SFM Tutorial

[TeamDman]

Currently, the learning experience for SFM newcomers is:

• The in-game examples
• The old github-only examples
• YouTube videos made by me
• YouTube videos made by others
• Discord
  • Troubleshooting your own scripts
  • Observing scripts made by others

There is plenty of opportunity for improvement.

Some ideas include:

• A web portal to link to all known SFM material
• Implementing vim in the in-game editor and including vimtutor
• A portal-style test chamber learning experience

This discussion is for that last one.

Currently, SFM has gametests that test all the expected behaviour of the mod.
Many of those tests could be reused to give the player an in-game scenario where there are signs for instruction, and the player has to write the script or perform some mutation to the test chamber to reach a goal criteria which would unlock the door.

Entry-level tests could include:

• Given a chest of ingredients, craft a manager
• Given a chest of ingredients, craft a disk
• Given a chest of ingredients, craft a label gun
• Given a manager with an existing program adjacent to two chests, pull the labels from the program and label the chests

It may be desirable to add features like read-only disks or managers from which the disk cannot be withdrawn to shrink the action space of players. If everything in the test chamber is indestructible, they will not be able to do stuff like punch the manager or cables or whatever.

• Prevent the player from breaking the test / entering an unsolvable state
• Add a restart command in case of unanticipated scenarios

Additional tests could include:

• Given a chest containing coal, a chest containing raw chicken, and a destination chest, create a furnace manager program (or use the example lol)
• Given two mek energy cubes, move all the power from 1 to the other
  • Could make tests dynamically present based on loaded mods

Would need to introduce a new void dimension for the tutorial, similar to skyblock where each player gets an island.

/sfm tutorial begin
/sfm tutorial end
/sfm tutorial invite <playername>
/sfm tutorial join <playername>

Would require the player inventory to be empty of items, armor, curios, baubles before beginning or joining the tutorial to prevent players from mining blocks from the tutorial.
Inventory would be wiped when you leave just in case.
Would have a log to file before wiping just in case something goes catastrophically wrong with the timing of the wipe.

Adventure mode or whatever may be useful to prevent players from breaking blocks while still letting them use items and interact with inventories.

The chests could be placed behind glass to prevent players from solving the tests by hand.
Ctrl+space in the editor could be used to identify the content of chests read-only at a distance.

Progression could have players start in adventure mode for the early tests, then put them in survival for the later ones.

Inventory wiped between tests with an emancipation grid, orange grid to change gamemode.

Dispenser to deposit test items, dispenser refilled with SFM outside the walls?