3DVista e-learning, and the exact point where it stops

The six actions you get for free

3DVista's e-learning module is not a bolt on. It ships six actions and they cover most training and assessment work on their own:

Question Card asks a question, simple or multiple choice, with media. Count to Score awards points, which is what you use when the task is spotting something rather than answering something, a hazard in a workshop for instance. Show Report puts up the results screen at the end. Show Timeout handles running out of time. Start and Finish mark the beginning and end of the assessed run.

You can run several separate scores at once, which is the feature people are most often surprised by. Measuring three competencies independently in one walkthrough is a configuration job, not a development one.

Scores are not variables, and that matters

This is the thing that trips up anyone arriving from ordinary software. 3DVista does not give you general purpose variables that you declare, type and set. What it gives you is a scoring system, plus display tokens like {{title}} and {{tour.name}} that the software fills in for you and you cannot write to.

So when somebody says a tour should remember something, the honest question back is: can it be expressed as a score, or as having reached a point in the run? If yes, the software does it. If it is genuinely arbitrary state, you are outside what the editor offers and into custom work. Knowing which side of that line you are on before you start is worth more than any technique on this page.

The E-Learning tab is the map

Everything assessed in the project is listed in one place: the questions from every quiz card, and every Count to Score action with its points, together, so you can read the whole assessment without opening panorama after panorama looking for it.

If you are auditing somebody else's tour, start there. It is the fastest way to find out whether the thing was designed or assembled.

Where it stops, one: the report screen

The generic report is fine and it looks like the generic report. The moment a client wants their own branding, their own wording, or anything on that screen the built in one does not carry, you are building it.

The route is documented and it is not difficult, it is just not obvious. In the Project, E-Learning tab, under E-Learning Actions, you remove the Show Report action so the generic screen never appears. Then you build the report you want as components in the skin, using text elements with the e-learning variables in them to pull in the values. Finally you add a Show/hide Components action, set to show, pointing at your report element, on the button or hotspot that ends the run.

That is the whole trick, and it is worth understanding even if you never do it yourself, because it tells you what a custom report should cost. It is an afternoon, not a project.

Where it stops, two: getting the result out

The report shows the score to the person who just took the assessment. It does not, on its own, tell you. For a training obligation, the score sitting on a visitor's screen and nowhere else is the part that fails an audit.

Anything that carries the result off the visitor's machine and into a system you can report from is outside the editor. That is the single most common reason a real e-learning project needs a developer, and it is worth deciding on before the tour is built rather than after.

What conditional actually means here

It does not mean if score > 8. Conditional in 3DVista means two useful things. First, every answer can lead to its own action, so answering one way opens one card and answering another way opens a different one, which is how you build a question tree. Second, a card can be conditioned on a previous action, so a question only appears once the visitor has found the thing it is asking about.

There is a third route people forget, and it happens before the tour even loads. The url can carry show-components-tags and hide-components-tags, so a link handed to one audience can open the same tour with different parts of the interface present. That is enough for a partner version, a trade version or an internal version without building three tours. It sets the opening state only, not behaviour during the walkthrough.

What you do not need to pay anybody for

Being blunt about this is the whole point of the page. If your project is a quiz with questions, points, a pass mark and a results screen, build it in the editor. If you need several scores measured separately, that is a checkbox. If you need branching by answer, that is configuration. If you need a question gated behind finding something first, that is configuration too.

Get someone in when you need the result to leave the tour, when the report has to be genuinely yours, when the scoring rule cannot be expressed as points on a card, or when the thing you are building is not an assessment at all.

That work is 3DVista development. The two companion pages are running your own HTML inside a tour and what to do about there being no JavaScript API.

What you get

• The six e-learning actions and what each one is actually for
• Why 3DVista scores are not variables, and what follows from that
• The one panel that shows every question and every score in one place
• How to replace the generic report screen with your own
• The two places the software genuinely stops
• An honest list of what you do not need to pay anybody for