Tutorial

This page documents the 0.5.0 style tutorial, and lists required Lua functionality.

Tutorial architecture
The mission is built up in a modular fashion. Each tutorial module covers one or more aspects of gameplay. The player may view each module individually in the order he chooses. The modules are accessed from a global tutorial menu, which in turn is accessed from the main menu.

Each tutorial mission creates its own player environment, providing the player with an appropriate ship and equipment and enforcing special rules where necessary to prevent the player from doing things not covered in that particular tutorial. When the mission is completed or aborted, the mission will terminate the play session and return the player to the main tutorial menu.

Basic operation
This tutorial introduces the player to Naev and what the game is about. It covers basic maneuvering, the overlay map and time compression, targeting, coming to a stop, boarding and landing.

Interstellar flight
This tutorial covers jumping from one system to another, fuel, and plotting multi-jump routes, including manual waypoints.

Communications
This tutorial teaches the player how to hail ships and planets, as well as the autohail shortcut.

The planetary screen
This tutorial covers the planetary screen and the tabs. Some tabs are handled in more detail in separate tutorials.

Basic combat
This tutorial covers weapon groups, how to fire weapons, energy, heat, ammunition, and the difference between disabling and destroying.

Advanced combat
This tutorial covers more advanced combat techniques. Much of this depends on the changes to combat mechanics in the future.

Trade
This tutorial will explain to the player how the trade system works. This module should not be written until the new trade system is finalized.

Missions and events
This tutorial explains how to accept and abort events, the concept of timed missions, as well as the general mission structure of Naev.

Needed functionality
This section lists functionality that isn't present in Naev currently. Once this functionality exists, this section will be removed.

✅: Main menu tutorial button. ✅: Tutorial as event. The main tutorial menu should be run in an event, which then starts each module as a mission. ✅: A mechanic for the tutorial event to return to the main menu. ✅: A mechanic for tutorial missions to return to the tutorial menu. A general run-event function would suffice. ✅: Disable ALL random event and mission spawning. ✅: Keystroke hook. Should trigger on every keypress or click, and should properly handle key combinations. ✅: Allow disabling and enabling player inputs. Each key input and mouse click should be individually controllable. ✅: Forced player ship swap in-space. For the purpose of the tutorial, this may be destructive. ✅: Forced planetary tab selection, or the ability to disable tabs. ✅: A way to set system known status (counterpart to system.isKnown) ✅: Clear message log.
 * Unndeeded: Disable takeoff button.
 * Maybe: Set unlimited player ammo.
 * Unneeded: Info tab hook (like planet tab hook). Maybe. Can probably do this via input hook.
 * Unneeded: Forced info screen tab selection, or the ability to disable tabs. Again, maybe. Possibly not worth the effort.
 * Maybe: Screen fadeout and fadein for less jarring scene switches.
 * Maybe: A portrait for captain T. Practice.<BR>
 * Open: Your feature here!<BR>