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Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 08 Mar 2017 18:51
by Kruemelchen
Hello everyone!

I've come to present Country Roads, a NewGRF designed to work with NotRoadTypes included in OpenTTD 1.10.0 and later.

Description:
Country Roads is a small set of special use case Road Types, including mud and sand. It is designed for graphical enrichment of country side with roads crossing fields or woods. It adds no extra functionality, just custom sprites.
This set is a fork of supermop's unspooled, and should be usable as an add-on for said set.
This set is also under GPLv2.

Current version: 1.0

New Road Types:
  1. sand (field) road: SAND → support for ROAD (regular RVs)
  2. mud (wood) road: OFFR → support for HAUL (heavy haul vehicles)*
Features:
  • 2 new Road Types: mud (designed for wood roads) and sand (designed for field roads)
  • adjustable speed limit
  • *mud road is enabled for heavy haul vehicles and cannot be used by regular Road Vehicles
  • but mud road can be configured by parameter to work like sand road (and thus allow regular RVs)
  • fine road transitions
  • custom depot graphics
  • custom wooden bridge surface
  • graphical support for temperate, alpine**, arctic and tropical climate
  • support for desert as well as snow, including changing snow line
  • snow marker poles on snowy terrain for sand road (on either side and end of track)
  • snow marker poles will only be drawn outside of towns
  • languages: English, German, French, Japanese
** this requires the correct "OpenGFX+ Landscape" parameter to be set
preview version 0.2
preview version 0.2
Kuty Transport, 8. Sep 1999 zsm.png (146.34 KiB) Viewed 22734 times
The download of version 1.0 can be found here.

I'd be happy to have this set tested and contribute to spread use cases of the NRT feature.

Cheers,
Kruemelchen

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 08 Mar 2017 18:58
by supermop
Looks Good! Glad to see more roadtype sets!

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 08 Mar 2017 19:32
by planetmaker
aye, I like the look of those roads a lot :)

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 09 Mar 2017 00:46
by Kruemelchen
Great to see some positive respond :)

A small update:

Version 0.1.1
  • custom depot graphics (farm building + wood shed)
  • optimisation of road and bridge graphics
  • German translation
  • adjusted parameters to allow for normal + haul vehicles on the mud road (i.e. for use with RVs that don't distinguish between the two)

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 09 Mar 2017 10:18
by Amak
Wow; Great work!

The dirt roads look spot on!

Sand road doesn't look much different I think, here in my area sand roads don't have grass in the middle, the middle generally a bit lighter colour from erosion.

Is it possible to have a road type effect reliability of vehicles driving on it?

Thank you for your hard work.

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 09 Mar 2017 10:59
by Kruemelchen
Thank you for the respond.
Amak wrote:Sand road doesn't look much different I think, here in my area sand roads don't have grass in the middle, the middle generally a bit lighter colour from erosion.
The roads I was thinking of when drawing this, usually have only one lane and run e.g. between fields to remote farms or settlements. These roads are usually only drivable by tractors or offroad vehicles, and not fixated like normal roads. But one-lane roads in OTTD are not supported, so I made two lanes.
If you want real sandy roads you might want to use the dirt road of Unspooled (or ARRS for non-NRT games).

But I might come back to your suggestion for temperate climate, as it looks a bit off with greenish grass in between.
Is it possible to have a road type effect reliability of vehicles driving on it?
I thought about implementing a different usability for normal RVs and heavy hauling trucks myself. But I think such things are not possible to implement road type-wise.
Also, this should eventually be done via RV sets, I think.
(Though, as the standard speed limit is 20 km/h, the player might feel like RVs break down more often, as it takes quite some time running over long roads :lol: )

What I'm looking into implementing is changing the speed limit due to snow. Such roads aren't usually serviced so they should become quite a hassle in winter.

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 09 Mar 2017 11:22
by andythenorth
Kruemelchen wrote:I thought about implementing a different usability for normal RVs and heavy hauling trucks myself. But I think such things are not possible to implement road type-wise.
For railtypes, the vehicle can read the current roadtype or current tramtype as a variable, and this can be used in callbacks that can modify some properties of the vehicle, for example adjusting power or visual effects.

It's hard to use this well, as it's not obvious to the player why vehicle properties change, but it does offer some possibilities.

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 09 Mar 2017 16:52
by Amak
Kruemelchen wrote:or ARRS for non-NRT games.
I use ARRS at the moment with JGR. But only because he hasn't included NRT yet.
(Though, as the standard speed limit is 20 km/h, the player might feel like RVs break down more often, as it takes quite some time running over long roads :lol: )
They are just bad drivers getting bogged haha. Here we dont get any snow, but tar roads are renowned for pot-holes.

Would the road type 'Gravel' interest you?

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 09 Mar 2017 23:05
by Kruemelchen
Amak wrote:Would the road type 'Gravel' interest you?
Well, I like the gravel road type supermop has implemented in unspooled. If I'd implement gravel roads they wouldn't be any better, so I think it's best to go for supermops road type set. You can run both sets together anyway.

