Transport Tycoon Forums

Yes, otherwise it would be A LOT bigger it does so... (Commercial App) But I am not very satisfied with the result yet.

I just found this: vnc2swf. It uses VNC to capture a desktop/screen/window and records everything that happens in it, then converts it to a flash movie.

The demo seems promising, and depending on how fast it is (or the computer it's running on) it may well be capable of making useful tutorials.

Anyone care to try it?

I have tried using a VNC client to control TTD from another computer. Not having color settings correctly set for this, or having some other problem, I could not successfully do it (The colors were wonky on the controlling PC, probably because I wasn't in 256 color mode). I think I will try that this weekend, and see what I come up with.

nMacro Recorder - Screen recorder program

If I may make a suggestion... nMacro Recorder is a program I found on a magazine coverdisc once, and it seems to work well making tutorials. It works by recording mouse and keyboard actions, just like the original TT Tutorials.

If you download 'tutorial1.zip' and place the EXE file in your TTD directory, hopefully it should demonstrate an aircraft tutorial when run! The only problems are that you need the windows TTDPatch running at 640x480 with the Planeset. (I think that's all, anyway!) This is only a first try, I can do more if you want. Or, you could find and download nMacro Recorder yourself!

Actually a macro recorder won't work, TTD uses one already and it fails.
I know how to write tutorials for the ingame macro player btw. but it won't work as I said earlier ... I wonder if the vnc2swf is any better in compressing then my test gif...

But surely if you record a new macro that fixes the things that were wrong with the old ones - clicking in the wrong place etc. it will work?

I think the argument against these marco things was that some patch switches change the position of stuff or summat, so they wouldn't do....

But then the next time the patch changes, it'll fail again. Or if someone has different .cfg settings.

nMacro Recorder enables you to run a program when the EXE is started, if you were doing tutorials for things that didn't require the patch, then you could get it to run a script that disabled everything in ttdpatch.cfg except the essentials and then run it. That way, you could ensure that everyone got the same tutorial! (theoretically)

Wait!:shock::o I've just remembered that I've got a demo of a commercial app that recorded screen movements into a Flash movie and could add balloons explaining what to do! The only downside is, because it's a demo version, it adds a watermark in the corner. Now if I could only remember it's name and where it is...

EDIT: It's called 'Demo Builder' from www.demo-builder.com. There's also a free one I found called Wink. I'll try them both!

If you switch all functions off in TTDPatch (except win2k) and reset the news settings (an error of plain TTD) to default the ingame macros work.

But what is not understandable on a macro recorder won't work. We need video capture system who will create highly optimized end products.
(As I said, I produced already an highly optimized gif animation, but the result size after the compression was simple to big)

Here is the sample presentation from Demo Builder. Unfortunately, it's stuck a whopping great watermark in the middle of the screen, so it doesn't look very good...

I'm going to try Wink now.

Why not create a custom scenario, with say four maps and a few industries. then use something like http://camstudio.org/ to record what goes on, with captions explaining what is happening. Create an account on youtube or something, then have a link from the Wiki to the videos. There would also need to be a link ingame to the Wiki.

EDIT
I ahve tested with camstudio, (which is free to use, by the way) and it allows balloons/ boxes to be added, as well as converting the AVI recorded video to SWF, so this seems to be quite the tool!

right, i should shortly have my first tutorial on youtube, under the user OpenTTD Tutor. Hopefully they will be of good quality and not too laggy! please let me know what you think!

A 5 year bump for an OpenTTD tutorial?

While I commend your effort, it would most likely have been better placed in the OpenTTD section...

As for the tutorial itself, it doesn't really appear to show much (it's a very basic setup).
The original TTD tutorials go into more detail (perhaps some annotation would be a good idea) and show you how to use signals/a multi-train setup.