Tutorials

Tutorial Screen

So my update schedule is going to be a little hit and miss as personal things are popping up in the way. Nothing bad, and I'm still working away. The good news is I have an idea of the seven tutorials that are going in. I'm going to be writing a supplemental tutorial editor for myself, just to make editing the timelines a little easier. Also, I have been looking at some new themes for the game proper. Nothing concrete yet, but I'm starting to narrow down what I want the true "Default" theme to look like. It's a little more blue and white with grey and a slight cartoony touch, but the "Classic" mode will still be there too.

 As for right now, there is a lot to back-end and co-opt the old help system, but this is the last functional feature I'm adding that I know of, unless I forgot anything.

Manual is Complete For Now.

New on the left, old on the right.

First pass of the manual is complete. All the graphics and callouts are in there. I did a quick review and saw it's not 100%, but it's in a self-contained format that can be edited and exported to PDF. I'm thinking about actually releasing the manual as a kind of promotion for the game, but I'm not sure I'm going to call that yet.

There are some subtle differences between the versions. In a perfect world I would of set up headings and other auto-format items, but as the original documentation was already formatted, I didn't bother. However, the headers are what's used for the auto table of contents and linking system. This is why the title in the page header is also missing. Even though the current version is a page-for-page copy of the original (for the most part), I have a lot of aggressive page breaks that's going to wreck havoc when I update the documentation. I'll worry about that when I'm in the finalization phase.

Next is the tutorials. I was monkeying with the demo save/record functions a little bit today. I'm not keen on the timers yet so I need to figure those out. There are 4 timers in the game, and they all have a resolution of 100ths of a second. Originally they were dependent on clock(), which required <time.h> but I wrapped allegro's timer function around them.

The 4 timers are as follows.

long mtime //The master timer that starts from 0 and runs as the game plays
long ktime // The keyboard timer for keeping track of when keys were pressed for demo recording playback
long rtime //??
long ntime //??

The last two are used for time swapping but never really investigated as they just seemed to work after I replaced the clock() function. This will be getting scrutinized as I convert the demo system into a tutorial one. That's tomarrow's mission.