Meanwhile, here is another update:
  • graphics for temperate climate, as well as snow (including sheds and bridge surface)
  • support for temperate/arctic and snow line (obviously)
  • changed order of roadtypes in the menu in order to better fit with unspooled
Still to do:
  • snow graphics optimisation (to better fit the OpenGFX style)
  • graphical support for desert climate
I'd like to do but don't know how to do (yet):
  • support for OpenGFX+ alpine landscape (temperate grass plus snow line)
  • custom road-side decorations
If these are solved this set could be considered feature complete.
Cheers,
Kruemelchen

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 00:23
by Kruemelchen
Final Version out now:

Version 0.2 (final)
  • snow graphics fixed
  • support for alpine climate (needs OpenGFX+ Landscape with correctly set parameter)
  • support for desert climate, as well as desert terrain
  • sand road in snowy terrain shows now snow marks on either side or end of the track (can be disabled via parameter)
  • code cleaning
First post updated with NewGRF Download.

This version is feature-complete.

If you find any bugs or graphical glitches, please report them.

Cheers,
Kruemelchen

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 06:50
by STD
Thank you for the work done. Well done. I really liked to test the game. Cool :bow: . I really hope that will end soon testing NRT to finally add in a nightly or future OpenTTD 1.7.0 :D .

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 07:34
by kamnet
STD wrote:Thank you for the work done. Well done. I really liked to test the game. Cool :bow: . I really hope that will end soon testing NRT to finally add in a nightly or future OpenTTD 1.7.0 :D .
It won't be released for OpenTTD 1.7.0, which is set for release in just a few weeks. It might be finished in time to consider for 1.8.0, though.

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 07:47
by STD
kamnet wrote:
STD wrote:Thank you for the work done. Well done. I really liked to test the game. Cool :bow: . I really hope that will end soon testing NRT to finally add in a nightly or future OpenTTD 1.7.0 :D .
It won't be released for OpenTTD 1.7.0, which is set for release in just a few weeks. It might be finished in time to consider for 1.8.0, though.
Even so. I hope that everything will happen a little faster. Importantly, work is underway to develop new types of roads.

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 15:31
by Pyoro
Frankly, when I saw that NRT would (for now) just be a patch I worried that nobody would bother with GRFs. But there's already quite a selection of great ones for it; quite the nice surprise :)

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 15:50
by andythenorth
Pyoro wrote:Frankly, when I saw that NRT would (for now) just be a patch I worried that nobody would bother with GRFs.
If there are no grfs, it won't make trunk :) Needs grfs to test it (both spec and code) ;)

Is it just a patch, or is it a fork with a build on the official compile farm? :twisted: http://www.openttd.org/en/download-ratt

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 12 Mar 2017 16:41
by Kruemelchen
I'd be awesome if NRT would be directly included into trunk at some point. If including into 1.8.0 seems doable, the better. Though NRT should be nearly feature-complete at that time. I doubt it could be included but switched on-off easily, like other experimental features like cargodist were.

I guess, the next step will be to make more RV NewGRFs support the additional road types.


However, in the first post there is a new version available, including mainly some (graphical) fixes:
version 0.2.1
  • updated graphics for better seamlessness of tracks
  • sand and mud bridges are now graphically distinguishable (sand on bridge, mud on snowy bridge)
  • snow marks now won't show in towns
What still bugs me, is however, that I can't switch off the snow marks (fake catenary) on road stops. Reason is I couldn't define special catenary graphics for road stops. However, since it is planned to support roadside decorations in NRT at some point, this will be fixed by using correct roadside decorations instead of "hacky" fake catenary.

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 15 May 2017 03:47
by GuilhermeJK
I've always desired dirt roads such as these. While testing it, none of my vehicles could go on mud road, only on sand roads. I am using Polroad, HEQS and Road Hog. What do you think it might be happening?

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 15 May 2017 04:11
by GuilhermeJK
GuilhermeJK wrote:I've always desired dirt roads such as these. While testing it, none of my vehicles could go on mud road, only on sand roads. I am using Polroad, HEQS and Road Hog. What do you think it might be happening?
Forget it, just found there is a parameter to allow other vehicles on mud road (facepalm). Sorry :oops:

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 19 May 2017 20:36
by Kruemelchen
GuilhermeJK wrote:
GuilhermeJK wrote:I've always desired dirt roads such as these. While testing it, none of my vehicles could go on mud road, only on sand roads. I am using Polroad, HEQS and Road Hog. What do you think it might be happening?
Forget it, just found there is a parameter to allow other vehicles on mud road (facepalm). Sorry :oops:
You're welcome! :wink:

Per standard the mud roads only allow for HAUL-Type vehicles (for realisms sake). Unfortunately there are few GRFs to support this, yet. If you play with HEQS (which doesn't use the HAUL vehicle type), I recommend you use this parameter, you just discovered.

However, I hope HEQS (and other GRFs) will adopt the HAUL-Road feature, some day. :))

Re: Country Roads (NRT)

Posted: 29 May 2017 14:29
by Lesarthois
I'm testing it now, and it's all but good fun.
I liek the adjustable parameters, especially since only Road Hod support the HAUL vehicles.

One little question (totally unrelated to the GRF, just for my personnal culture) : what is a sand road? :p
It looks like a regular dirt road to me when I look on Internet?