RPTools.net

Introduction to Macros tutorial is up. Many of you will probably find it useless. Its aim is to combine with the Chat Window and Die Roller tutorial to allow people with absolutely no coding experience to get started. Future tutorials will dip the toe a little deeper into the macro pool.

Also, this is the first tutorial with Closed Captioning. My goal for that is to get the tutorials into as many languages as possible. I am PMing those that are active on the boards that seem to have a different native language, to see who is interested in helping translate. Anyone who wants to volunteer, please feel free to contact me.

It may be worthwhile to also check the credits in MapTool, as I think everyone in the credits for translation work has an account here on the forum.

Thanks for all of your work, brad!

Thanks for the tip Azhrei. Will do.

cant you also post them on youtube, cause
1. it will give more publicity
2. i just tried to open both movies but the ony thing I see is the 'screencast' window. After 2 minutes the movie finally started and Im currently behind a 1 Tb connection.
I think most new commers will think its broke (after stairing 20s or so at an 'screencast loading' window).

edit: I noticed that the movies I watched are the general introduction to Maptool, where are the macro tutorials??
another edit: found them, your menu structure is counter intuitive, it looks like when you click on the 'maptool tutorials' you should get the two submenus in the main window where you can select. But in reality the three menus entries are three separate menu's. You should align them all three to the left without indents.
and the last edit: nice movies (good editing), it indeed covers the basics without scaring of too many people

I do have some of the old ones on youtube. They are blurry though. These new ones will be able to go into youtube at full size and be clear.

I am not sure why it took so long for any of the screencasts to start for you. Maybe the internet was having a bad moment, as this is the first complaint of that. For me they always take between 5 and 15 seconds.


Yeah, I am still tinkering with that. I am hoping in the future to have tutorials for the other tools as well and was looking to have a menu structure, but the Wordpress theme I am using handles things in certain ways. For now your suggestion probably would be best, as it will be a while before I get around to the other tools in any case.



Thanks!

note that it concerns these 2 movies. If I click on the macro movie it's all peaches, loads within a second. I just checked and the two movies are still doing the same. It looks like they needed to be loaded competely first before they are showed, while the macro movie works with a buffer.

Both movies start reasonable fast here (standard dsl connection).

Me too. I just checked again. I cleared my cache. Then I viewed each movie. Each started in under 10 seconds and they were using the buffer. Neither was fully downloaded when the screencast started. I have a cable connection.

Spanish translation of Introduction to Macros tutorial is up. Thoughts on how to organize multiple versions of each video? You can see from how I listed Introduction to Macros in the Step by Step series how I have started. Each tutorial that I do from now on is going to have a screenshot with that play symbol on it for you to click on to play the tutorial. That is followed by the title and description. Then the last line is going to be a list of links to the translated versions. Spanish | Italian | Japanese | etc...

Does that make the translated versions obvious enough? Thoughts on other ways to organize?

Hey Brad... not sure how easy it is to edit, but for the Macro tutorial, it might be nice to have color highlighting as you discuss a specific part. For example, around 4:00, you are talking about "notice the plus sign links together the text and code" or something like that.



This might be most important the first time(around 2:00) or two you reference this syntax and can probably be ignored later on. Does that make any sense? Not sure if that will be useful or not....

Editing wouldn't be a big deal. Just a few minutes for the rendering really. I am just wondering if the highlighting is necessary. At the 2 minute mark when I first show a + linking text and code I sort of hit the viewer over the head with it by highlighting the code line and then drawing an arrow right at the +. That is why at the 4 minute mark I just give a little "and notice the plus sign again".

That is just an example you said though. Do you think it is lacking quite a bit through the tutorial? I thought I did a lot of highlighting and arrows in this one, whenever I thought the viewers' eyes might be in the wrong location, but maybe I am wrong. I will go back and look at it again.

Yea.. I don't know... I will have to look at it a few more times, but that kind of stood out to me initially in both sections. Of course, given that I have ADD and possibly Aspergers, I know for a fact that my mind works differently than a lot of other peoples and i could just be me, so if you check it and seem happy with it no biggie...

So, you are talking about highlighting the + at both the 2 and 4 minute mark? There is already a big red arrow pointing straight the + at the 2 minute mark. I actually purposefully didn't use the highlighting at the 2 minute mark, because I figured it would be a big possibility that lots of people would not see that small of a square of yellow. That is why the big red arrow instead. I mix highlighting and arrows throughout depending on which I think would be more effective due to size and placement.

Ok, I finally took the time to put everything up on youtube. I will update youtube as I add new tutorials from here on out. The good news it that they are not all blurry anymore. My first round of tutorials way back when didn't convert right or something and were hard to watch on youtube. These ones are clear.

Google has upgraded the video conversion process at least twice that I know of. That's probably why they look better. And they're supposed going to H.263 in the future which will be immensely better than Flash.