A couple of versions ago Empires had this nice little feature: It was originally a feature of Krenzo's Smashball game and courtesy of him we got the code to include them in Empires too. Basically it was a little text box that appeared whenever you entered the vehicle factory, the armory, the barracks, etc. It explained what building you were in and what you had to do spawn a new vehicle, etc. More pictures can be found in this thread: http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=11007 [YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/K_zV0Yn0jD8?t=95s[/YOUTUBE] I could not find any videos of it, but here you can see the version Smashball had: The big advantage of this feature is that it explains stuff to new players while they are playing. I don't have exact statistics but you can be assured that about 8 out of 10 new players will never read the manual, watch videos or do tutorial maps. Yet Empires gameplay depends on players that atleast somewhat know what they are doing. I always found this the best way to provide a little assitance for new players. Of course there was an option in the menu to disable them, for the more experienced players. The pop-up helpers were removed because they caused memory leaks and were scheduled to reappear with the new GUI. So I respectfully suggest this as a worthwhile task for our new dev generation.
I'd reuse the L4D game instructor functionality for this: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Adding_the_Game_Instructor:es
I wondered why I wasn't getting these popups anymore, I assumed I'd simply disabled them. I'll look into why they either aren't working or why they might have been removed.
They were removed because they were leaking several megabytes of memory per minute. MOOtant ripped it out one day.
Related commits in the orange-box repo: 10/18/2010 db2246d Disabled building hints until they're moved to building KV. 1/24/2011 fd067d9f Moved hints to building script.
