Transport Tycoon Forums

                  Sun's Venezuelan Train Set
                           Development Thread


Latest release: N/A
Current version: 0.7.1


❝Sun's Venezuelan Train Set (SVTS) it's an NewGRF that adds 20+ engines which are currently in service or have been used in the past by several railways companies in Venezuela. Each of these locomotives are provided with the real life paint scheme. Most of the technical features such as power, weight, capacity, introduction dates and others are based on real life values, with some minor adjustments.❞

ABOUT THIS NEWGRF

While wandering in the forum, I always have seeing people trying to recreate pieces of their countries in this game. Whether buildings, vehicles or trains, they make an effort to put their own identity in his work.

For a long time, all I could do was see what they were doing. All that changed when, just a few weeks ago, I decided I will learn how to create NewGRFs. Following the Purno's drawing tutorial and the NML tutorial on the wiki, as well as checking pieces of codes of others and asking my doubts in this forum, I was able to create my first .grfs

And now, here I am. Using the knowledge I've adquired in these weeks, I'm trying to develop a entire set of trains that are in service or have been served in Venezuela since 1950. Best of all was not just to know how to create the add-ons for the game, but during my research I learned also a lot of things about the past and present of the locomotives and the railway system of my country

The Sun's Venezuelan Train Set (SVTS) aims to add 20+ locomotives owned by many venezuelan railways companies from 1950 to the present. Also, I have plans to add some maglevs and maybe monorails engines, based in RL prototypes created by venezuelan engineers, or maybe some fictional trains.





No .grf will be uploaded at the moment. I want to have a really "playable" version and make others adjustments before make it public. Please be patient

                  

List of planned rolling stock:

Engines:


Wagons:
Passenger coach RAIL DRAWN & CODED
Mail coach RAIL DRAWN & CODED
Metro wagon ELRL DRAWN & CODED

Note: The introduction date is based on the date that the locomotive entered Venezuela, not the date of the availability in the market.


A little preview of the real engines and the sprites

↑ Click in the image to open a large view

The side views maybe look decent, but the diagonal look horrible . I need to improve my drawing skills a lot more before try to redraw
------------------------------------------------------------
For now, I have some questions and concerns

1) Is possible to apply both livery refit (color scheme) and cargo capacity refit to the same engine? Let's say: I have a unit with two color schemes, but also I want to select between 2 capacities of the same locomotive. Can I have it for both? example: something that let me choose between this: 2) About cost factor. For testing purposes, I have used the default cost factor, and tried to adjust the price of the locomotives of my set. But problem come when I compare this set with others (like DACH, for example). My 9-part EMU cost like 400k € with the default basecost, but a train of similar characteristic in others sets cost more than a million. What do you recommend?

3) About adding metros and suburban trains. Should metros be implemented as trams or just like a normal electric engine?

4) About licenses and those stuff. I've read this thread, but still I can't decide which license implement. I know most of the projects here are under GPL, but I have my doubts about "(...)make the sources publicly available along with the binary/NewGRF". If I put the .nml file and the graphic files attached in this topic, it will count as the "source"?

sorry for my english, feel free to correct me

Wow, sounds awesome. Already got some screenshots or artwork to share?

Those __ views look really nice! You certainly got the feel of OTTD captured in them. Answering some of your questions:


1) Yes, it is possible. Easiest way is to simply create four separate cargo subtypes, and define livery & capacity for each one of them.

3) I would code metros as normal electric vehicles, and later, if you feel like it, you can define more complex railtypes for them, like metro tracks.

4) Yes, if you do that for every release, but that would be really cumbersome. I recommend transfering your project to http://dev.openttdcoop.org/. Front page has a link, where you can start a ticket for a new project. I also recommend joining the devzone irc channel. If you've never used a software repository system, it will take some time to get used to, but it is really worth the effort. If you are using Windows, this tutorial has everything you need to make the magic happen. I personally followed that tutorial with basically no knowledge of Linux or Mercurial, and everything turned out fine. Some parts of it are outdated, because of updates made to Fedora, but you should be able to figure it out.

Sunmannus wrote: 4) About licenses and those stuff. I've read this thread, but still I can't decide which license implement. I know most of the projects here are under GPL, but I have my doubts about "(...)make the sources publicly available along with the binary/NewGRF". If I put the .nml file and the graphic files attached in this topic, it will count as the "source"?

Yes. If you also include the necessary language file(s) and - if used - custom_tags.txt.
Just make a single zip file with the nml, language and graphics files and you'll be quite on the safe side.

Additionally or alternatively you could consider using a service like offered at the DevZone which can host the source for you if you use a version control system (sounds complicated? Is not! Join #openttdcoop.devzone for help).

EDIT: juzza1 was faster than me

For most proposed engines, the efficient thing to do is just reliverying their US Set or NARS versions.

Perhaps the 2ccSet got some useful sprites as well?

