Dynamic railway(suggestion)

Mickeye · Post by **Mickeye** » 17 May 2005 21:11

We were talking in Tycoonez.com:munity about more versions of railroad. After some posts, Marek come with great idea of dynamic railways.

Every square is made from five layers: grass around track, gravel, nettle (or other weed), railroad tie and rail in this order or in order railroad tie < - - > nettle.

Every layer is made form one sprite, grass around track can be merged with something else, because is static and don’t overlay anything.

Gravel is lowest dynamic ply. Newly putted is fresh gray, after time it become more browny and after dozens years is completely brown.

Putlogs can be narrow or wide, made from pine or oak wood, later from concrete, and it ought to be depended on year of built, or maybe on player choose.

Nettle will grow after some time of disuse (maybe one year). After restoration of activity on rail nettle will slowly disappear. On older railroad weed could grow up faster.

Top layer, rail, is most dynamic. After a little disuse rail will get darker and then rusty, after frequent using, rail become brightly silver.

This is only suggestion and I think it could be extremely hard or impossible implementing this idea to TTD Patch. But what about doing some more versions of railways? Not only standard rail and electrified rail, but some railways like light old rail with wooden putlogs, classic construction (present version of rail in TTD), main rail (concrete putlogs) and corridor railroad (with anti noise walls). Remember this is only suggestion, and I don’t want to push anybody to do it.

Aegir · Post by **Aegir** » 17 May 2005 21:29

Interesting...

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 17 May 2005 21:31

There are only 3 slots for railroad types, hence the choice between keeping monorail or maglev if you decide to use overhead wires.

Aegir · Post by **Aegir** » 17 May 2005 21:34

Hyronymus wrote:There are only 3 slots for railroad types, hence the choice between keeping monorail or maglev if you decide to use overhead wires.

I think he was more reffering to railway tracks that change dynamicly over time. Im very dubious about the patchability of this, but lets not hold out. One of the guru's might have an idea how this can be implemented (Not me damnit).

Mickeye · Post by **Mickeye** » 17 May 2005 21:37

Hyronymus wrote:There are only 3 slots for railroad types, hence the choice between keeping monorail or maglev if you decide to use overhead wires.

So it's no way to make new types of railway?

Mickeye · Post by **Mickeye** » 17 May 2005 21:48

Aegir wrote:I think he was more reffering to railway tracks that change dynamicly over time. Im very dubious about the patchability of this, but lets not hold out. One of the guru's might have an idea how this can be implemented (Not me damnit).

I wrote both. I thought it seems is nearly imposssible to implement dynamic railroad to the patch, but I ment that more versions of rails could be not so hard to code it to the patch. We'll see what Patchman say(write) about this.

batis2ta · Post by **batis2ta** » 17 May 2005 21:56

Very interesting!

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 17 May 2005 22:03

This idea has come up before, but you're the first to actually draw a picture of what it would look like. (Although something is wrong with the image, it's all pixellated, maybe you can re-upload it?)

Certainly it would be possible graphically to put this in the Patch, although I'm not at all sure Patchman would want to invest his time in this sort of eye-candy. It would take a HORRIBLE lot of sprites, but we recently had the sprite-limit lifted, and conceivably this whole feature could get stuffed into a totally new, unused area of memory. I don't know enough about the Patch internals to know if that's possible.

Programmatically, it seems to me that the real trouble is in the latest-use array. You'd have to have a large two-dimensional array (a programming feature) so as to keep track of the last time each square was used. Of course not all square have track on them, but you'd probably have to index them anyway, unless there was some sort of quasi-database involved, but that would raise performance issues. Actually, it's even more complex than that, because you'd have to keep an eye on track both above and below a bridge....

Then, whenever a screen was displayed, it would have to calculate how long it had been since each track square visible was used, and swap in the appropriate image, adjusting for whatever switches were present, etc.

LOTS of programming work, and processor power, I think, to say nothing of memory usage. TTD wasn't really designed for that I don't think.

