[OTTD] Kamnet's Screenshot Thread (Updated June 28, 2016)

[OliTTD]

Overcrowded beaches, this is HELL !

[kamnet]

On Friday, I entered into my THIRD YEAR of playing my "current game". In-game, only 22 years has passed, starting from 1955. A good reason that's happened is because I'm playing with ChillCore's Patch Pack and have the Daylength patch cranked all the way up to a factor of 35. It makes the passage of time pretty slow. I'm also playing on a 2048x2048 map. I'm also playing using FIRS. This combination has resulted in a large, deep and continually-developing playing field for me to constantly explore and evaluate.

So here's how a typical round (lasting several real days of my life!) occurs:

I'm notified that there's a subsidy to transport coal to a lime kiln, and I build a quick cheap line. After, that kiln is actually going to need some lime, so I locate the closest limestone quarry, and connect a line there. After, I look to see what I can do with the chemicals it produces, and there's an aluminum production plant in the region that I can ship it to. While plotting my route, I find that there's also a bauxite mine that I can route my line near and pick that up as well. What to do with the aluminum? In the opposite direction some distance away, but still in the region, I've got a machine shop that can take the metal. The machine shop also needs petrol, and to my luck also in the region is a oil refinery, and just right off of all these established routes is an oil field. Now, that oil refinery is going to take all the oil and make equal productions of both petrol and chemicals, and likely in much greater quantities than the lime kiln that I originally set a line up for. Looking around, there a fertilizer plant that has just popped up as well, which can turn the chemicals into farm supplies. which the lime kiln will also be making. And what happens to be right in the middle of all of this mess? Over a dozen farms that can take the farm supplies from these two plants, as well as the machine shop! The machine shop is also making engineering supplies which can then go feed the coal mine, bauxite mine and oil field! Also right in this region I have a half-dozen cities that can accept food, I've got an iron ore mine, that can feed a steel mill, that can feed the machine shop. I've got a forest that can feed a saw mill that can feed a lumber yard that creates more engineering supplies and building supplies that can go to two local builder yards. By the time I've built all the rail and road networks to support this, I've got the infrastructure in place to build passenger and mail networks, and all I need to do to finish this region now is to build a long-distance rail or airport facility.

PHEW. This is WORK, I tell you.

[Valdez]

..and I thought my games take ages.. looks like I wouldn't even register on this scale..

[jor[D]1]

How many vehicles does that game run? Sounds really impressive. I usually work the other way around. Start a Passenger line connecting 2 not too far cities and after the passenger line is done connect industries to it. (Causing trouble at stations etc.)

[kamnet]

1107 Road Vehicles, 160 trains, 3 airplanes and one ship, spread among 7 companies. I've got WmDOT running to build basic road infrastructure, MailAI to handle all my mail, TownCar AI to buidl random traffic, and companies to handle passenger bus transportation, mining & construction transport, and agriculture activity.

[kamnet]

Well, after 3+ years of running my current game, I had to put it aside due to a serious error that has come up under ChillCore Patch Pack v14_7. No doubt caused, in part, by my overly-excessive tinkering with NewGRFs in an active game. I don't know if it can ever be saved.

With that said, I now have an opportunity to begin exploring some of the newer OpenTTD features, NewGRFs and vehicles, thanks in part to TI1985's creation of the OpenTTD Spring 2013 Patch Pack v1.7.55 Full. I convinced him to install Muzzly's patch that increases the NewGRF limit, and he has thrown in a lot of patches included in ChillCore's pack, including my favorites: CargoDist, Infrastructure Sharing, Daylength, More Height Levels.

Lemmie tell ya... it's WORK setting up what it takes to make me happy! First, I've spent the last FOUR DAYS simply trying to cram all the NewGRFs I want included. I didn't do a count, and I don't think I hit the 255 file limit, but there's definitely a limit to sprites and which NewGRFs will work together. I had to do a lot of re-arranging to get everything I do have in, and even then I had to leave a few things out. I'm very sad on one hand, but on the other I get to play so many updated NewGRFs!

Now I'm waiting... and waiting... and waiting... to generate a new map. That was another day and a half of fiddling around with things, but I think I have a happy one I like. It's only taken 15 minutes (and going) now to generate a 4096x4096 map with 40 height levels, trees, industries, cities, and RIVERS! Lots and lots of rivers to frustrate me!! In the end, we'll see if it's worth it. I have a feeling (I hope) that I won't need to add NewGRFs too often.

I probably won't have screenshots for a few weeks, and I may not have much to show for it. This game is going to run as slowly as my last one.

[ChillCore]

Looking forward to them screenies Kamnet and whatever you do ...

No mas foefelaré with them NewGRFs, no mas!

[Purno]

Screenshots of the beginnings are interesting too.

[kamnet]

And here we go, an overview of our new world... maybe. I'm going to try to generate one more version with 80 height levels instead of 40 to see if I can't get more mountain-like peaks, but I do like this map here with may large water sources spread out through the map, and lots of connecting rivers. With the wide distribution of industries, I should be able to develop several small communities. I'm also running a city growth GameScript which will boost the challenge a little.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, that may make this game insane... in addition to running FIRS, I'm also running the experimental WIRES electricity industry, I've thrown in Born Acorn's old Oil-Fired Power Station as well which gives me THREE different types of power stations to run with (since the latter also re-activates the default OpenTTD power stations). I also activated the Canadian steel and copper industries in the latest version of Canadian Trains... I have NO idea how well, if it all, any off this is going to work. The last time I tried mixing industries I tried playing FIRS and Zydeco's Eels, and that produced some really bad results. I know the Oil-Fired Power Station doesn't provide any conflicts, at least I think, I never actually used it since oil wells were more scarce in my last game and I just used the stations for eyecandy anyhow...