@ juzza1: thanks!. I'll try again with the refit options. About the subway, my concern is about the speed. the rl speed of most metro lines here is near 90-110km/h, and for the TTD universe, that isn't very useful.

@ planetmaker & juzza1: I've taken a look at the devzone and I think that is a great tool, but really I don't want to worry now with mercurial, emulate linux and those things. Maybe in a future. I'll take the GPL v2 and use this thread to attach the source, after the first public release.

@Purno & oberhümer: Yes. I know that the US Train set and Canadian Train Set have used many of the same models than I want to implement (furthermore, some trains have exactly the same paint scheme, because one of the venezuelan companies bought the trains directly to Canadian National Railways, and they did not worry about repainting). . But when I started doing this set, I chose to make everything from scratch (well, looking constantly other similar trains ). And ofc, I was not sure about licensing issues and these things, but now that I've decided to work with the GPL, maybe is time to be more 'cooperative' and look carefully if I can use pieces of other newgrfs (provided that it is allowed, of course.)


Well, time for another screenshot

These are the trains drawn and coded until now:

↑ Right click in the image and select "open in a new tab" for a large view

LEFT
From UP to DOWN:
EMD GP15
GMD GP38-2
MLW M420-W
EMD SD9
GE C30-7
ALSTOM S5000 (subway) (with VTS metro wagons)
CSR DFJ2 'Pioneer' (made using parts of TGV Thalys and one the Shinkansens trains from the 2cc Trainset)

RIGHT
From UP to DOWN
GMD GP9 (with the three liveries)
Baldwing AS-616
EMD F7 (with VTS passenger coach, using livery override)
Baldwing DRS-4-4-1500
GMD GP40-2W
CSR CKD4C
CSR 'DMU for Venezuela'

Disclaimer:
The author of this set will not take responsability for injury to your eyes if you look too close to the diagonal views of the sprites

These look bang on the money. A very interesting project!

Doorslammer wrote:These look bang on the money. A very interesting project!

Yes, a very interesting project. I'm Waiting for the release of this set of trains to use in the game .

Been hoping someone would do a South American trainset. Tried to get pikka and Dan to do SARS but no dice . This looks nice.

This train set with the building set is awesome!

Well, there has not been any updates in a while. now I came with a new set of question to you

1) I still trying to learn more about nml. Currently I'm trying to put some parameters to allow users to select the purchase and running costs that they want. But I need help here. I need to know what are the values of some of the others trains set, like the canadian, finnish, 2CC, swedish and so... If some of you can provide me with that info, I'll be very grateful (especially the values of BUILT_VEHICLE_TRAINS and BUILT_VEHICLE_WAGONS). With those values, I can adjust my parameters and offers a better compatibility between sets.

2) Again, I'm stuck trying to create the four refit options for both capacity and livery selection (look at the second post). What I want to do is something like this I can do the switch for livery or for capacity, but I don't know how to combine it. If someone could show me how, I can continue working in the rest of the code.

3) I never liked the original openttd train depot. That's why I tried to make ones from scratch, but i failed. So I thought maybe I could use some of the graphics of the other newgrfs, and adapt them to look like depots. The result:

Right click and select 'Open in a new tab' for a large view

What you think? It isn't completely finished yet, some fixes need to be made. And ofc, depots will be disabled or enabled via parameters (disabled by default). What I'm not sure is about copyright stuff, but, as at least I give the proper credits, 'll be within the law, right?

4) About replacing GUI icons: If I'm only providing new depots and using the default railtypes, can I only replace the depots icon in the GUI, without affecting the rest? (signals, rails, underlays...). And if yes, how? Personally, I don't have problems seeing the default icons, but it would be nice if the set can provide their own icons

I had a lot of questions to ask, but I've forgotten many of these :F Let me remember and I'll be back

To me this type of depo like. Good .

1) Many sets change the base costs, so balancing will be difficult. One way is to keep the basecosts unchanged, and balance your vehicles according to the default vehicles. If you want to know the values, for Finnish Trainset we used 0 (default) as a base cost for vehicles, and 4 for wagons. Running costs are all set at -1. Dutch trainset uses -1, 1 and 2 respectively, so you will already notice balancing costs between two sets will be very hard.

2) You will need to use the cargo_subtype variable in your other switches to change stats according to your refit option. If you are using the "refit hack" to change the length of your vehicle, then of course you will have to go much deeper than that, but hopefully that code helps you forward.

3) GPL v2 stuff doesn't need permission or credits, as long as you re-release it under GPL v2. The other license is, according to Wikipedia, attribution (by) license, which means you could re-release it freely as long as you credit the original authors.

4) You could do it with a replace block or by defining railtypes which themselves only define the depot graphics (this is ok, as the rest of the properties and graphics will fallback to the default onces). I'm not sure which approach is better, though.

Sorry to necro this post. I really like the depots posted earlier in this post, so I made a small newGRF that basically adds just the depots. All rights go to Sunmannus, the FIRS crew, and the people who made the total town replacement set GPL v2