[32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

[R2T9]

Very nice! Question though. On the Far Future slider thingy, you had something about vehicles...would these be redoes of the standard vehicles or something new or did I misinterpret it?

[V453000 :)]

In general the idea of BRIX is to replace base set graphics without any NewGRF magic changes.

That means that all of the trains will definitely be full-length 8/8 so you cannot expect anything like articulated vehicles or shorter wagons.

Other than that I honestly do not have too much of an idea how will they actually look like. Some of them might be similar to original, some perhaps less. I did not really put too much thought into that yet; which is kind of why it is a far future thing

In general most of them are probably going to be sort-of different but nothing super wtf like NUTS or such (probably)

[V453000 :)]

After some massive amount of effort put into railway tracks, I have reached a solid state with them.

I am using a kind of special technique where the track overlays only have 50% of the sleepers, and the rest of them is in the track underlays.
While this causes some left alone sleepers in the middle of some junctions (not super common to happen), it means that in junctions at the ends tracks combine MUCH nicer and in less destructive way.

Of course seeing the 3D tracks overlap is still a bit weird, but I think the solution is pretty nice. For maglev I will try to do something else though...

There is also a ton of hacks especially around tunnels - they are sprites which actually do use the sloped grass ground tiles, and the tunnel sprite being put on top of it with some feather edge in postproduction.

I also have super-early versions of monorail and maglev, you can have a look at those on the left of the screenshot.

Next on the list: rail road crossings, rail bridges, rail depots, and then the same for monorail/maglev.

I have also come to another conclusion - With how the source is structured, the project will be released under GPLv2 since all of the 3D outputs are fully re-renderable with just one click, the postproduction as well, and compiling is obviously fully automated as well. The only thing you need is the graphics software...

What do you say?

[lukasz1985]

The rails are really nice - I would like to see more of the monorail.

The tunnel entrances could get some love. In the lower - left side you also have issuess with shading.
See the attachments for what I mean.

[V453000 :)]

Haha some good points there.

With the tunnels I am not sure yet; some shading is even removed by masks to give more clean transition to the terrain tiles since the terrain tile is one huge hack anyway. But I will certainly consider something like your suggestion.

I will probably at some point do a proper hand-drawn photoshop postproduction, which can take care of such issues and integration - just need to get a solid result first, because hand-drawing cannot be re-rendered so easily.

The terrain shading needs a lot of love in general, but I did not notice this one yet

More monorail coming fairly soon, I only need to get the junctions and tunnels done.

Thanks!

[V453000 :)]

Slope shading issue found: it is a different tile XD I think that is some rough or rocky terrain, you can see the flat part of the tile is also brighter.

These tiles are just placeholders and will be replaced with way more interesting tiles.

[lukasz1985]

Slope shading issue found: it is a different tile XD

How do you render the tiles? Do you do it like the zBase - make new sprites for each different rotation, or rather (so did I) use a single tile and rotate around using some script?

the flat part of the tile is also brighter.

Haha, my clunky monitor wasn't enough kind to tell me that, I had to check out myself by fiddling with the contrast in gimp.

[V453000 :)]

I have various models for the 19 slope variations, but the same shapes come from the same model, and are just rotated. Then a camera travels between them in time.

At the moment I do everything that way, nothing is rotating, just camera movement. It does not really matter which way it is done I think.

What would be more relevant in this case though is a render tree which would swap textures on the model - that way the model would be the same always.

My models for flat tiles are the same because their geometry is linked to each other - except the ones which actually use a different geometry like bulldozed land, rough tiles, snow, later rocks etc.

I will make a documentation on BRIX devzone at some point (probably after releasing 0.0.1) to show it all in detail.

[lukasz1985]

My models for flat tiles are the same because their geometry is linked to each other

Thats a pretty good idea I didn't though of; including the texture swapping really could offer some good amount of flexibility (in my case there was a limitation about what I can put on a single object instance).

[V453000 :)]

I do not know which 3D application are you using but 3DS MAX has some super awesome functions of instancing/referencing ... so I for example have one source of a straight rail track, whenever I need to re-use that exact same piece, I instance it. But whenever I need to adjust it, I can just Reference it and apply additional modifiers in the modifier stack, like slice to cut pieces of the track away. (for example for bridges).
Sure, it is still a bit limited in terms of "fit stuff into 1 instance", but as long as you keep vertex count the same in Edit Poly modifiers, the procedural modifiers can stack on top of each other pretty much infinitely :>

Texture swapping is cute but for some reason the state sets in Max are super fragile when changing camera so I am using just Batch Render - state sets are basically a big tree of render passes, and you can do pretty much anything in each render pass - change materials, change geometry, even change which modifiers are turned on, and also change which camera is active at the viewport. Batch Render is just a function in which you simply click which camera goes to which folder and some other details.

