What am I talking about? Tutorials, of course. For everyone who hasn't completed them yet, they're the first menu item in the 'Play Game' menu, once they're completed, the menu item wanders down. Yeah, I said they wouldn't be feasible because the infrastructure isn't there, but if you don't mind hardcoding the missing bits instead of making them data driven, that's not too much of a problem. A few hooks in gGame.cpp are all that is required, all the ugliness hides in gTutorial.cpp. And it isn't too bad. Most things can simply be covered by setting up a regular game with custom parameters and calling it complete once the human player wins.
What's there:
1. Navigation. Get to the winzone!
2. Survival. Don't crash into your own wall for a bit.
3. Grinding. Grind the AI to get a minimum speed (I'll probably change that one to "Use your speed advantage to get to the winzone first", it's not really satisfying right now how the tutorial ends when you hit the target speed, but a good test for the custom win condition hook)
4. Test. The old first start tutorial. Is there as a test for the basic code, mostly, it will probably be reworked or thrown out.
Planned:
The AIs already have the capacity to follow given paths, I had almost forgotten that. It *should* be possible to use this for the obvious
5. Conquest. Conquer the fortress zone defended by the endlessly circling AI leaving a reasonably sized gap.
6. Team startup. Learn to collectively grind for speed. Here, a custom fail condition is needed, your teammates must not die.
Also:
7. Just a wall of text introducing the players to some of the play cultures they will encounter online.
NOT PLANNED: Digging, double binding, color chat, color overflow bug. Only digging would be possible to do at all in this form anyway.
Any other ideas? There are no limits to success and failure conditions, but what is actually happening must be something you can set up for yourself with the right map and settings and possibly the AIs following strict paths, or strict paths until they hit an obstacle. Fortress Defense and Sumo are out, basically.
Oh, also, there are introduction animations! Yay. They're in a really basic format, showing individual .pngs in a specified order for a specified time, and limited alpha test based animation. Basically, the alpha test threshold is moved down from 1 to 0, revealing more and more parts of a partly transparent image. That's how the 'check' and 'fail' effects are done. In theory, this could be used for smooth cycle movement animations, but I couldn't find out how to properly set up the alpha channel in gimp. If I do, they'll get better. I wouldn't object if one of you wants to do the work, either
And most importantly, what you can do is try to break the tutorials. They're obviously not cheat-proof and not meant to be; you can just edit your user*.cfg and mark them as completed, for starters, or bring up a console while you play them to spawn you an instant giant winzone. But what they should be is accident proof. Anything the player does outside of the tutorial in good faith in the menus should not break them. What's not working right now, for example, is if the player activates spectator mode before going in. Or splitscreen. Those are things that simply need to be overridden. If you find other menu settings that break stuff, do tell. When testing, remember that for the full first time user experience, you need to move your user*.cfg out of the way; only then you'll get the 'how to turn' tooltips, for example.
