Stuck on "Initialising the experiment..."

Online experiments
1

I’m working on an online experiment developed using Builder in v3.2.4.
It works when run from the PC, but the online version gets stuck on “Initialising the experiment”. The experiment presents a series of sounds in random order and collects a rating for each.

https://run.pavlovia.org/CullingJ/culling_test2/html/

Any idea why it won’t go? Many other threads seem to have this problem, but the causes seems to be quite varietous.

John

2

Hi @CullingJ, it appears from the code in your repository that you are using quit an out of date version of PsychoPy. The issue is because your experiment name in the Experiment Settings is different from the actual Builder filename - to fix, just make the experiment name match the filename - would also be good to not have multiple Builder files in the same directory, as best practice is to use separate folders for separate tasks. The filename issue was fixed a while back, but if possible, you would be better off updating PsychoPy, aternatively, try using an up to date version from the Experiment Settings.

3

Thanks for your reply, but, I am actually using v3.2.4. I took the trouble to uninstall all other versions of Psychopy (2 and 3.0.3) before installing the latest version and only then did I use Builder to write an expt. from scratch. Moreover, I first wrote something really, really simple, which did work and this has a name that I set when I uploaded it, and that did not seem to be a problem.

https://run.pavlovia.org/CullingJ/culling_noddy/html

Does all that mean that the error you suggest should not be occurring?
I have now removed the expt. I mentioned. I was hoping to have another go today (trying to keep the name the same), but from my home machine I cannot even get Psychopy to launch.

John

4

So, back at work this morning, I tried to write a completely new Builder program again and upload it using the same name. When one uploads for the first time there is an invitation to set the name (still in v3.2.4, when presumably entering any different string here will make it fail). I made sure I entered the same thing, ‘test’, and the experiment did then run, but in a rather mysterious way. It ran the old version that I had deleted, not the new one that I created today.

I will look into how to put things in different folders. I do not recall anything that asked me what folder I wanted to use/create.

John

5

Hi @CullingJ, is it the same URL? If you have updated your code, and it is not being displayed in your browser, try refreshing your browser cache, because your browser probably still has the old files stored in the cache:

6

@dvbridges I have a similar problem which updating cache doesn’t seem to solve. I updated an excel file which contains text items that are presented sequentially inside a loop.
I updated it to have another column that controls the text color for each iteration, and also changed some other things in the original column which contains the text items. In the builder it looks as expected.
When I run the experiment online this loop looks like before the change.
In the resources folder within the html folder, the file seems up to date, and I updated the browser cache and even deleted the entire history, but it didn’t solve it.
I’m attaching the xlsx file. the ‘instr’ column contains the text stimuli to be shown and color is, well, the desired color for each of the sentences.instructions_1_M.xlsx (10.3 KB)