UK Scenario

[Wasila]

I was wondering if there were any decent scenarios of the UK - the only one on BaNaNaS is the England and Wales one and a) that is missing Scotland/NI and b) let's just say that the UK seems to have undergone a manufacturing boom in this alternate reality. So, with the many UK grfs to go with this game, I was wondering if there was a better one?

[sootynz]

There are several UK regional scenarios. From BaNaNas, you might like to try the North of England
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... 17#p785517

or Wales and West England
http://www.tt-ms.de/forum/showthread.php?tid=3883

[Born Acorn]

Oh cool. I remember creating Wales and West England for OpenTTD inclusion waaaaay back when. Good to see someone has been updating it!

[Wasila]

Yeah - I meant the entire UK, sorry if I didn't express that properly. Never mind, find one on the wiki page!

[Wasila]

Sorry for double post - I was wondering if there was an England and Wales scenario. There is a heightmap just no scenario.

[brickie]

I've been fiddling around with the heightmap to create a scenario - try these:

[Wasila]

Did you just create that map now? It's amazing - can't wait to get started on it! Did you use that patch which does it automatically? If not I can't imagine how long it took you. But could you please make a version without so many GRFs - it limits the experience and restricts the end user's choice of how to play. Buildings GRFs are OK, but not anything more.

As soon as I get a chance I'll give placing of some industries a shot, so things like North Sea oil. What other major industries are there?

[brickie]

No, the heightmap was from somewhere on t'internet. I just added the towns. Had this one around for a while. I've got an ongoing game with it, I'm up to 1978 - I'll post a couple of screenies if I can figure out where the heck OTTD is saving them to...

I say "just", it took a while and some towns are probably still in the wrong place, especially in the centre of the country where there's no coastlines to refer to. Trying to get Google Earth to have the same perspective as the isometric TTD map is a right royal pain, I can tell you.

One thing I've been thinking I might have a crack at is properly-placed industries: coal mines in South Wales and Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire/S. Yorks; Iron ore mines in Cornwall, Forests in the rural bits, steelworks in Sheffield and Middlesbrough, that kind of thing.

Trouble is, it's ball-achingly dull work and as soon as you start the game, they all close down en masse and re-open somewhere else anyway.

[Wasila]

I'll give industry placement a try in an hour or two - whatever happened to that patch which banned random closing of industries?

OTTD, in Windows XP, saves screenies to My Documents\OpenTTD\.

Also when you say 'just', I say good work! I think that placing industries will be easy compared to the amount of towns you laid down there. Are the populations to any scale? I prefer it this way, as a London 8x larger than the next city is not good in an OTTD game. Maybe when I have some time I'll work on improving town layouts, but I doubt it.

EDIT: Also I suggest that once you get a few industries up you upload your scenario to BaNaNaS - it's very good.

[brickie]

Are the populations to any scale? I prefer it this way, as a London 8x larger than the next city is not good in an OTTD game. Maybe when I have some time I'll work on improving town layouts, but I doubt it.

No, they're purely on guesswork. Incidentally, Sutton Coldfield (just NE of Birmingham) is *way* too big.

[Wasila]

Sorry for double post, but I have been working on brikie's lovely scenario to introduce a new and (hopefully) improved version.

I created the scenario with a CargoDist build but I don't think that will affect anything. Tell me if it does.

Changes:

London is significantly larger than it was - this is as many of the towns on its edges in the game (such as Barnet and Hounslow) are actually part of London.

Thames significantly widened where it runs through the city to allow room for docks and ships.

I have reduced the number of GRFs required from a dozen or so to just two.

As requested by brickie I have reduced Sutton Coldfield from 9,000 to 7,000 residents.

Expanded Cardiff & Swansea slightly to make Wales less... empty.

Increased number of trees by quite a lot.

INDUSTRIES:

17 oil wells placed in the North Sea (no relation to real locations of oil rigs).
I personally like the idea of sending all my primary products to one place, so 3 oil refineries randomly on the NE coast.
43 coal mines placed in South Wales & northern England
8 power plants placed around the coal mines.
14 iron ore mines in south-west England.
I thought steelworks in Sheffield would be a little difficult what with the ore in Cornwall, so I placed 5 around the iron ore.
So much for 'realistic placement'. 17 farms planted around the country - I suggest that cargo planes are used for this game .
8 factories placed around the UK, predominantly in the north, but I had to place some in Cornwall to make the iron ore reachable.
27 forests around the country, including 4 huge ones on the south coast where the New Forest is.
8 sawmills, one placed conveniently near the New Forest but mostly in the north.

Due to the scale of the map and the huge gap between primary industries and secondary industries in the UK I have been forced to try and strike a balance between realism and playability - one thing I hate is a pretty map which is unplayable.

Do I have permission, brickie, to post this on BaNaNaS (with credit to you, of course)? Could you improve on this (more industries?)?

