User instructions
1. Download this AI
2. Go to AI settings and put this AI in the first AI slot.
3. Change AI start delay to 1 day
4. Start a new game
5. When this AI starts, it will print a message using signs at the center of the map (starting location)
6. If you have any suggestions, please post them here
AI - User interaction
My idea is that the AI will print text-messages to the user and wait for the user to carry out some action to tell the AI that it can progress to the next step. My first solution on this is to:
- Display messages as signs
- Also print the messages to the AI debug window and tell newbies about this in the introduction
- Print button-signs that are clicked by removing them
- Have an optional section (marked as "fairly advanced") in the introduction that explains how to cheat to the AI company and use CTRL+Click to remove signs)
- Include a message about the existence of the sign list so that they can find the message signs if they get lost
Currently spaces are added at the end of all lines to fill up all chars. This should give good left aligned text if a user have a fixed-width font for signs. However that's not the case for the default fonts in OpenTTD so I wonder if this really is of any benefit or if it would be better to keep all lines centered.
That said, I do realize that the capabilities in OpenTTD to rely longer texts is fairly limited compared to the wiki, thus the main focus has to be on showing users step-by-step rather than giving them long text messages to read.
Tutorial chapters
Currently I've just taken the same chapters as the Wiki article, For this my plan is to copy/reuse as much code as possible from existent AIs with compatible license (GPL2).
1. Introduction
2. Bus Service
3. Train Service [not done]
4. Train Service [not done]
5. Conclusion [not done]
An initial implementation of the bus chapter has been included in version 2 of Tutorial AI. Some texts has been written for the Introduction. But apart from that the remaining chapters yet has to be written. If anyone is interested in contributing chapters that would be more than welcome. If anyone want to write a chapter of them own, each chapter has its own directory and can live fairly separated from everything else. (except for sharing the same global scope with the rest of the AI)
The text strings in the initial version of the Tutorial AI has only been quickly written and checked by the spellchecker in GVIM, so there are surely room for improvements in wordings and selection of what to include and not include in the strings. If anyone see any text improvements text change suggestions are welcome.
Download
An initial version can be downloaded here. Depends on SuperLib 9. License is GPL v2. Development
http://dev.openttdcoop.org/projects/tutorial-ai (including hg repository)
Screenshot