UK Towns Set [v3.0/spiritual successor now out]

[Zephyris]

Find the release thread here...

Hi all!

So I finally scraped together all the sprites I produced a year and a half ago to make a UK town building set, and now I am looking for a coder! There are:
16 houses, each with their own gardens.
8 terraced houses in 4 orientations, with 4 "universal" gardens.
8 terraced shops in 4 orientations with company colour shop fronts.
16 offices in two orientations.
All have three construction stages and above-snow-line graphics for the completed building. The sprites were drawn in 32bpp and converted to 8bpp, so will need palconverting! As these were all produced in 32bpp if there is interest a full set of 32bpp graphics for OpenTTD could also be made...

I am looking for these to be coded in a similar style to the North American city set, simple but effective! I envisage the following zoning:
0: Houses only
1: Houses and terraced houses
2: Terraced houses and terraced shops
3: Terraced shops and offices
4: Offices only

There may (in the future) be some special buildings/skyscrapers for zone 4, but for now keep it simple! I will probably also produce/adapt some other specialised buildings - churches, petrol stations, tourist attractions, etc. in time.

So with no further ado here are the sprites.... (8bpp only for now)

[Zephyris]

Terraced houses:

[Zephyris]

Shops and offices:

[buttercup]

Well, I've made a start with the coding. If you'd prefer someone more competent just let me know

I'm not sure how advanced you intend this set to be; presumably you want the buildings to face the road, which shouldn't be too much of a problem.

One thing I noticed with the house sprites though: the positions of the houses in each of their different forms (construction stages and snow version) aren't consistent. This isn't a problem in itself but the black outline on the corresponding ground sprite is also inconsistent between the normal and snow versions (the black outline on the snow version is one pixel higher than it should be). I hope that makes sense.

[Zephyris]

If you'd prefer someone more competent ...

I'm sure you'll be fine!

... presumably you want the buildings to face the road ...

Yes please This is vital for the terraced houses and shops. I drew the office graphics with both rotations, but tbh I don't think these need road-sensitive orientation.

... the black outline on the snow version is one pixel higher than it should be ...

Oops! I'll have a poke, this should be very easy to fix!
*edit* Hmmm, I think the problem is more complicated than just one px shift on the snow graphics... This may take slightly longer!

[XeryusTC]

Maybe you should do a 32bpp version of this and start a hand drawn 32bpp replacement set. These graphics are quite beautiful although I don't think they'll fit the original graphics that well. Still very beautiful indeed

[Zephyris]

Attached are the corrected house sprites, hopefully these are right but I confused myself a bit when making them so there might still be problems!

... although I don't think they'll fit the original graphics that well.

That would be because they perfectly match OpenGFX

... 32bpp replacement set.

This could be done, to a large extent, already as most of OpenGFX has been drawn in 32bpp and converted. Unfortunately the difference is small, at least for highly textured objects like brick buildings and CC objects... Tbh I don't think it is worth the effort but given, at least for this set, all the 32bpp graphics are perfectly ready it may be worthwhile.

[audigex]

I think that if you've got the 32bpp version available, there's little point in keeping it to yourself. If you post them, others can put them into whatever projects are most apt and the community gets most benefit from them.

The only reason to do 8bpp graphics solely anymore is when they're being drawn natively as 8bpp

[Zephyris]

And 32 bpp...

Planetmaker suggested setting up a repo at the devzone and setting up a modular coding style, I think this is a good idea, so buttercup could you have a think about helping with this?

[planetmaker]

I setup a dummy repo at the DevZone which is configured to become this set. The only thing still missing is basically the NFO and the converted PCX sprites. I added Zephyris and myself as managers, I couldn't do so (yet) with buttercup, as he isn't yet registered

http://dev.openttdcoop.org/hg/ukhouses

Playing around with it, I found templating the action1 is difficult due to the layout of the sprites.
But that's not a general problem (and could possibly be fixed in future by moving the sprites to a uniform graphics template (e.g. a graphics file with exactly the same x and y coordinates for all houses, each house within a separate PCX file) - and even if not, we can always re-use the action 23 chain code even already now.

For a start, of course we could start completely without templates - we can always introduce them later on. Maybe it's even sensible as we then have a better overview of which code structures are repetitive.

[buttercup]

All done!

ukts.png (173.86 KiB) Viewed 44896 times

ukts.grf

(1.34 MiB) Downloaded 964 times

The population and mail generation stats might need a bit of adjusting, but this doesn't affect playability too much.

[cmoiromain]

Impressive!

[Zephyris]

Wow! That was fast

A few thoughts:
I wish there were more town zones! You hardly see any of the terraced buildings... Maybe the zoning should be:
0: Houses
1: Terraced houses
2: Terraced houses and shops
3: Terraced shops and offices
4: Terraced shops and more offices

I don't think the original buildings generally fit that well... Perhaps disable all but the "special" ones; parks, statues, fountains and things like that...

I think the bounding boxes on the office buildings are taller than they need to be; could this cause problems?

Do you think it would be worth making climate specific grass for the buildings? How easy would it be to code?

The shops have a company colour shop-front (or should do, unless they got palconverted out!), could you code those to use random colours?

[buttercup]

A few thoughts:
I wish there were more town zones! You hardly see any of the terraced buildings... Maybe the zoning should be:
0: Houses
1: Terraced houses
2: Terraced houses and shops
3: Terraced shops and offices
4: Terraced shops and more offices

Yep, that's not a problem. I can also increase the relative probability of the terraced buildings if you want.

I don't think the original buildings generally fit that well... Perhaps disable all but the "special" ones; parks, statues, fountains and things like that...

OK. If you want to select which buildings you want disabled from here, I'll do that. (The ID is all I need.)

I think the bounding boxes on the office buildings are taller than they need to be; could this cause problems?

Don't know if it would cause problems, but I've reduced them anyway.

Do you think it would be worth making climate specific grass for the buildings? How easy would it be to code?

If you don't mind drawing them, I don't mind putting them in.

The shops have a company colour shop-front (or should do, unless they got palconverted out!), could you code those to use random colours?

Whoops! I forgot about that. Fixed. (There are 16 colours to choose from, and each of the 8 shops can use 4, so each colour can appear on 2 different buildings.)

[Zephyris]

Cool, I'll get working on the alternative grass ground tiles, should be nice and quick when I get home from the lab...

As for original buildings to keep I think remove them all except 09h 0Ah 0Bh and 0Ch (those are the statue, fountain and parks). I will work on some new buildings; I think I'll want churches, stadia, warehouses/light industry and some special buildings - these should add some variety...

[OzTrans]

...

[cmoiromain]

I have a little suggestion for the set:

How about replacing the HQ with some real UK buildings? For example, it would be fun having the Gherkin as the last HQ (although I don't know how the scale would fit...)
If you are interzested, I have a *very basic* start of the building, but it's only drawn on a single tile. And it's very primitive, but the shap is correct IMO

[Coxx]

How lovely!

Is it planed to have a some restrictions of growth like Early houses?

[Zephyris]

Apologies for the slow progress, this last week has been very busy! My plans for the final special buildings are:
Churches (a couple of countryside and a couple of town variants)
Petrol stations (for industry grf compatibility)
Stadia (a big and a small, like the original graphics but more in-keeping with this set)
Landmarks (a school, hospital, museum, univerisy college and town hall, probably victorian gothic revival ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Waterhouse )

I will also do the terrains for the different climates...

[Zephyris]

Some ground tiles... Tropic and arctic for the terraced houses.