Wishlist to make a tutorial map super effective.

A wishlist. Can do anything I need to atm, but it's not as intuitive as it could be.


1) Brush entity that changed a players class when walked through.

2) The game to be set as sp/mp, so that we can have a single player style tutorial level where you zone in rather than having to choose a spawn point. Also could allow for a great deal more detail to be added in later sections if we decided to add more advanced driving techniques or something in.

3) cvar for the time a building is "dead" but not gone.

That's all for now. As I think up things that might be nice to add to the tutorial to make it much more intuitive, I'll add them.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wq_sIYnaiU

 

metalsmith im not gena lie, im not sure how much im feeling this tutorial, takes a long time to get through without much done.

I'd prefer a quicker one in a more sandbox environment. Cause I mean think about it, what does every empires player do at some point? Start a server of their own with lotsa money and just fuck around with stuff. I'm thinking a quick strait forward begining showing you how to build and that only explosives kill buildings not bullets, maybe dropping walls or turrets or ammo boxes. Then a quick walkthrough hall of all the differnt buildings, which you can read more on or move on. But then after that player gets slain to a little black room with a powerpoint like presentation of how to choose team select spawn point and spawn at a separate piece of map. There will only be one spawn selection possible and it will be in a little sandbox area with 2 bases, mini canyon or crossroads style. The player can ran around and do whatever, have little signs or lost coast commentary models everywhere describing things and their uses. So it would at the end be like create a server with all the shit already built and an enemy base/comm for them to kill. Prolly make a bunch of vehicle spawners for each vehicle type for them to play around with as well lest the vehicle creation menu be too difficult.

No reason we cant do this with the tools at hand, one thing might need help on is forcing the player to spawn at the beginning(no weapons or anything).

anyway heres a quick and uncomplete little concept I've doodled up so far.



I dont think we want to go into everything in a tutorial, squads, points, vehicle creation menu. not really things I want to address in a quick tutorial. With the sandbox they can figure out how to do that shit if they want to, by experimentation or by reading our signs. But all in all a quick player that knows what he's doing should be able to run through this in like 3 min if he wants to. Leave options and descriptions around if someone really wants to know wtf a radar does, but make it an explore at your choice kind of thing.

Its all rather simple in general to make, just alot of talking into a mic and sections of text descriptions. Only part im not sure about needing support on is the beginning force spawn, past that even if the player killed themselves they could just spawn in the sandbox area. Hell vets might even play this just to use the prebuilt sandbox area to test shit, load map kill self spawn in sandbox kinda thing.

 

Your tutorial looks pretty sweet right now, but maybe I'd nix the first elevator ride down, or speed it waaaay up. No one wants to be just sitting in a box for 2 minutes for no reason.

 

What manbeef said.

I'm actually quite startled at some of the architechture you used - it's things that we never see in-game and are actually quite interesting. It seems a lot like the hl2 1 course, which is cool.

Keef has a point but there's been a structure around for these maps for ages...my viewpoint is maybe you should just do what you want, while you want to do it, instead of waiting and designing a bunch of things that you won't complete. No offense, but it's just that these things usually stall halfway through...

 

Hey that was great, except the first elevator... omg just kill me and let me spawn there faster. Ya, speed it up by a factor of 4 plez.

While your asking for things, for the brush entity that changes class, you should also be able to choose there skills and load out.

 

I'm pretty sure the lift at the start is that slow because there is going to be an introduction playing...

 

A note: the architecture is all blight's doing so far. He made the initial map, but most of the logic was missing for the engineering section, so I made several edits to complete the existing pieces. This is just to show the first section as it will be.


The lift is horribly slow for there being nothing else, but if you've ever played Halo2, there is a sequence just like it at the beginning where everything is being explained as well.

Also, the level already has the first area of crossroads in it. I simply edited out spawning in that section to limit the size of the file. It was 12 gigs uncompressed. 20 gigs before I reduced the screen size to 1280x720 from 1440x900 :D.


One other thing. That video quality sucked. Does anyone have a really good program for making this video an mp4? Virtualdub keeps making it with only sound

 

I use both Virtualdub and Super I switch between them. When one won't convert something I want, the other generally will.

 

Just use a flag brush with a emp_infantry restricts blocking every non-X class? No need for additional entities, just use some work arounds.

 

that would only make it frustrating for a player who doesn't catch on at first I think.

Possibly make the door only let engineers through and make the whole hallways a cap point, but that might also be confusing.


By the way, I'm going to use an env_soundscape at the start of the level and set it to random. The file will repeat itself every 5 seconds or so when you join the server, telling you that you can either go through the in depth tutorial as BE or skip straight to the sandbox style as NF.

That should be a good work around, and we can just add a section to the NF area that has BE vehicles for grens and roffles to kill. Possibly force the server to spawn a couple of bots to run around aimlessly :D.

Script for the intro so far:

I'm going ahead and using audacity to make filler sound clips and placing them in the map for now. This file will play the moment you begin the map, while still looking at the MOTD. If anyone has a better script, please share it :D

 

this map will represent empiresmod for 50% of the new players

do you want some shitty workaround to make our first impression?

imagine google wanting to hire you, and you are invited to there office at an adress close to you

when you arrive on the adress you notice the google office is made of cardboard, and instead of an elevator there is a ladder in the elevator shaft

 

Better to have a decent tutorial than nothing at all. And this is a mod, not google.

 

lmao....

 

exactly, hence why his requests as they keep reasonable and he keeps preforming his job should be met

 

Is there even a reason to change classes? Wouldn't it be easier to just change their weapons?

 

I dunno if it's possible to force a player to equip weapons / skills without having be apart of that assigned class. I would prefer if you could just trigger a switch that would change the class with certain weapons and skills selected.

Which reminds me, would probably be a good idea for the map to start the player off at the rank of "Captain". I'm sure there is a rank of captain, though I don't remember what rank it is specifically. That way we can use that as a way to refer to the player during the tutorial. Make it a refresher course in a building, while starting off in a sandbox area like keef suggested.

at any rate, keep me posted on the lua.



heres a link to the current files:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10061381/emp_tutorial.rar

My thoughts so far:

Not included in any of this is the fact that there is a section of the map from crossroads that is hacked off at the edge of the area of each first base in there to give the player a sandbox to mess around with dropping com buildings and refineries and researching and such.

 

I think you guys are missing the point. a tutorial map is an introduction to empires, as well as the mechanics of the game. There is nothing wrong with a 2 minute elevator ride, *as long as atmosphere is included*.

The great thing about every game that has ever been made, is the atmosphere of the opening sequence. Portal is a good example, but the best is also the most relevant: Half Life. The elevator ride was long, enclosed, and had nothing for the player to *do*, yet none of that mattered in the slightest.

This is something I'd like the storyline forum to get into. We can make the ride as long or as short as we want. We can have shuttles fly in, tanks rolling around, or infantry bots shooting at targets. This isn't unrealistic and doesn't take much time or thought, all it needs is a voice over, and for that we need an atmospheric script. I see the tutorial map, the architecture, and see something that has a huge immersion quality to it. It's perfect for the first 15 minutes a player will spend in the game, to get them pumped for their first game in a real server.

 

I honestly disagree there. It will be hard enough to actually make people do the tutorial, but making it long will encourage them to quit it. Hell, the Smashball tutorial was far too long, and that was actually useful to some extent.