Unreal Engine 4 has that blinking Tutorial icon at the top right. It would be great if you guys actually finished the functional aspects of it. As it is now, it is terrible. Step Recorder technology has been around for a long time, it is all just chains of actions.
The Tutorial System should be the primary place to learn UE4. Teachers should be able to create Step Recordings of what they are doing (regardless of how deep into the bowels of the system they need to go), that would look similar to Waypoint system seen in games for years that create a marker indicating where to go next. When the teacher was finished with the recording the teacher should be able to place context relevant info between action in the form of text, picture, audio and/or video or Pop Quiz(it is obviously important to also get the students thinking). There should be no limit to the perceived difficulty of the tutorial, Teachers should be able to create very complex professional quality games or simulations if they want to, and have this entire complex chain of action be recorded for students to follow along. They tutorials could be banquets of computer science, mathematics, and linguistics knowledge. the thing being created could be itself a banquet of historical knowledge of some particular era or a study of the mechanics of political machines or just have some fun with a fantasy themed universe, etc… A hyper efficient, superior, all in one education system.
The Tutorial System should have a Skip Action and a Go Back To Previous Action tool always available. More developed students will not want to go through every action, thus a Window needs to be available that shows a list of all the actions in the tutorial that the student can use to find the 10 or 15 actions that the student is actually interested in. Obviously they also need to be able to save at any given point to pick up later.
The tutorial system needs to allow teachers for receive patronage (perhaps through Patreon) or charge a small amount for their hard work, or maybe take a sliver of that 5%. Or add to that 5% and teeny tiny little fraction of a percent(this is probably best idea because it incentivises the teacher to do their best), or something. I don’t like education systems that just sell education materials for money because this causes them to produce a lot of volume, but of a low quality. So the Pay from Profit approach is probably the best.
The next step would be to move this system directly onto Windows and Mac and Linux so this method can be used to expose complex chains of actions across multiple software packages.
Lastly the Tutorial system should be designed so teachers can check their action chains with new versions of software as it is released (similar to a compiler) to check for any breaks in the ‘action chain’. They should then be able to go directly the breaks and fix them, so their tutorials would then be easy to keep up to date, so students would Not have to be constantly using out of date videos. Teachers and students alike would save huge amounts of time, and would not spend much time messing around with those horrible videos that are always out of date, and often something important has been skipped, and personally I hate scrubbing those things seven times to find the tiny little boolean switch that I missed somewhere that causes the whole program to fail.
This thing would likely be useful in identifying overly long action chains and many bugs. It would likely improve the quality of the software overall.
**Additionally The Tutorial system needs a more robust search tool, and needs to have ‘Mapquest’-like technology that allows the user to access the tutorials from any place in the operating system environment. This Mapquest technology would plot a route from wherever the User is, To wherever the User needs to be to begin the tutorial.
**additionally as far as bugs go, this method would be perfect for literally identifying a bug and sending a literal action by action chain report to Epic. it is obvious from being in the AnswerHub that the people I am talking to don’t know what I am talking about in many cases, but If they could go through a literal chain of actions to reproduce the bug, this obviously would make the problem obvious.