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Storytron > Swat > Immersive tutorial (Part 1) Introduction Thanks for volunteering for a lab rat position at Storytron. I'm Senior Lab Rat Jonathan, and I'll show you the ropes. To begin, please download the pre-alpha Swat. It is available on the page from which you got here. You will need to expand it using a program such as WinZip. No installation required. You'll also need Java 1.5. If you don't have it, you can find instructions on how to get it on the Swat download page. Done? Let's start with a few words on what we're going to do. I assume that if you came this far, you're interested in becoming a storybuilder. And believe me, I and the other Storytron members want you to succeed. I am writing an online course that will teach you everything you need, but at the moment the technology is still in too early a stage for this course to be useful. In the meantime, though, you can start learning the most important storybuilding skill - Scripting. That's what this tutorial is about. If you want to go deeper into Storytronics, you're welcome to check out the reference section, which has a goodly amount of material for you to ingest. This tutorial is written in a rather unconventional pedagogical style. I will be showing you some things which will seem very complex at first, and I won't be explaining them thoroughly. You can expect, at times, to have absolutely no idea what you're looking at, what I'm talking about or why I am asking you to do certain tasks. This is all part of the plan. Not only will you understand everything in the end, but you will have gained an incredible amount of storybuilding skill. All that is required from you is to be patient, read, see and do. It doesn't matter if you don't understand what you're reading, seeing or doing - just put those questions on hold and read on, do on. For starters, here's a no-brainer: I. Go to the directory where you've expanded Swat. II. Open the directory "Swat Package". III. Open the directory "Swat". IV. Double click Swat.jar. After a moment you should be staring at a strange screen, most of which is blank. At the left you should see a folder tree, whose top folder is called "Verbs". Please follow the numbered instructions: Pretty messy, isn't it? I keep telling Chris to come down from Mt. Sinai and clean up his mess, but he just shouts "Philistine!" and plays his thunder sound effects (scared the cahoots out of me the first couple of times!). Don't worry though - we'll sort it out.
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