Result is that I have one big scene and each object is rendered only once, alternatives are placed elsewhere. Which comes to be a problem when I need to output CompanyColour masks - which are generally just a selected few objects or such. Earlier I did that with the state sets and changing materials/rendering properties... now I will just have to for example duplicate the bridges, and assign materials there separately.

Issues do not end there though, since I am at 7,5M polygons at the moment, performance issues could come real quickly so duplicating objects too much is not a super great idea XD My current plan is to separate things I can from the main scene - like buildings, industries, vehicles, ... Having one scene is awesome though.

I attach three screenshots - a general overview of my scene, a look at my terrain setup and at the awesome stuff with tracks - showing how the X junction is done just by 4 references of a straight track, each of which being rotated first, and sliced at the center after.

[lukasz1985]

Wow, this is a hell you got there (when I first looked at the first screenshot you posted - I thought "what the hell is this?" XD - to be honest I first associated this image with some kind of mothership hahaha) I mean.. aren't you concerned about potential error that could destroy all your setup? And the performance of course - rendering so many polys in the viewport is bad for your machine if not yet for the framerate while modelling. Don't you think about spliting your scene into multiple files?

And in fact, I was thinking you're using Blender - and that's the context in which I was speaking about so there is a bit of misunderstanding.. And now I wonder how the texture swapping actually works. If you mean swapping texture of UV unwrapped (texture mapped) model on a per-frame basis... I dont really think it would be possible in Blender.

About the duplication: maybe, if 3DSMax supports such a feature - you could separate the files and use "link" idiom from Blender there? I mean - it's possible in Blender to link different data blocks - or simply copy them. If you copy a datablock you got two separate copies; if you link one datablock to the other - if you change the original datablock - the linked one reflects the changes. For example if you create two objects, and link the mesh of one to the other - changing mesh of one will make changes to the other. In the end it's possible to have a file called say "stations_roofs.blend", "stations_seats.blend" and a file called "modern_station.blend" where you put the parts you need from other files, and edit things in the "source" files - and they will propagate to the "target" files.

Haha, I wonder what's the size of your single file .

No offence of course. In some manner I like it - in the end it's not a disorder. And surely it's impressive how much work you have put into this.

[V453000 :)]

Yeah it is getting quite intense, but then there should not be super high amount of things to add now to this scene. Regarding "accidental borking of the scene", I can always just put the geometry into another scene if all goes wrong. The only thing it would cost me is that I would have to re-assign the Batch rendering. Which takes a little while but it is not a huge issue.

The reason for having one scene is this instancing/referencing stuff. The magic is that you are not just linking geometry/polygons, but also the modifier stack how it is created. In the end the difference is not huge, and it would definitely be possible to work with stuff like an object library saved on the disk (Vray works great with it's proxies), but it is just a lot more work for less convenient workflow, so I will keep it like this for as long as I can.

Viewport performance is not great, definitely not, but bearable. Eventually I will definitely have multiple scenes - for example trees are independent scene at the moment. But for things which do not instance/reference the other related stuff.

I am using both 3DS MAX and Blender, but for BRIX I am using max.

With Blender I am running into a lot of issues with this sort of automation, stuff like:

- Blender layers being super limited. Max has normal cad-like layers, and mainly you can have as many as you want. Blender's 20 layers just is not enough for bigger organized projects. At the moment I am using about 40 and that is the minimum I need for now.

- changing materials in Blender, the only way probably is animating the values in Mix nodes - not so bad actually. In max I do not think there is a way to do that in the actual material, but the state sets are a tree of changes that you did to -stuff-. It looks like this (attaching image) - you can see each of the states has some changes like viewport changes (camera selecting), material applying, changing modifier settings, making layers visible/invisible

- multi-materials do not seem to exist in Blender - I am aware I can assign parts of the mesh to have certain materials, but I do not know of a way to make one material which I just put on the model, and it consists of other materials, assigning them according to material IDs of each polygon. That way I can easily have one material for ie rails, which consists of 10 other materials. Extremely handy for big projects.

