Timberwolf's Boats

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Timberwolf
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Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

In case you were wondering whether the surprise announcement on the livestream was some sort of in-joke or an accident hastily regretted... no, it is true! May I proudly present Timberwolf's Goats.

Er, Boats.

A project that looked like it might have been scuppered before it left the slipway by voxel hulls being even more difficult than pixel hulls, but as GoRender proves a lack of artistic talent can be somewhat overcome by writing programs at it until it stops being art and starts being JSON. A short evening at the Fiddleweed Go Fountain and we now have Humber, a tool for generating plausible voxel hulls which can then have ship bits added.

Development may be a little slower as I want to avoid the crushing pressure grinder that was 3-4 trains in an evening or those large, detailed station buildings, but such is the pace of life upon a canal. Having accidentally become the purveyor of early starts and those ubiquitous horses, I'm intending to add a suitable roster from 1700 to the present day. All in glorious Foster-style 2x 8bpp, because if I'm to die on a hill it's definitely going to be one that makes people point and go, "uhm but it doesn't match the rest of the landscape tho"

First actual vehicles:

Image

And my favourite warm-up exercise, making sure I mean it when I say Foster-style. Spot the differences!

Image

(This one probably won't make it in game, unless I find a similar prototype I really like the look of, but replicating existing sprites is a good way to establish scale, style and rendering settings)

Scale on ships is one of those fun excursions into OpenTTD scale, where a 240m cargo ship looks like it'd struggle to fit a 12m bus in it. Since I'm making my life harder by going for a time period spanning everything from narrowboats to supertankers, I'm playing with a logarithmic scale for this one, so everything together looks like this:

Image

I am, of course, already pondering how to make this such a mess of callbacks and voxel rendering tricks it needs changes to the OpenTTD code just to keep performance acceptable in large games. More on that as I figure it out.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Wahazar »

At least! No more struggle with incompatible Sailing Ships and Fish set? Just one consistent ship set?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Fairyfloss »

What's next? Timberwolf's Planes? Timberwolf's OpenTTD?

In all seriousness, I'm already very interested in this. I love narrowboats, so being able to play with them, with a style that fits your RVs and Trains, sounds absolutely amazing.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by 2TallTyler »

Love it! Do you plan to add horsies? I'm interested to see how you deal with towpaths when it comes to narrowboats on open water, wide canals, canal intersections, and the other problem areas which, combined with laziness, kept my horses invisible. :P (In all seriousness, I am/was planning to do RoadTypes for canals to get around most of these.)
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

I think I might choose the cowardly path and those signature horses won't be getting an outing this time... canal boats built before the motorisation drive of the early 20th century will be assumed to be powered by arcane wizardry. Perhaps I should draw some warlocks.

(I do want to try some exciting things which haven't been done by a ship set before, it needs some figuring out what that could be though)
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Taschi »

I'm hyped.

Are you going to use realistic speeds for the narrowboats, which I suppose would put them somewhere around walking speed, or give them a couple of extra mph for the sake of gameplay?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

"Remember when you said, 'making all those large station buildings was a pain, let's do something without as much detail'?"
"No. Can't have been me. Must have been one of the other Timberwolfs."

Image

Well, I guess things will improve once we get back into the modern era, maybe?

I thought I'd put this up as an example of the gradual process these voxel-generated sets go through before they eventually reach something close to suitability for public consumption. I can spot at least three things going wrong here that will need new GoRender features, so it's probably going to be back to the code for a bit before I'm happy with the sprite output and we can get back on track with the models. Some non-technical problems as well; sails need to be bigger, while not obscuring too much detail. Also the logarithmic scale needs to provide enough difference that large ships don't look too out of place against small ships, which I think is going to require handling multipart MagicaVoxel models as the largest modern craft are going to be >256 voxel objects.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by bassem.90 »

That ia cool are you planning for zoom aircrafts ? 🙏😍😍😍
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Taschi »

bassem.90 wrote: 28 Apr 2021 16:11 That ia cool are you planning for zoom aircrafts ? 🙏😍😍😍
"Timberwolf's UK Airplanes", containing only Vickers and BAe planes, plus the Carvair.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

One thing at a time!