[Supercheese]

I'm also running the experimental WIRES electricity industry...

I'd be very interested in your feedback as you attempt to make the best of that silly hack of a grf.

[kamnet]

I'm also running the experimental WIRES electricity industry...

I'd be very interested in your feedback as you attempt to make the best of that silly hack of a grf.

I poked with it a few times after I downloaded OpenTTD 1.3.1 a few weeks back. The default station tile looks silly, but while a "proper" one might be needed, simply using one of the "bare ground" or "empty platform" ground tiles from a few other station sets works just as well. One thing that would definitely boost the eyecandy appeal of the set would be a new form of bridges. Unfortunately the only bridges that can be built include rail sprites, plus they just look too large. I'm trying to imagine graphics that would work well with both WIRES and PIPES. Of course, I could always not worry about that and just build them underground anyhow.

[kamnet]

After a few more tweaks, I'm LOVING this map already. Setting the height level to 40 seemed insufficient, but 80 seemed way too much, so I compromised on 60 and I think I got a nice result which FINALLY allows me to start playing with the Cablecars NewGRF! A nice cablecar route from the top of a mountain to the bottom is turning some great profit!



Alas, not all is well. I've discovered that RocketAI has a fondness for delivering the WIRES electricity, but doesn't like the building the infrastructure for it. Instead it has picked the Opel Blitzer from Long Vehicles to transport electricity via truck. I dunno if anybody can do anything about it at all, I may have to go in and manually futz with the AI to make it deliver electricity. Ideally, I think WmDOT should pick it up and run those lines next to the roads it creates rather than building ship routes for its profits.

[kamnet]

I got suckered into reviewing my entire screenshot thread. Wow, a lot of memories of fun gameplay over the last four years! Wish I had more time for actual play right now, but my job and family and life definitely gets in the way. Still, it's nice keeping involved in the OpenTTD community as a whole in other ways. Perhaps during Christmas work will slow down and I'll finish getting Fake Airport Anthology up and going. That's actually been a lot of fun working on the graphics.

Thank you to everybody who has provided kind feedback on my screenshots. It's been one of the easiest ways for somebody to become involved in the OpenTTD community. It's opened up a lot of dialog between me and other players, developers and artists over the years.

[kamnet]

It's 2014 and it's time for me to get back to some proper OpenTTD gameplay! Over the last year I've been significantly sidetracked with work, I started and stopped on a couple of NewGRF projects, and I waited for some things to settle down, such as the Spring 2013 Patch Pack becoming more stable and NewGRF authors getting their latest updates pushed out. With OpenTTD 1.4.0 just around the corner, and stable finally catching up to some of the major trunk changes, I think now's a good time to give it another go.

I'm using Spring 2013 Patch Pack v. 2.0.103, playing on a 2048x2048 map at 60 heightlevel, daylength factor cranked up to 31, and just about every decent, halfway decent, and even not so decent NewGRFs loaded. The map came out fairly decent, I made a few edits to the water features so that they were more connected. I'm again using both WIRES and Born Acorn's Oil-Fired Power Plant along with FIRS, so I did have to go in and edit a lot of redundant power plants. What I did this go-around was simply locate the oil-fired plants, looked around the area for any other coal-fired plants, deleted them, and then rebuilt with both an oil-fired plant and WIRES power plant in the same area. I tried to keep the power plants away from cities and farms. One thing I didn't like about this map is that it generated a HUGE steep mountain range next to the open water on the northeast edge of the map, which almost made it useless. I fixed it by populating the mountains with lots of oil wells and forests, and the coast lines with lots of farms. This map is sub-arctic, but I'm also using OpenGFX+ Landscape with both temperate grass in arctic, and a very low winter snowline and high summer snowline. I'll be running with several instances of IdlePlus to create several companies: one each for passenger rail & bus service, farming & food delivery, mining & construction, mail & goods delivery, airlines, ships, a utility company to manage WIRES and PIPES. I'll run MailAI to manage mail as well, and TownCars for some traffic, and WmDOT to build me some roads.

With all this, it only took my Intel core i3 w/ 4GB RAM about 5 minutes to generate the map. It's a little sluggish at times, but I can tolerate it. I'll get some screenshots uploaded soon, for now I'm uploading my save game as a backup. Since I know I'll screw it up at some point.

http://kam-net.com/openttd/2048x2048x60 ... -edit1.sav if you want a look. It's nearly 7MB.

[kamnet]

Some early game screenshots while I'm waiting for WmDOT and TownCars to come online.

[kamnet]

A few more towns.

[YNM]

Mixes of town / building set NewGRFs...

Silly to look at those TAI buildings, specially the ones on snow, hope pikka finishes it soon...

[keoz]

Is that a no trees map or transparency is ON ?

[kamnet]

Transparency was on. I'll put the trees back in later when things start to look more interesting.

[kamnet]

Work keeps getting in the way of me playing a good, long game. Today I started messing around with some new broadcasting software and decided to record my old savegame from ChillCore's Patch Pack. Here's Train 47 delivering aluminum to Wallace Machine Shop. Video is a little choppy, I'm working on making it more smooth. http://youtu.be/8AkZOV9-1nU