Conceivably, something could be done with the timing array used to show grass growing after you've bulldozed. Not sure though.

I suspect this is more of an OTTD kind of feature than Patch TTD.

Korenn · Post by **Korenn** » 17 May 2005 22:21

In fact, this has already been done in OTTD, but in a less detailed approach...
However, it has so far not been included in the main OTTD development branch.

B52 · Post by **B52** » 18 May 2005 02:03

Just like in OTTD, like Koreen said, make it aging track.

eis_os · Post by **eis_os** » 18 May 2005 07:52

Because people already start with OpenTTD I don't give any comment on this... But I already talked about such things earlier (highspeed tracks)

Mickeye · Post by **Mickeye** » 18 May 2005 10:29

Korenn wrote:In fact, this has already been done in OTTD, but in a less detailed approach...
However, it has so far not been included in the main OTTD development branch.

I didn't play OpenTTD, so I don't know that this feature is already implemented in OpenTTD, but that idea and graphics work made by Marek could be somehow used (after Marek agreement) in future in OpenTTD.

krtaylor wrote:This idea has come up before, but you're the first to actually draw a picture of what it would look like. (Although something is wrong with the image, it's all pixellated, maybe you can re-upload it?)

Hmm, I can't see any problem with that image. But if thought there is problem with lighter grass pixels, it’s not mistake, that is a nettle and I mentioned about it in first post.

Actually if you seem those rails interesting check page http://tram.wz.cz/tycoonez/railset.js/r ... en0054.htm and you can compound your own version.
You can also visit http://forum.tycoonez.com, where you can ask about every Tyconeez projects (like CSRoadSet, CSDSet, CSTramSet and much more) and our website http://ttd.tycoonez.com/, but we still are not finished with translation to English and website is still under construction. (Try looking on the ttd.tycoonez site in Czech language it’s much more filled)

Sanchimaru · Post by **Sanchimaru** » 18 May 2005 13:29

The image takes ages to load here... during that process it's first more pixelated and then it goes getting definition. But I haven't been able yet to see the completed image, the browser says wait time elapsed... and I'm not using a slow connection.
I had the same problem before with the image of the bridges from the Check set

SuperTycoon · Post by **SuperTycoon** » 18 May 2005 13:41

you could keep the array a bit simpler by not bothering with track on bridges - it doesn't have grass etc. around it and nettles wouldn't grow on bridges so thats not an issue. i'm not sure how much simpler this makes it?

SHADOW-XIII · Post by **SHADOW-XIII** » 18 May 2005 13:53

I also request uploading the image on the forum than linking ....can't load it

altough from pixels I've seen it's great idea

Mickeye · Post by **Mickeye** » 18 May 2005 16:07

Ok. It's uploaded now. (We have problem with hosting, so sometime source of image was offline)

And please, remember, this is only example how dynamic railroad can look and for now we will not make any playable of those railways, although some parts could be included to CSRailSet.

Dextro · Post by **Dextro** » 18 May 2005 17:47

This is just great, it would be great to see this and I too believe this is something that could be better for openttd than for ttd patch since it requires many changes to the track display behaviour.

Still it would be great to see this, it would add an whole diferent level of realism to the game! And if the tracks would change based on usability? for example a used track would show much more brown than a less used one that would have much more grass in it.

It would also be a good indicator of the trafic flow, we could see where the trains pass more often just by looking at the grass

eis_os · Post by **eis_os** » 18 May 2005 17:49

The trackdisplaying is already patched on A LOT places for catanery + we have enough room for additonal landscape arrays, that isn't a problem...

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 18 May 2005 18:10

Well, eis_os, if you are planning to lift the hood on the caternarys, while you're at it, can you make it possible to have the caternary displayed on the third track type too? That way we can have it on the Shinkansen track, for the Japanset.

eis_os · Post by **eis_os** » 18 May 2005 19:35

No I don't plan anything on that particular of code

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Dynamic railway(suggestion)

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