Some useful GoRender improvements this evening:
  • Voxels closer to the camera have higher priority in the output sprite (improves definition of rigging and masts)
  • Voxels at the edge of an object are more accurately handled (reduces the "clumping" effect of fine details on object outlines)
  • Palette colours can be set as "process" colours to influence object normals without appearing in the final output
  • Performance improvement for rendering small objects on a large canvas
Output now looks like this:

Image

No big changes to the canal boats (which is what I'd expect), but far better detail on the galleon. I'll probably play around for a bit to make sure nothing is too broken and I don't need to add any other features or tweaks, then make a new public release of GoRender for those using it.

Other realisation of the day: the default boats shrink in one of their diagonal views. The usual Transport Tycoon fun and games, but having measured all of my size templates against the original game they now need a bit of tweaking. So that needs fixing before I go too much further, and then I ought to draw a really big ship to make sure all of the scales work and don't break the game too much.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Fredinho »

Super excited about this, and it already looks great!

Just out of curiosity, how big can a container freighter be?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by nihues »

That's looking great, not sure about size of veil, feels a little small for the ship size.

Expecting Evergreen ship that get lost on canals!!!
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

Sails were just a brief test, I think they will need to be much bigger and more impressive for the final version. I have plans there...

I think container ships go up to about 360m, maybe a little more but the bigger you go the more ports and canals you'll start to have trouble navigating. There are classes roughly based on which canals they can and can't navigate, e.g. Panamax (Panama), Neopanamax (Panama after upgrades), Suezmax and so on. Oil tankers are larger, I think there are a few at over 400m. Although I know basically nothing about ships, so don't trust anything I say!
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Fredinho »

and how about ingame, how big can a ship be?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by bassem.90 »

Taschi wrote: 28 Apr 2021 18:54
bassem.90 wrote: 28 Apr 2021 16:11 That ia cool are you planning for zoom aircrafts ? 🙏😍😍😍
"Timberwolf's UK Airplanes", containing only Vickers and BAe planes, plus the Carvair.
Is it available for download?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Fraenklie »

Vickers VC 10 <3 my all time favourite!
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

Gentle reminder that I'm doing boats, I don't currently have (nor do I have plans for) an aircraft set. It's nice for everyone to be enthusiastic but also a little unhelpful if the development thread gets buried in requests for something I'm not making. One of the things I'm trying to get away from is doing newGRFs where I can't even announce a minor bugfix release without being bombarded with lists of things to add, because it makes something which should be fun start feeling like work.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by piratescooby »

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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Rezot »

Really looking forward to seeing this develop, the narrow-boats are always handy, whilst galleons simply look fun!

Out of curiosity, will there be any particular focus in the set (e.g. primarily inland/coastal shipping) or will it be a general "If it floats, it's boats" approach?

Also, just because.. shoutout for Butty Boats?
https://www.peterloud.co.uk/photos/MK/C ... boats.html
Haven't seen them in any set yet ;-)
"Their is much pleasure to be gained from useless infomation"
Timberwolf
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

At the moment, what I'm really looking for is some overviews of specific areas of maritime history (passenger carriage, riverboats, ocean-going cargo) so I can get a feeling for what happened and why. Things like that narrowboat history are really useful, the biggest thing I lack at the moment is context and what general trends were at any one time.

The rough aim for the set is to have a meaningful journey through inland, coastal and ocean shipping from the 1700s to the present day. Probably more of a "greatest hits" than a detailed anthology, but I'd like it to be representative and make sense. That's why overviews and resources which give me a 50-70 year (or longer) slice of history are so helpful, because I can get a feel for what needs to go where gameplay-wise. There's a lot I need to learn, for example I have a reasonable idea of what happened to passenger ferries from about 1950 onwards, but absolutely no idea how we got from "I'll take you across the river in me coracle for half a sheep of wool" to driving your Austin 1100 up a metal ramp to the boat.

With that in mind I'd like to avoid requests for individual types of ship as much as possible, partly because such things tend to take over a thread to the exclusion of all else but also because I'd like the first roster to be a bit of a surprise, with a few "wow, I didn't realise you'd include that!" as the screenshots emerge :)
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