EDIT: Perhaps placement of some more rivers could be a priority - my widened River Thames makes ships useful as you can transport from the heart of London to a good number of destinations along the river.

[Pingaware]

There's mine (in my sig) based on West Country 902011 from the original game.

[brickie]

Sorry for double post, but I have been working on brikie's lovely scenario to introduce a new and (hopefully) improved version.

Cool.

I created the scenario with a CargoDist build but I don't think that will affect anything. Tell me if it does.

Hmm. I think I need to go download the latest version - I'm on a rather old Nightly build at the moment so it doesn't like the scn file!

Changes:

London is significantly larger than it was - this is as many of the towns on its edges in the game (such as Barnet and Hounslow) are actually part of London.

Yes, I know - I did this with several large cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester etc. I was trying to have a situation where the towns would grow together organically. A lot of the places around London in particular were quite separate until the arrival of the Underground system in the 1920s and 30s - so with a 1930 start date, I figured I'd start them as individual places and then let them grow together.

Also, from a practical point of view it means you don't have to dynamite quite as many houses to get a railway station into the middle of the big cities...

Thames significantly widened where it runs through the city to allow room for docks and ships.

Yes, that's a good idea. I generally play mostly-trains, so I never really thought about it.

[snip]

Increased number of trees by quite a lot.

Yeah, kind of couldn't be arsed laying that many trees myself - again, was happy for them to grow organically. But it looks better with trees. Could put some stony ground in around North Wales, the Pennines and so on.

INDUSTRIES:

[snip]

Due to the scale of the map and the huge gap between primary industries and secondary industries in the UK I have been forced to try and strike a balance between realism and playability - one thing I hate is a pretty map which is unplayable.

Indeed. You'll never have true realism until you can stop a train taking a year and a half to travel from London to Edinburgh and back...

Do I have permission, brickie, to post this on BaNaNaS (with credit to you, of course)? Could you improve on this (more industries?)?

I'd like to have a look at the updated version and potentially make a couple more tweaks - as I say, I just need to get a more up-to-date version of TTD sorted.

The other thing I'd like to do is try and track down where the original heightmap came from and credit the creator as well...

EDIT: Perhaps placement of some more rivers could be a priority - my widened River Thames makes ships useful as you can transport from the heart of London to a good number of destinations along the river.

Indeed. At the very least, a larger bit of Mersey, Humber and Severn, which are the three with big estuaries.

[brickie]

Hmm. I think I need to go download the latest version - I'm on a rather old Nightly build at the moment so it doesn't like the scn file!

Double Hmm. Latest nightly, and it still reckons the scenario is built using a newer version. What version are you running?

[petert]

Hmm. I think I need to go download the latest version - I'm on a rather old Nightly build at the moment so it doesn't like the scn file!

Double Hmm. Latest nightly, and it still reckons the scenario is built using a newer version. What version are you running?

Sounds like he made the scenario with a modded version. You should post a link for that version so that people can play your scenario

[audigex]

There was one by Jon Scaife, whoever he is, in March 07.


More info on the third row centre on this page

I've got a rather crudely modified version which, IMO, improves gameplay somewhat by adjusting some town sizes and adding others in to sparsely populated areas. I'm not sure whether I can distribute it though.

Distribution info from the original:
"This file may not be provided or supplied for any kind of fee or profit.
It may be redistributed for free as long as this original info file is included."
Does anyone know if this "license" would include distribution of a modified version? I'm presuming not until told otherwise.

[Wasila]

I think it's OK as long as you credit it and don't make money from it, but I'm not sure.

Sorry about that, the version is at http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... start=1400, second one down the page (r18972). Downside being it's not supported by devs, upside being it's stable and you can turn CargoDist off (go into Link Graph in Advanced Settings and switch treatment for everything to unhandled).

About the suburbs that you placed around major cities, it doesn't make a practicaly difference how lcose you are to the city centre for the only thing that matters are the buildings in the catchment area - if you're on the edge you're on the edge.

And about the trees - you can place them automatically .

EDIT: I was wondering; is there some way of editing the version number for the scenario? I don't want to make all the changes again but would rather that the scenario was compatible with vanilla. As CargoDist doesn't affect scenarios I don't see a problem with just tricking the game into thinking the map was created with vanilla (if it can be done).

[Wasila]

Sorry for double post but I thought this was necessary. I have tried to replicate my changes in beta 4 of 1.0.0 (I really don't know how people manage without small-map zoom). I think that my original work is better, but this is pretty similar.

Industry seems to have emigrated to the SE here, due entirely to those iron ore mines which so much depends on.

Also I would like to reiterate that I would recommend using cargo planes.

[brickie]

Do you mean the South-West?

Otherwise, yes, looks good. Will need to actually play it of course, but it looks good...

[Wasila]

Yeah, that . I'm playing a game on it now - that Welsh coal is really valuable!

I'll give some rivers a shot tomorrow.