Roujin wrote:General suggestions:
1) Can you make the window pop up somewhere else than in the middle of the screen? It's obstructive there and it's irritating that you can move it somewhere else, but then once you click continue it will be in the center again. So I suggest to either remember where the previous window was, or at least display it somewhere in the top left. If neither is currently possible I would like to make a feature request to the OpenTTD devs to enable one of these two things.
I can't control where the window is opened nor can I move windows. So you'll need to poke the OpenTTD devs or write a patch for OpenTTD first.
Your point is valid though, I too find that the message window tend to overlap the aircraft construction window unless maximize OpenTTD over my entire screen.
Roujin wrote:2) General movement is never explained, e.g. how to move the window (right click and drag mouse, or use arrow keys). I know there are alternative movement schemes, but I'd say we can assume standard settings here.
I'd make a new chapter about this and show it before all others.
Things that could be shown in such a chapter:
- Moving the viewport
- Zooming out/in
- Using the map
- Using the town list to locate a specific town (conveniently, this could be the first town you use in the following chapter)
- But don't add any more / too much, to not make it boring before the "real" stuff starts.
In the following chapters you could then let the user navigate by himself more often. It's less disorienting than just jumping to the towns without warning. And if you must jump, tell the user beforehand: "Click continue to jump to XYZville".
I think the reason why I used jumps is that it simplifies the tutorial. But you are right that it might be disorienting and confusing. Your suggestion could be included in the intro chapter that is very short at the moment. Though, *someone* have to write a chapter plan for that.
In case anyone want to make a try, please get the current
chapter_plan.txt document and use that as a starting point. (mind that the aircraft chapter is not up to date, as I haven't updated the plan document with the minor tweaks that happened during the implementation)
Roujin wrote:3) Give a choice at the beginning which "chapter" to jump to instead of just displaying the chapters and then playing them in order.
You could write that it's recommended to do them in the given order, but if someone wants to learn about a specific thing, they can then do so.
That's something I had in my mind to add. Not to mention that I will have use for it when testing.
Roujin wrote:Comments about the Airport tutorial:
1) For the order to the second airport, the tutorial mentions that you should not click on the hangar tile. It should explain that for the first order instead.
That was fixed for version 5, but I accidentally overwrote that fix when I added the changes that Pingaware had made without realizing that I had made changes to english.txt. In version 6 there is a note also for the first airport. It might be too much to have it also for the second airport, I don't know.
Roujin wrote:2) When the user is prompted to look at the station details, he is likely to click on the 2nd airport, which the plane has not yet visited at that time (except the user is suuuuuuuuuuper slow
). Per default settings (IIRC) there will be NO pax/mail piling up and no rating before the plane arrives there. This should be mentioned in the tutorial, or new users might be confused ("WHERE are the waiting passengers, WHERE is the rating? Am I looking in the wrong place?").
Good point. Can you add this Pingaware?
Roujin wrote:3) In the step "We are going to try to build an airport near this town. Please click on the highlighted buttons, starting on the main toolbar.", it only starts to blink once you've pressed "continue", which is inconsistent to other steps. Also, if you already click on the aircraft button before clicking continue (let's assume someone plays this who already knows where the airport button is), the tutorial gets broken. It will highlight the airport button once you click continue, but if you click the airport button then, the tutorial does not go on.
Thanks for spotting this. I'll make it so it start flashing before the window is opened.