Japan Set Development

[dandan]

I like your arrangements of Steven's buildings. I know it's a lot of work, but I think the more different arrangements you can make, the better it will look (though more than 10-15 is probably pointless). As for the recoloured small houses, I think those look pretty good, too.

I wonder about one thing though: The whole notion that colours of houses in Japan were more subdued in the past, is that really true or is it more of an artistic approach, based on the impression we have from old black and white films and photographs (where, surprisingly, the world looks less colourful)? Either way, I like it and it will go very well with the trains in the set that are also less colourful in that period.

[krtaylor]

From the few color photos and movies based in that period that I have seen, Japanese life was colorful in the sense of clothing, banners, signs, and whatnot, but the buildings themselves were mostly brown (wood), whitish (shoji or stuccco) and maybe grey (stone or cement). I haven't seen pictures of ordinary houses painted in bright colors, as with e.g. Victorian-style housing.

[stevenh]

I'm all for meeting on the server... I'm awaiting my new net connection on the 1st June, but the server is still alive, so please all go for it.
Toni, you have my MSN... haven't seen you online yet. Awesome work with the buildings, btw.

DanMacK, welcome

dandan, again, full of surprises... it only takes a spark to get everyone excited again. I'd love to throw the building set on the server, but i'll playtest a little first beforehand? Or is it a worthy upgrade to something that was a beta anyway?

loving the progress... thanks everyone.

[dandan]

About the EF81: I just noticed that it is supposed to expire in 1992. Apparently, it is true that none were produced later, but the Cassiopeia cars only come out in 1999. So I guess I should just keep it available open end?

Concerning the Twilight express cars, they still use the 2CC green, so I had to resort to Pikkabird's suggestion. His code worked just fine, but it turned out that recolouring to dark green didn't give the right result: The CC dark green uses different shades of green, unlike dark blue for the first CC which really leaves the blue unchanged. I had never noticed that in game (I never use dark green).

However, simply returning 00 C0 for callback 2D basically did the job, with only one downside: The one-pixel company coloured name sign at the end of the train now remains blue. There is probably some solution to this, but if no one objects, I'd like to just leave it at that. Toni, don't know if you want to change the sprites again because of this detail. (In reality the name sign is apparently pink, at least on the loco... pretty ugly IMO.)

[Toni Babelony]

Well, I guess no-one will be bothered by this. If someone decides to fill in a complaint, I'll happily change it all, but for now it's fine IMO. We shouldn't overdo it, now should we?

Anyways, let's make the EF81 last until forever. It's still a very common engine and also practical engine, so why not.

[dandan]

Here is an update of the train set with the bugs found by Steven fixed and all the latest sprites by Toni. I also made some small changes to the readme, so that too should be uploaded to the website.

[krtaylor]

Website updated. I take it that there are now no trains needing to be coded?

[NekoMaster]

New set is awsome, btw, what are the parameters for this set?

[stevenh]

New set is awsome, btw, what are the parameters for this set?

Please download the ZIP file and check the README folder. There's a description of them all in there.

[dandan]

Time for another major update, here is the new version of the Japanese Stations!

What's new?
===========
The biggest addition are the modular stations and other station buildings by Toni. Most of these will be available from 1960 onwards.

There are also some codechanges to the platforms: Buffers automatically face the right way (including double buffers), and the various types of platforms can be quickly built in an automatic configuration. I also merged the Shinkansen platforms with the rest (now called "glass roofs") since they work fine with any kind of track (available from 1980).

Enjoy!

[MrMox]

That's incredibly awesome - outstanding...

[DJ Nekkid]

tested it, and only one comment, cant you make the high and low overpasses buildable in "drag and drop" mode...

[stevenh]

dandan,

perfect work as always
The GRF is on BaNaNaS... but not in-game yet....

I'm now following your version numbers, since I've realised it's a requirement to ensure a new version number on BaNaNaS... otherwise the content downloading doesn't overwrite your old files.

On a related note, the Signals GRF seems to be causing segmentation faults on the dedicated server. I'm trying to pinpoint the exact cause, but am not having much luck with little debug information.
If anyone isn't using this GRF on their local machines then it would be greatly appreciated if you could load it up in single-player games to see if you can't make the game crash.

