Transport Tycoon Forums

Maybe this is the wrong forum to put this in, it's kind of borderline.

The original TTD had tutorials to show you how to build and run vehicles. Because of Patch changes, these tutorials don't work anymore.

We constantly get new players asking questions about how to do this or that, even when they previously played un-Patched TTD. It must be even worse for people who are completely new to TTD.

Apparently it is not feasible to re-code new in-game tutorials. But I wonder if someone might be able to make a tutorial of some kind using Macromedia Flash. This is useful for graphic animations, and that's what TTD is really.

Does anyone here know how to code Flash? I don't.

What about savegames? it's better than flash.
We can use an error massages to guide the new students.

second, there is noway to change the demos files?
they are .dat files.

The problem with a savegame is (1) it isn't dynamic - I mean, it can't show something being built, it can only show something already built; and (2) that it's dependent on the user's CFG settings, which may or may not be what you want.

In theory, I expect it would be possible to change the tutorials, but it would be a huge job most likely, because I don't think anybody has decompiled the format. Plus, because of the way the tutorial system works, maintenance would be a nightmare. See, all it is, is recorded mouse movements. That's why the original tutorials don't work anymore - the Patch has changed where some of the controls are, so the tutorial-mouse hits the wrong button.

Some people have partly debugged it, the problem is the windows version of TTD doesn't have the recording code, aswell it would need to be havily fixed... I think videos in compressed format are a lot better, changeing one switch in TTDPatch can change the behaviour totally, and make the tutorials aswell useless...

On the other hand, people should read the TTD manual to get the main idea...

The TTD Manual, if you mean the wiki, is a bit big and confusing. When a new beta is released, these kind of tutorials and perhaps a brief manual thing would be very handy to newcomers.

By the way, what about new tutroials?
I see that there are people which don't know how to use pre-signals,
PBS, ro-ro stations etc.
I know they can find the answers by searching, but this will be more comfortable, and they won't have to post some questions in these forums.

I see. With new tutorials they'll post here and we have to provide them with links to the tutorials. At least that saves us from explaining things over and over again...

Correctly krtaylor has touched on a issue that is growing with every wonderful improvement to TTDPatch. The Patch documentation is becoming unwieldy, we need to discuss options to make it easier to find information.
Interestingly Patchman has a full head of steam at the moment and he is staying with Alphas it appears. Consequently the Patch Docs are not being updated ever.

I mean the TTD Manual, it's not the job of the TTDPatch manual to replace the TTD Manual.

Sample: people want vehicles unload in a depot

We get people asking for such simple things like building tracks... The wiki has all alpha switches, and people like the users should help to improve it. (So we have more time doing other things, but only Patchman is really active on the Wiki)


Imho the manual http://www.ttdpatch.net/Manual/ttdpatch.html fits the main download: TTDPatch 2.0 rev1

I would like to see new Tutorials treating PTTD as if it were one game - not discriminating between original TTD stuff, and Patch features.

When I had said "new tutorials", I meant to make a new flash tutorials.
But if we are talking about the wiki, I also suggest to make a link to the wiki in the game.

On the topic of the wiki, with the 113 listed switches that are not sorted, trying to find info on a switch is damn near impossible. It should be sorted.

Thank you eis_os for vital information that Patchman is updating Wiki.

Enduring thrust of krtaylor's urging is his idea of graphical alternatives to text documentation. Consideration being given to restoring TT file recording for in-game tutorials would be great.
Makes me smile as i remember my early days playing TT, the in-game tutorials where invaluable to me.
Showing my age here.

gmyx wrote:On the topic of the wiki, with the 113 listed switches that are not sorted, trying to find info on a switch is damn near impossible. It should be sorted.

Sorted how? Alphabetically by title is pretty easy, but that's not particularly useful. Aplhabetically by switch is utterly impossible; there is one page that describes all four of planes, roadvehs, ships, and trains.

If you can come up with a decent sort order; I'll consider re-arranging things, but until then, I suggest you just use the search box.

The Index is autogenerated (and it's sorted by feature introduction time),
so new features are at the end...

Feel free to start a new wiki page with better sorting...

Guys, could you talk about new flash tutorials, please?
it's not a new wiki topic.

Is there anybody who knows how to make flash files?

Well, it doesn't have to be Flash, if someone can come up with some other way of doing animated tutorials. But for sure, the Wiki isn't going to do the job.

Although, I suppose it might be a good idea to rig it so the TTDXC links directly to the appropriate Wiki page for each of the various switches. That's a question for Andrex, though.

Maybe a relatively easy way would be to use a screen capturing program and then make movies out of someone demonstrating the feature in question.

You'd need a good codec for that, though, the usual suspects don't do very well with this kind of image. There was a possibly useful codec posted on the patch mailing list some time ago, but I don't know how well it works since I can't get it to run on Linux.

How good is support for animated PNG files these days?

I thought about a screen-capture movie, but I've never seen any kind of movie codec that was anything other than enormous.

Support for animated GIFs is excellent, but I dunno about animated PNGs. I've never seen one. I have tools to animate GIFs, but not PNGs. Do you have an animated PNG that you could post here, just so we could see who could see it and who can't?

An animated GIF that properly illustrated a feature, would be way too huge to be practical I think. Kind of like the same problem as with a movie.

The only other thing I could think of would be some hack into the multiplayer code, allowing some sort of remote control of the game engine. Sort of our own way of doing a controlled tutorial. Is this possible?

Patchman wrote:How good is support for animated PNG files these days?

Not really good (see http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/mngapps.html)

For a sample mng see http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/mngpics.html (these forums don't allow mng in attachments/img tags...)