Ok, first the good news:

With v13 you can now add as many highlight boxes as you like to a simulation slide. Instruction boxes have improved text formatting and I would say it's better than CpC. Both types of boxes can be placed anywhere on a simulation slide. Note that they can't be added to content slides or question slides. Under shape appearance you can select different geometry (shape) options and we are no longer limited to a basic rectangle.

Highlight and instruction boxes can have animations applied for entrance, emphasis and exit, similar to CpC.

Highlight boxes double as the new replacement for CpC image objects. Under appearance, you can select the fill of a highlight box to be an image. Somewhat convoluted and unintuitive. If you are used to using image objects to 'patch' an area of a slide background in CpC, it will be frustrating in Cp13 to align pixels as there is no option to nudge in pixel increments using the keyboard.

The bad news:

Unfortunately, the geometry options are very limited – rectangle, ellipse, balloon with pointer, (thought) cloud for instruction boxes. The balloon geometry option is a small step in the right direction, but it doesn't present a sentence of text well and looks amateurish and PowerPoint-like. It would be better to have a rounded rectangle with a leader/pointer. See attached examples.

My request below in August 24 to make the shapes editable (at least like the Edit Points option in CpC) and to have the ability to import a common shape file format – say, I dunno, maybe Adobe Illustrator – are still a distant dream.

For reasons only known to the Adobe Captivate team, you can't copy an instruction box or a highlight box and paste a duplicate on the slide – or any other slide for that matter. You are required to create a new instruction/highlight box, copy the appearance of the one you want to duplicate then apply the appearance to the new one. Besides the obvious omission of Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V, I would like to see alt+click & drag added – a common shortcut for copying objects found in other Adobe apps.

If you want to align multiple instruction/highlight boxes vertically or horizontally as you can in CpC you will have to eyeball it – with your mouse. You can't nudge these boxes in any direction by small increments like you can with arrow keys in CpC. And, you can't select multiple boxes at the same time and move them with the mouse – it's one box at a time.

Happy New Year.
Seriously, though. Where are we at with this. Nearly 3 years for implementing this is just silly, unless implementation wasn't actually started and this ticket was just marked that way so we would shut up about it.
Well, I won't.

This is soooo so basic...it boggles the mind why "the latest and greatest" version would be released without this capability???

I also am hanging onto CpC 11.8 until this change is made. Please provide an update on when this will be included.

Drew commented in March; it's nearly December. Care to share any progress? "We're struggling with implementing this feature" should suffice.

Bump. How's progress on this Adobe? Implementation supposedly started in July 2023. This is now the final feature holding us back from moving to Cp12 (we are still on CpC 11.8)

A couple of refinements to this request:
1. Please allow the shapes to be editable.
2. Use a file format for shapes that allows users to define their own shapes.
3. Allow the objects (images & shapes) to be placed anywhere on the canvas, not restricted to a layout block.

I also need the ability to add more than one click box and more than one highlight to a slide.

This would be super important to have this option in the new Adobe Captivate, I've always used my own shapes and boxes to help identify key areas and for visual help in software simulations. Would love to see this in the new version as well.