[dandan]

cant you make the high and low overpasses buildable in "drag and drop" mode...

Good idea, I didn't think of that. They are "drag-and-drop-able" between platforms, just not along platforms. But since they could also be used to build a station under a building rather just an overpass, I guess that would make sense, too.

@steven: I'll take a look and see what I can find out. But if it's reproduceable, you should probably report it on flyspray. Even if the grf has some kind of bug, the dedicated server obviously shouldn't crash.

[dandan]

A series of small updates/bugfixes/readmes from me this weekend. First go the buildings:

1) Changed some recolourings. Several buildings that had CC blue and green in them (like the small houses) now use various colours. Use less bright colours in the early years, similar to Toni's sketch above.

2) Many buildings were virtually impossible to remove because town authority decrease was way too high.

3) Changed some start years to make the set a bit more usable in the early years

4) Added one additional building by Toni that was originally intended as a station store.

EDIT: Files removed... see next page

[dandan]

Next are the trees. Fixed the use of action colours in the arctic trees and updated the readme.

[dandan]

Signals: I don't know what causes the problem with the dedicated server reported by Steven above. But there was a control character in the description that was not supposed to be there, so I removed that. Unlikely that that was the cause, but anyway. Also updated the readme.

[dandan]

Landscape: I added the rice fields by Prissi that had been sitting uncoded on the website. They arguably belong more into a future Japanese Industries Set, but who knows when we will get around to that. For those who don't want the rice-fields, they can be deactivated by setting the first parameter to 0.

[dandan]

Here is an overview of the status of the various parts of the Japan Set:

Trains. In pretty good shape for now. In the long run we will want: Greater variety of passenger cars, more early steamers, higher/configurable capacities for passengers, a distinct arctic version

Buildings. We need more of them! Most wanted: Early houses, early commercial buildings, skyscrapers, stadiums.

Stations. Quite complete from 1960 onwards or so. We need more variety for the early period, some generic stuff as well as historic station buildings.

Landscape. Pretty much finished. I don't particularly like the foundations. But it's easy to use another grf to replace them.

Town Names. Not bad, but greater variety would be an improvement. Anybody interested?

Trees. I quite like them, but I know Sanchimaru had plans to improve them further. Will probably have to wait until he comes back.

Faces. Finished.

Signals. Finished.

Trams. Very nice, but not much has happened since the original release AFAIK. In the long run, it would be great to extend this one to a Japanese Road Vehicle Set. Anyone wants to draw some sprites?

Bridges. (TBRS for Japan Set) The current way of replacing bridges makes it very cumbersome to adapt the TBRS to the various combinations of track types we have. At the moment it only works with narrow gauge tracks on, Shinkansen tracks replacing maglev, and Japanese roads. I am still hoping that a more flexible solution to the whole track type issue (newroutes) will get implemented at some point. And when that happens, other bridge sets (like the TBRS) will hopefully work fine with the Japan Set, so that we don't have to bother.

Industries. Don't exist yet. I know there were some sketches and excel tables, but very little graphics have been produced so far. I am not even sure we really want to produce our own industries set from scratch. Maybe at some point we could develop some Japanese stuff for the FIRS or PBI or some other industries set.

[planetmaker]

Bridges. (TBRS for Japan Set) The current way of replacing bridges makes it very cumbersome to adapt the TBRS to the various combinations of track types we have. At the moment it only works with narrow gauge tracks on, Shinkansen tracks replacing maglev, and Japanese roads. I am still hoping that a more flexible solution to the whole track type issue (newroutes) will get implemented at some point. And when that happens, other bridge sets (like the TBRS) will hopefully work fine with the Japan Set, so that we don't have to bother.

Besides that it's a lot of work, the sources are available here via svn: http://svn.openttdcoop.org/grfdev/total_bridges/
I'm sure that th_gergo wouldn't mind (we would need asking him, of course), if someone takes it and adds your rail and road types to it and we would be glad to grant write access to that repository then.

That said: good job with this whole Japan set you produce overall. It really looks awesome!