Transport Tycoon Forums

Timberwolf's US Trainset!

AmtrakSmashS7 wrote: ↑06 Sep 2020 12:38 Timberwolf's European Trainset...

Maybe

I'd honestly love to see him make an american set when he finishes with this

Class 717?

What do you think you're going to accomplish? Generally, most people don't enjoy being spammed with unsolicited requests for what they should do in their spare time.

Taschi wrote: ↑08 Sep 2020 05:04 What do you think you're going to accomplish? Generally, most people don't enjoy being spammed with unsolicited requests for what they should do in their spare time.

"spammed"? I indirectly made a suggestion. I don't care if he does it or not, but it would be cool if he did. Like you said; it's their choice, I'm not trying to force him.

If someone or some group were to make the tracking table and the voxel models, I would be more interested...

(I'm not really familiar enough with US railroading, and I think it'd need an equivalent US road vehicles set to make things complete. Code-wise I think most of what's needed is there, although I think it'd need something similar to the class 20 nose-to-nose code for creating the A and B units where the US likes adding extra boxes of engines rather than just one loco)

Finishing the stations is my next goal. A little bit slower as there aren't so many practical examples for things I want to do so I need to figure stuff out from scratch. Current things to figure out are how to add fences on tiles at the "edge" of a station, and make adjacent footbridges link together properly (i.e. switch spriteset if there's an adjacent tile of the same type)

I could be of great help if you do decide to take it on. I have plenty of info on locos from the states!

I am learning a lot about how much easier NML has made creating GRF files. It took me several attempts to finally figure out how to do an Action 14 callback to make dynamic station fences work, but I think I am finally there (give or take some niceties such as fences for the ramp tiles):



On the plus side, having finally figured out how a callback chain works it should be a little bit less taxing to work on some of the other things like 2x1 (and larger) station buildings, multi-tile station halls, auto buffer stops and other such fancy pieces.

Mmmm tasty station set

I started making some 1x1 station buildings - I don't want to go too mad with the station set but it's nice to have a few non-track tiles to add details here and there. (And totally not to walk your catchment area a few tiles over and take advantage of that cluster of skyscrapers you can't quite get the platforms near enough to...)



Larger buildings will follow but after the ordeal of fences I wanted something that was simple to code, and the single-tile buildings fit exactly that brief.

That looks great! station buildings themselves are always a must!

Timberwolf wrote: ↑15 Sep 2020 20:08 I started making some 1x1 station buildings - I don't want to go too mad with the station set but it's nice to have a few non-track tiles to add details here and there. (And totally not to walk your catchment area a few tiles over and take advantage of that cluster of skyscrapers you can't quite get the platforms near enough to...)



Larger buildings will follow but after the ordeal of fences I wanted something that was simple to code, and the single-tile buildings fit exactly that brief.

Looking fantastic! Are you thinking of making single sided platform variations? Would be good for us eye candy players out there who don't use double sided station tiles.

Yes! The main reason I haven't done any yet is it's only a tiny change in the program I use to generate the NFO to do a single-sided layout, and I wanted to get all the complex bits out of the way first.

These buildings look really good. I think they could look even better by adding just a shade of darkness in and under edges (e.g. roof edges). While this is not strictly real-world, it subtly enhances the contrast for a crisper look.

Hi, could you please enable autorefit (station refitting) for this set? (and maybe also the road vehicle set?) It's quite essential for a lot of playstyles I think, and personally it's a feature I find it hard to live without.

It would also be great if the container and covered wagons weren't just limited to express cargos, but carried all covered/piece goods as well (e.g. Timber, Vehicle Bodies, Recyclables)

Thanks for your continued effort on this set

The refitting should be easy enough, when I next get round to making a maintenance release, it's only a simple flag on the vehicles.

On the cargo selection, that's a deliberate gameplay choice, I found with sets that follow the more "anything can go in anything it could feasibly fit in" approach I end up with everything going in the fastest possible vehicle and it loses the sense of variety and the challenges of having different length vehicles and slightly different maximum speeds on the main freight line. (Although speeds in my set aren't as divergent as say UKRS2, it's usually more like 5-10mph difference). When I get back to trains one thing I'd like to do is make things worse by having even more specific vehicles such as the Cartic!

Station progress is slow and somewhat intermittent, I've been playing around with custom foundations - still not got anywhere too useful, depending how I feel this could end up going in the "get something out and come back to it, very few prototypical station buildings actually need this" bucket.

Timberwolf wrote: ↑15 Sep 2020 20:08 I started making some 1x1 station buildings - I don't want to go too mad with the station set but it's nice to have a few non-track tiles to add details here and there.

Well, make sure to not get yourself hooked into it then, if not we'll find ourselves blessed with a wide variants of non-track tiles

Timberwolf wrote: ↑15 Sep 2020 20:08 (And totally not to walk your catchment area a few tiles over and take advantage of that cluster of skyscrapers you can't quite get the platforms near enough to...)

Heh

By the way, will there be single-sided platforms and buffers for that station set? And if you happened to accidentally fall into the pit of Rail Furniture, would you mind giving us some nice waypoints too? Also, do you not fancy a Garratt?

Timberwolf wrote: ↑05 Oct 2020 20:52 On the cargo selection, that's a deliberate gameplay choice, I found with sets that follow the more "anything can go in anything it could feasibly fit in" approach I end up with everything going in the fastest possible vehicle and it loses the sense of variety and the challenges of having different length vehicles and slightly different maximum speeds on the main freight line. (Although speeds in my set aren't as divergent as say UKRS2, it's usually more like 5-10mph difference). When I get back to trains one thing I'd like to do is make things worse by having even more specific vehicles such as the Cartic!

Fair enough, though as a counterpoint I'd say that the autorefit-heavy playstyle changes the dynamics of this somewhat. For example using the Dutch trainset I can carry recyclables in both fast container wagons and slower open wagons, but I'm still forced to use the slower wagons if I'm carrying ore in the other direction.

But I guess it's just aimed at a different playstyle than say, Iron Horse. But that's why we have options

Some work in progress...



I think this uncovers a bug in the way GoRender is producing shadows. (Hence the odd shaded patches on the side wall). There are a few things used to calculate shading, and I can get debug output for any of them. Checking this, the lighting based on calculated normals is fine:



Ambient occlusion doesn't have any unexpected shocks either:



But the shadows are a world of crazy that makes no sense at all:



I'm guessing there's something wrong that ends up being fairly subtle on objects with a lot of intricate detail, and it's only creating something big and slab sided that's shown up some rather bizarre calculations. Interesting that the window pattern is being shifted a good distance over on the wall. Such is the curse of writing your own tooling, you only get to make art for so long before you have to start coding again...

Edit: and now fixed. This is a bug which only turned up on objects which were flipped by the renderer. The object being rendered is flipped, but then the shadow path flips it again and you get shadows tracing a mirror image of the object and therefore doing weird things.

Station tile (in need of more detail still, but I did say work in progress!):


Corrected shadows: