Dutch Road Furniture Development

[FooBar]

Hereby I present you with something new and exciting: Dutch Road Furniture!
Dutch Road Furniture is an eyecandy object NewGRF that features road furniture which can be found alongside Dutch roads.

Now what is this, this "Road Furniture" you might ask? Well, the Dutch call it "wegmeubilair" or "straatmeubilair" and the more common English term is street funiture. I decided to go for Road Furniture instead, as TTD speaks of roads and not streets and this will eventually also include stuff to dress up your motorways and those are definitely not streets. The road furniture itself can be anything that you find next to the roads in the Netherlands. Be it fingerposts, highway direction signs, barriers, guardrails, hard shoulders, lamp posts and suchlike. Basically everything to make the road more comfortable.


Downloads
See the release topic.

Screenshots
Below are some screenshots of what you currently can find in this set.


Screenshot courtesy of Quast65

[kamnet]

Is this a NewGRF station set or a NewObject set?

[Hyronymus]

Is this a NewGRF station set or a NewObject set?

I believe it's a NewObject set after reading the project page on the devzone:

Dutch Road Furniture is an eyecandy object NewGRF that features road furniture which can be found alongside Dutch roads.

EDIT: Silly me forgets to mention this is a nice idea. NewObjects will make games nicer if you can be bothered to fund some realism.

[Leanden]

Pfft, stole my idea!

[Hyronymus]

Pfft, stole my idea!

Did you have a patent on it ?

[FooBar]

This is indeed an object set, so no station misuse here

Pfft, stole my idea!

That is very well possible. I believe I read somewhere someone pondering a British road signs set. And I figured I could make something Dutch myself
But if it's indead you're idea, I'll credit you in the next release if you want.

EDIT:

Silly me forgets to mention this is a nice idea. NewObjects will make games nicer if you can be bothered to fund some realism.

Thanks!

[Leanden]

Its a little bit different to my GRF, in my GRF ive put the roadsigns straight onto the road graphics as not to interfere with buildings and such.

[FooBar]

That wouldn't work with signs this big. Ideally it should be possible to build objects directly on road (or rail for that matter).

[Leanden]

Your signs like kind of massive compared to the RVs though. so maybe they need to be scaled down, the signs i used for my set (and these are quite big IRL: Image) And they are only 5 pixels high.

[Transportman]

Your signs like kind of massive compared to the RVs though. so maybe they need to be scaled down, the signs i used for my set (and these are quite big IRL: Image) And they are only 5 pixels high.

The Dutch fingerposts are that high.

@FooBar: They look nice, I will use them sometime soon.

[jor[D]1]

Beautiful, this make a dutch eyecandy map complete.

It would be nice to have some kind of guardrail. So you cnn make nice highways without big cities building along them.

[planetmaker]

I just looked at the way posts: The signs attached to the post don't hide anything of it. It'd look probably better, if they overlapped the post they're attached to by one px.

[FooBar]

It would be nice to have some kind of guardrail.

I have some ideas for that, but haven't found the time to draw them yet. So yes, those will be added eventually.

It'd look probably better, if they overlapped the post they're attached to by one px.

Yes, you may be quite right. I'll investigate that whenever I intend to fix the "hovering".

[FooBar]

I'm back with a teaser from the hard shoulder, to show you what I'm working on right now. I must say I quite like it myself

A screenshot perhaps? Yes, here's one:

hardshoulder.png (7.66 KiB) Viewed 34105 times

If you still don't get what it is: it's a hard shoulder to be built next to roads. Makes them look motorway-ish and prevents houses building themselves next to the road. The roads themselves are of course still your normal roads that vehicles can use!

I agree that this isn't Dutch in particular, but some later variations on this adding guardrails, lamppost and traffic signs will be inspired by Dutch roads though. Can you get this anywhere? Not yet; what you see in the screenshot is everything I have drawn and coded so far.

Hope you like it, too bad if you don't

[Level Crossing]

It supports corners too, right?

PS Maybe make the color of the line configurable to allow NA Roads support?

[planetmaker]

I'd slightly step down on the brightness of the white lines. They seem more shiny than the middle one - while they usually are less so.

But great stuff!

Btw, as idea for implementation, I go for a similar thing with the fenced land: an object can have 1, 2 or 4 vies. The road shoulders could get like 4 views where one is plain, 2 are one thing or another and the 4ths is a random thing (all additionally next to the shoulder, like signs, trees, ... as you mentioned). this might make for some variety while also giving the player some choice and not cluttering the menu

[FooBar]

It supports corners too, right?

Not yet, but I intend to make tiles for corners. Outside corner will be a bit tricky though...
Also the slopes need separate graphics.

PS Maybe make the color of the line configurable to allow NA Roads support?

The line colour is actually fine for NA Roads, as roads in North America have yellow lines in the middle and white lines at the sides. But it's the tarmac that's the problem; I'm using the OpenGFX road sprites to make the shoulders and these just don't fit the NA Roads, see for yourself:

hardshoulder_NARoads.png (4.12 KiB) Viewed 34071 times

On the other hand I've seen numerous hards shoulders in the US made from a different type of tarmac/asphalt than the actual road surface, so in that sense it could work that it's different...
At this point I don't have plans to draw matching sprites for any other road set myself, but if someone else wants to make the sprites I can look into adding them.

I'd slightly step down on the brightness of the white lines. They seem more shiny than the middle one - while they usually are less so.

Actually I used the very same colour, it's probably because of the larger 'surface' that it looks brighter. I'll make them less bright, as they are currently too bright for my liking as well

But great stuff!

Thanks!

[FooBar]

Outside corner will be a bit tricky though...

In retrospect the inside corner is probably the more tricky one. Needs "only" nine sprites to cover all possible adjacent sloped road configurations. And that times four for all corners The outside corner needs just two sprites and doesn't care about slopes at all. So as you can guess the corners will take a little longer.

I inted to make all corners "automatic", which means that if you place two perpendicular "shoulder pieces" they will automatically show the corner sprite. Don't know how that will work out in code, but it should be possible I reckon.

corners.png (2.52 KiB) Viewed 34013 times

Straight pieces are done for both flat tiles and all possible slopes. I decided to "cheat" a bit (well, actually the whole thing is a cheat because the shoulders are actually coded as building and are moved outside of their original tile, but I digress) and not follow perpendicular slopes exactly and covering those slightly. Judge for yourself, but I think it works.

[Leanden]

I know im coming up with this pretty late in your development stage, but why did you make the hard shoulder sit on a different tile. Right now the hard shoulder is wider than the actual road lanes which is not realistically scaled at all. The green space along the current roads, changed into a hard shoulder would have been more than wide enough to keep in scale without spilling out onto another tile.

[FooBar]

The reason for the separate tiles is that you simply cannot build objects on top of road tiles. So they have to be next to it. I didn't want to change the actual road sprites: I don't want shoulders everywhere. The added benefit of using am additional tile is that this prevents houses being constructed next to roads with this shoulder.

If you look closeley the paved shoulders are just slightly narrower than the width of a lane. This is precisely the case in the Netherlands.