- "safe way of working" with max, using selection only tool - this is mainly something one has to get used to, in Blender there are alternatives of how to select objects to prevent any accidental movement of stuff. Especially when viewport gets performance-heavy, it is easy to select an object and move it by accident. In Max there is simply a tool just for selecting things - I got used to selecting only with it, and I never accidentally move things. With Blender you have to use "B" box selection or the "C" brush selection mode, both of which are nice, but not for all situations, most of the time you want normal click-and-select way of thing.

- one would expect to be trivial stuff like rendering multiple cameras in a batch (in Blender can be done by python but I did not invest the time into learning python just for that reason yet), in Max there are at least 2 tools to solve it - the Batch render and State sets, each having their advantages. In Blender the only way is to create multiple scenes and then through compositor render various scenes at once. But as soon as stuff gets into multiple scenes, compatibility between them is pretty nonexistent - materials, geometry, objects .... linking geometry is cute but as it does not even link materials or modifiers, it is very prone to being majorly insufficient later. An option would be something like the object library, referencing an external file. OR having everything in one blender scene, which is probably even worse idea than in max.

- the modifier stack. Sure, Blender does have modifiers, but in Max they are a part of the mesh basically. You gradually build the model, using the modifiers, and mainly - Edit Poly modifier means that you edit the geometry itself. Being able to stack multiple of those on top of each other is extremely handy as I can for example have a flat tile in one Edit Poly, in second I can assign polygon material IDs - and each polygon has different material that way, in third I can change the shape of the tile (like making variants of ground tiles), and in fourth I can extrude the polygons based on the material IDs. The greatest thing is that I can turn any of them off, and as long as I am keeping amount of vertices (for example the extrusion will not keep that), it will still work.

In general Blender does have it's advantages, but they are mainly in having simple tools which are extremely quick to use, while max is slower but has a lot more tools to actually use. Blender has a very strong point in texturing, but with BRIX I am not really using any textures.

My main scene is currently almost 250MB, trees scene only has temperate trees so far and it already has 43MB.

[V453000 :)]

Yeah now I remember what problem I got stuck on when making RAWR 0.0.2 ...

[V453000 :)]

Do not ask me why but using just one 8bpp colour in the 8bpp Company Colour mask is what fixes it. XD

Now to make the bridges look nice on their own Especially the tubular ones will be reworked almost completely.

[SyberSycho]

Do not ask me why but using just one 8bpp colour in the 8bpp Company Colour mask is what fixes it. XD

Now to make the bridges look nice on their own Especially the tubular ones will be reworked almost completely.

Glad you found a fix. Thing's are looking pretty sexy and I can't wait to see what's next.

[R2T9]

Sweet! Bridges look nice, especially the suspension one. Tubular bridge looks a little odd...maybe make the ends less of an angle?

[V453000 :)]

Thanks for the positive words guys, any form of feedback - even if negative - help me stay motivated and doing good progress.

The tubular bridges will be totally different, the current ones is just a placeholder.

As for what is next, probably finishing monorail tracks, maglev tracks, depots and stations.

If I feel like it then perhaps also signals, let's see. Tracks alone are a lot of stuff to do, and the most important thing of the whole graphics set, in my opinion. So I will stay in the track realm for a while still.

Moar coming soon - I also have farm fields and new snow prepared, just need to get the various slopes done.

V

[SyberSycho]

So I like the concept of the bulldozed spirits but look odd on the angles, due to the blocks not being the same orientation as flat land. I also feel like they don't tile well and are more eye catching then they should be. Bulldozed area's aren't really something I personally care to focus on in game, so if they blended in more with the landscape by maybe making it greyscale instead of coloured it may be better.

Keep up the amazing work.

[V453000 :)]

That is actually completely true and a good point.

However, I will probably keep it colourful, here is why: I like the idea of exaggerating destruction, especially since the hole gets there by using dynamite which exploded in that place. And also because this game is about constructing - destructing should feel at least a little bad.

They look slightly odd / bricks in different directions, because the extrusion/hole is the same, and just the slopes are edited. At some point I might do all of them individually, but at this moment it would take relatively a lot of effort I could put into something else, while this solution kind of works. (to me at least)

Though you are completely right that they tile terribly. I will see what can be done about it but probably not anytime soon.

Bridges, tracks, roads, and a lot of other stuff still needs attention way more critically

Thank you for your feedback

[R2T9]

Honestly I hadn't even noticed the dynamited tiles...but now you mention it, they do look kinda cool! Just curious...you have the big holes for dynamiting the ground...what happens if you raise or lower it? Will those actions produce this effect?