BTEUK / TeachingTutorials

An interactive tutorials system for Build the Earth
MIT License
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Expand the Step instructions, making them Location specific and the hologram location customisable #78

Closed george112n closed 1 year ago

george112n commented 1 year ago

It was immediately established when designing the instructions for the first tutorial that step instructions would have to be specific to the location. The instructions are extremely relevant to the location and this cannot be avoided. Having multiple locations per tutorial is currently impossible without seriously and unacceptably degrading the quality of the instructions.

The second issue is the location of the holograms. Currently the location is calculated based on the current location of the player, what direction they are facing and the height map of the terrain. The position tends to feel unintuitive when playing through a tutorial. The hologram for step instructions does need to move depending on what step a player is at because they may move around a map when completing a tutorial, and there is currently no start of step teleportation which could be a useful base for step instruction hologram location, but the current implementation is terribly unintuitive.

Other issues with basing it off of other locations is the issue of text height and text being placed within blocks when a player moves into a range go angles. Attempts to improve this whilst still basing it off of other locations have limited effect.

Start of step teleportation (issue #77) and Location specific step instructions involve creating a table in the DB for Location-Step specific data. This would be the natural place to hold hologram position data as well if it was decided that basing it off of the start of step location would not be desirable enough.

The third issue is that with each word, the colour of the text is reset. The solution is to put colour codes in front of each word, example: &AWe &Anow &Aneed &Ato &Acreate &Asome &Astraight &Asides .... This has to be done manually or in a text editor. This is not ideal. A solution to this problem, and an improvement to the way colour handling works is to utilise the colour editor from the progress mapper. This provides a GUI for editing the colour to be any hex colour possible.

george112n commented 1 year ago

It is decided that to solve (2), hologram locations will be stored in the Location-Step table

george112n commented 1 year ago

In addition to the features already specified, we will also add the ability to add paragraphs into the instructions and have these displayed on the holograms. This should simply involve changing the hologram creator to handle new line characters appropriately.