New Tutorial

[UngeheuerLich]

hi,

first i want to say sorry...

...but the new tutorial doesnt work if you just don´t do what told...

e.g.:
-just don´t recruit straight away in part one and it tells you to use your imaginary elves

-dismiss the unit you have to recruit on part 2 and its already over because you can´t do anything...

[Maeglin Dubh]

Those are both very stupid things to do, and if you do them both, you are stupid.

The idea of the scenario is to do exactly what you're told. If you don't do that, you fail the mission. Fairly simple, and not, IMO, broken.

[Woodwizzle]

Those are both very stupid things to do, and if you do them both, you are stupid.

The idea of the scenario is to do exactly what you're told. If you don't do that, you fail the mission. Fairly simple, and not, IMO, broken.

The point of the tutorial is to teach. A tutorial shouldn't break when you do the wrong thing. It should tell you what you are doing wrong and wait for you to do the correct action before advancing.

[scott]

Those are both very stupid things to do, and if you do them both, you are stupid.

The idea of the scenario is to do exactly what you're told. If you don't do that, you fail the mission. Fairly simple, and not, IMO, broken.

No, no, no . A user can validly decide to try different things before getting around to the task at hand. Remember that annoying guy who kept going on and on about The South Guard? Well, the tutorial actually is the right place for that kind of behavior. The old tutorial did an excellent job at tracking what you were doing. The tutorial should be robust.

This is a work in progress, and rusty knows about it. In fact, yours truly got Konrad stranded off the castle somewhere where it took multiple turns to get back, and each turn dug him further into the hole of being behind. Although it tells you to hit 'u' to undo, it's possible to forget what to press and key in on the end turn button. Making the tutorial smart enough to handle a rogue user is just good business.

[rusty]

Those are both very stupid things to do, and if you do them both, you are stupid.

The idea of the scenario is to do exactly what you're told. If you don't do that, you fail the mission. Fairly simple, and not, IMO, broken.

The point of the tutorial is to teach. A tutorial shouldn't break when you do the wrong thing. It should tell you what you are doing wrong and wait for you to do the correct action before advancing.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, there are almost an infinite number of ways to mess up, and handling them all is not feasible 8( So I handled some of them, and wait to find out what people actually have problems with before fixing the rest.

There are several "TODOs" for the tutorial, and handling wrong recruits is now one of them: thanks for the bug report!

Rusty.

[Maeglin Dubh]

It doesn't make sense to account for people doing things directly against the instructions given... Mistakes, yes, but when it says Recruit This and You Don't, you fail the scenario.... Or should.

[Skippy]

It doesn't make sense to account for people doing things directly against the instructions given... Mistakes, yes, but when it says Recruit This and You Don't, you fail the scenario.... Or should.

Consider, for example, the case of someone who doesn't know how to recruit units - just the kind of player who will be playing the tutorial. Consider also, that they find the given instructions confusing and fail to recruit units. Your scheme seems more like a driving test than a driving lesson.

At any rate, rusty obviously gets it and I appreciate his efforts in this direction.

[Rhuvaen]

I tested the new tutorial (not because I needed one but because I found Mallor's comments about a tutorial quite valid, although wrongly applied to campaigns) and must say that it flows quite naturally and seems pretty robust to me!

The dialogue helps with letting the player learn from his experience - for instance by telling them the effects of their attacks or warning them about units that are very low on hp - after they made their own decisions. In the second scenario it even teaches the inevitability (at least for the normal player) of losing units!

There were one or two instances where the dialogue was not appropriate and even misleading. The first being in the second scenario when I captured the village on the left side of the bridge north of the river. The dialogue seemed to indicate that the enemy captured that village. The second I don't quite remember...
EDIT: remembered now - in the second scenario I recruited again on my own initiative when I had enough gold, and then one turn later (when at zero gold), I was told to recruit because I had enough gold .

Really good work, this! I think it's important that the second part feels like a real scenario, and gives the player an idea how to look at the overall situation and to decide where to fight etc.

[UngeheuerLich]

I didn´t really want to discredit the tutorial...
i just wanted to help improving it... ithought its under development and feedback is needed... i don´t deserve beeing flamed, and the developers don´t need only "fine, fine, good" although there are some flaws. They know, that they did a good job, when someone is interested in what they are doing (like me)... at least i think so...

also, i remember on the first page, there is said, that there are some new and wonderful bugs to be found by the community

I just wanted to report, that there are some opportunities, where you can ignore what told and you get impossible orders (like recruiting a dismissed unit... and you can´t recruit another one instead)...

so, my last word:
thanks for making wesnoth, good job...

[Maeglin Dubh]

Not flaming anyone...
It just sounded to me like you -tried- to break it, and it didn't make any sense to change it. If we can make a more user friendly version, that's always wonderful. Sounds to me like that's exactly what people are working on... I only know that of all the people I've introduced to the game, the only trouble they ever had was defeating Delfador.

I suppose this sets a precedent of -wanting- people to find little holes in scenarios? Nothing wrong with that... But is that something we want to do? This was actually a good suggestion, looking back on what's come from it, but they won't all be this useful.

[xtifr]

I suppose this sets a precedent of -wanting- people to find little holes in scenarios? Nothing wrong with that... But is that something we want to do?

I certainly think so. This is called QA work, and it's ugly and tedious, and anyone who really wants to take a stab at it should be encouraged, not flamed. Especially with Free/Libre/Open Source, people should, IMO, always be encouraged to look for problems and to report problems. Because too many people stumble across problems and end up just giving up on the software completely. Any problems, even obscure problems, that can be found and fixed with a reasonable amount of effort should be found and fixed. That's what makes, e.g., Linux so much better overall than Windows.

And yes, you were flaming.

...if you do them both, you are stupid.

That is flaming.

As far as whether "we" really want to encourage this sort of thing, well, I can't speak for Dave or the dev team, but speaking as someone who has been programming professionally for nearly as long as Dave has been alive, I love it when I can get this kind of detailed feedback! It's usually all-too-hard to get users to provide any sort of useful feedback at all. Sometimes, yes, the problems may not be worth fixing, but unless you know the problems exist, you can't make an intelligent decision about whether they should be fixed or not!

It may even be the case that "if you do them both, you are stupid," but even so, the scenario should respond better/more intelligently than it does. If a user does something stupid, you're supposed to detect it and tell him. Especially in a tutorial, where the user may be confused and floundering. Woodwizzle's comment was 100% on-target. Leaving the user stuck in a position that makes no sense just increases the chance that your software will soon be deleted and discarded.

[Oliphant]

I used to play a FPS that had a tutorial with friendly units in it. You were supposed to shoot at targets they had lined up but I figured what the heck? it's just training... So I trained my sniper rifle on a (friendly) guard in a tower about a half mile away... Alarms sounded, in about a minute there were black helicopters with machine guns coming after me, troops on the ground not long after that.

Just to say, I kind of liked the attention to detail. They really did think of everything.

[joshudson]

Since the excellent introduction to FoW was removed from HttT, I felt like having a try at a third tutorial scenario that explains FoW & Shroud.
Anybody like the idea?