Transport Tycoon Forums

I have spent hours searching this site and the other sites that have info and things about TTD & OTTD and found nothing, i am going to try and create video tutorials for OTTD. I know that we cannot create tutorials with the OTTD itself.. so please tell me some things i can put in these tutorials thanks
Hopefully it will help those people that havent played TTD b4 and maybe help improve people that have played TTD before but never got the idea of it

Thanks for any Suggestions

Birdey

Video-recording could be done with FRAPS. However, it would drain poor megabytes. I think screenshots or in-game demo would be much better. Voted "yes".

I was thinking about a in-game tutorial but after searching the forums, found out the you cant as the new programing wont allow it and also they wont put it in because they are too busy with the new map array, also i have tried to use other peoples tutorials but with different things, eg java but the screenshots dont seem to show to viewer exacty what to do, i also have a file server so am not too worried about the mbs, thanks for the interest...

Birdey

If someone would put the effort in to making a video/demo tutorial, put it ingame.

If someone wants to do a video-tutorial, let him/her do that. This is after all a community project. However it might not be included in the official bundle just becuse somebody does them..

I know many people do not have >=10Mbit yet. But as long as somebody are willing to host a few of them it should not be a big problem. (EDIT: offcores it will be a problem for them on slow connectinos to download them, but as long as they are hosted, a few days of download should get them down at even their computers.)

Also if you dont want to make pure video records, there are programs that can create flash-records that only store what hapens, not every frame. (None of them that I have tried work on Linux.)


If we hapen to sit here with loads of nice movies.. somewone surely will write a patch to display the videos in game. But until then its kinda meaningless to write that patch.

Thanks for the advice, i wasn't expeciting them to be published with the bundle as the bundle would be almost impossiable to download, i will look in to the flash records and see if it will help me, again thanks for the advise...

Birdey

zuu wrote:However it might not be included in the official bundle just becuse somebody does them..

Thanks for the info, it is not in the least bit not obvious. [a little sarcasm don't
hurt no one]

Personaly I would like it if it were more like a script you load into ottd (?) that
simply plays the game and some messages to the player. And I personally
would not recomand anyone to do a video tutorial in any media format for
ottd.

making the game do a demo is possable, it just currently doesn't work because too many things have changed since the demo was implemented (In TTD DOS) with a constatly changing game like OTTD, tutorials would be pretty hard to do to keep working...

If a script said: "build rail on X drag to Y place station etc etc.." Would it
break any time someone edited the code?

I am no programmer so maybe it is impossible. But wasting my time on
making an avi that would be like 28 MB big does not sound too tempting.

That says more about the AVI format than anything else. Flash is probably going to be the best format to use for a stand alone demo.

Brianetta wrote:That says more about the AVI format than anything else. Flash is probably going to be the best format to use for a stand alone demo.

Yes flash, is good. In a way..

In what way would you go to do a tutorial in flash then?
Is it possible to make it ridiculous small as say an all vector swf?

Pilatus wrote:If a script said: "build rail on X drag to Y place station etc etc.." Would it
break any time someone edited the code?

I am no programmer so maybe it is impossible. But wasting my time on
making an avi that would be like 28 MB big does not sound too tempting.

Ill look into doing an interactive tutorail like that for each of the different aspects of OpenTTD. Cant be too hard to program... If i knew more about C (Im proficient with Qbasic so it wont be hard

Ive tried recording a few clips that play just like the tutorial demos in TTD. Its just not possible to do a videoclip, even a 1 minute presignal clip takes up 8MB for a reasonable resolution or 1.5MB for the Highest compression. While its 1.5MB its impossible to see whats happening.

I have also tried video but the size of them is too large to download, or even upload... i have also tried flash, but it seems too choppy for my liking, also the sizes of them get tooo big also, so i am also learning c++ thorugh tutorials and hopefully to learn it before the new 5.0.1 version..

Birdey

I wish you good luck! I really hope that you can manage it (both).

Birdey wrote:..., so i am also learning c++ thorugh tutorials and hopefully to learn it before the new 5.0.1 version..

Birdey

Hopefully you will, we have still 0.4.1 until 5.0.1 its a long way... will there ever be a 5th version??

0.4.5 is next

we talked about this more than once and it should be added, but nobody have made it yet. If I remember correctly, the idea is to make a savegame (good way to ensure that it's the same map each time) and then save each command executed. This way the game will be the same each time and can be played as a video. I think somebody managed to get it to save each command, but I'm not sure

the next step would then be to save UI data with the commands. This might be done by saving input like commands. Commands like click left mouse button, release left mouse button, move mouse x,y.....

If those two functions are implemented, it should be possible to start to make tutorials, that are small enough to add to releases

another nice touch would be to add the option to add signs to tell what is going on


Needless to say, I don't think I would actually use a tutorial myself

Would it be possible to do it in C, hijacking the mouse input functions, not sure that it'd be easy though.

Yes, it would be possible. And not to hard either. The problem would be to make the code look nice. And to handle different resolutions. Or maybe thats not to hard? Now I have to check this out

dont use resolutions, use percentages instead, should handle resizing ok