Tutorials will be mission-like. Currently BO tutorials are under development.
They will have their own tab in the client. Some UI design is needed.
Tutorials introducing players to the FA.
Basically they are tests of your eco balance skills for new players:
The real question is how much new players would be interested. It is less intimidating than playing vs trainers etc since some people seem to prefer to improve a bit before consulting trainers. The next would be getting high level players to try them on a defined map so that you can produce challenging times.
Tutorials showing map specific build orders to the players. Build order will be 5-10 minutes, just to know what to build at the beginning since everything else will rely on what the opponent is doing anyway.
Keep the builds simple! The goal is to give a clear guideline to new players. Standard could be 3 factories with acu and then walk. Special builds like the loki treegroup-reclaim build can be done in an advanced version.Example
Content:
This set of tutorials will be an introduction to the 1v1 (for now) games. It’s expected that the players already know the very basics of the game.
Maps should be newbie-friendly.
Preferably this maps should be for newbie ladder, so when a new player would search ladder, he would be getting only these maps that we have tutorials for. Should be around 10 maps.
To-do:
In Process:
Done:
Some nice UI with all available tutorials, split into categories. Currently there are only basic Build Order tutorials but the plan is to have all types of those.
There will be need for some text with basic information, what the tutorials are about. What they do and what not.
Description of the map and map preview would be nice as well.
Some of the tutorials might be just a text in the client since not everything requires launching the game. Right know I don’t know what’s the best approach for these so feel free to suggest that. If wiki is the way to go or w/e.
Tutorials can be launched directly using command line arguments.
What’s needed:
/init init_tutorials.lua /map MapName
No clan, number of games or rating is required. BUT saving the game.log in case something goes wrong.
The map name is the folder name of the map in the featured mod.
Server Requirements
tutorials.tut with that there’s also a custom init file for them init_tutorials.lua All map tutorials are directly inside the mod. Since there won’t be replays, there’s no need to version all maps, but just the mod.Since the game does not care where the map files are as long as they are properly linked in scenario.lua the mod doesn’t contain vanilla map files (.scmap). Question is if you can make it to download specific map from the vault when player tries to launch a tutorial on that map. This would reduce the side of the mod a lot as the scmap file is the 90% data of the map.
Sure, the above is already being done for coop in the Python client, as long as the maps are in the map vault. -mazornoob
Additional files for voices and videos will have to be downloaded as well. The mod will have 2 sound files for common VOs and videos or each of the VO (packed in file FAF_TUT_Common_VO.nx2, or any expansion that is needed). And then the same for each specific map (example FAF_TUT_Theta_BO_VO.nx2).
I think the best would be to always pack all voices and videos for one map together and download it if player tries to launch it. The client should be able to unpack the videos from that (right duke?)
Afaik it is possible to make the updater pick only some files and folders from the git repository and pack them. Currently the voices and videos are not in the repo but I can add them later if needed.
So to sum it up: when player tries to launch one tutorials it will download the custom init file, the packed mod tutorials.tut, packed common voices and videos for the tutorials and packed voices and videos specific for that map. (and the required map from the vault)
Init file should not require changes once it’s placed. But checking it for changes can’t hurt.
Version of the mod will be specified in mod_info.lua, updating the mod will update all the maps as well.
Updating VOs.
All tutorials are planned to be translated into all languages that FA currently supports.
You can keep an eye of these files and translate all strings in them. That means everything after = between “ “ symbols.
https://github.com/speed2CZ/faf-tutorials/tree/master/mods/tutorials/hook/loc
