.

I am very conscious of this fact. I try to notice when I do something tangible in case it helps my client justify hiring my experience on a project. It can be a challenge to recognize when it happens. I am reminded of interviews where a reporter gushes about a heroic rescue, and the fireman says  ” I was just doing my job.” (Not to compare professions).

So I can relate to the uncelebrated Closed Caption bar that finally will make an appearance in a starring role.

Tic-Tac-Toe Whaddyaknow is the first eLearning product offered by Novatek.

We are exploring the notion that we could sell eLearning tools for use by other developers, so we are giving away the first one to the community. Created in Flash with the Engage SDK, instances are authored using Articulate Engage, a commercial template-driven eLearning development tool we use quite often.

I hope that once learners experience a simple game like this the response will drive instructional designers to come back to buy more.

Got a nice mention on Articulate‘s Word Of Mouth blog, and the downloads have begun!

We shall see.

DIY 3D head maker/morpher. Takes a webcam or uploaded image, maps to 3D PV3D head maquette.

Me in 3D

Now with panther

See Papervision Site for more info.

Go here for free software related to the creation of the examples: Digimi

Adding objects to a scene is very similar to the process for adding a character. According to the documentation the only difference is that objects are static, and they require less memory resources from the engine to exist on the stage.

You can use any method to create the graphics that make up an object. I used a prop in Poser and set it to an angle that I hoped would fit in my layout. You can create multiple angles using the same method as with characters. Keep the pixel dimensions of the object bitmap as small as possible – I keep a high-res version and make smaller copies from it. Make sure to set the export properties so that ActionScript can find it:

You can store multiple objects in a single fla/swf. I approach them as any shared library – you can organize libraries by project, theme or other principle that meets your project’s requirements. They don’t have to be placed on the stage as I’ve done either.

Create a definition file for your library to enable ffilmation to utilize it. The name should be the same as the swf name, only with an .xml extension. Here is a sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<definitions>
<media src="../media/medicalProps.swf"/>
 <objectDefinition name="LabTube">

 <displayModel>
 <sprite angle="0" src="LabTube"/>
 </displayModel>

 <collisionModel>
 <box width="116" depth="70" height="200"/>
 </collisionModel>

 <shadowModel>
 <shadow type="sprite"/>
 </shadowModel>

 </objectDefinition>

</definitions>

Then you must add the library swf and object definition to your scene definition file.

In the head section add this:

<definitions src="../definitions/medicalProps.xml"/>

In the body section:

<object id="labTube" definition="LabTube" x="422" y="224" z="0" orientation="0"/>

You will probably need to experiment with a few details of your object: the location of the origin in the MovieClip and the collision area shape and dimensions. If you see light between the bottom-most parts of your object and/or weird Z-sorting, the origin is probably too high. I set mine near the bottom and center. I start the collision shape and dimensions that match as closely to my bitmap pixel dimensions and then test with a character in the game.

If you use png format when importing bitmaps your game will look better in low quality, since the quality setting will not effect their display, unlike shapes. Compare the gurney to the vacuum chamber in the screenshot. Also notice the built-in support for transparency in the object and the shadows, and Z-sorting.

The developer of ffilmation created an AIR app that can be used to create scenes and levels. It will read, edit and write new definition files so that components can be created by a team of asset developers and integrated without writing any additional code. This includes putting in jump-points to teleport the character to other levels, lighting, materials, layout, z-sorting, geometry and some properties.

Scenes can be developed and changed over time by an external process that writes changes to the XML files.

The project folder structure must adhere to the names and relative locations used in the demo project to enable use of the editor.

The editor

The editor in geometry mode with Flash Player displaying the same scene.