Preparing a holidays multiplayer session with my friends

[Rocko Bonaparte]

I have some friend in a board game group that I'd like to try OpenTTD as a sandbox around the holidays. Basically, we just want to play with some trains and make our own little optimization problems. I was trying to figure out a good setup for people who otherwise would have never played OpenTTD nor the original games. There's also a question of theme. Last I checked, there wasn't much for Christmas-themed GRFs so I figured I'd just go with an arctic terrain. Are there any little things here and there I can throw in that have little splashes of Christmas? No, not Toyland.

To let people dabble in some optimization, I was thinking of using the FIRS arctic basic. I don't know if anything particularly revolutionary has come out in the past two years or so but I'll consider alternatives.

There are some configuration settings I'd like to figure out. I want to give people plenty of flat, open space originally so I was thinking of a pretty flat terrain with industries and cities being somewhat sparse. The thing is that I don't want to have the normal distance penalties applied to these increased distances. I just don't want people struggling with things to then have to also have too many issues with terrain and crowded areas (some will come up naturally). Are there settings I can tweak to adjust this?

[jfs]

A few years ago I started a concept for a holiday-themed "Winter Wonderland" industry set. I have the basic coding for it done, but I don't have any graphics for it, which is basically where it's stuck.

From the top of my head, some of the industries involved are:
Farms supplying wool (from sheep) and poultry.
Knitteries turning wool into warm sweaters.
Candy wells, pumping molten candy out of the ground.
Offshore candy wells, pumping molten candy out from underneath the sea, production increases with a steady supply of sweaters to keep workers warm.
Candy cane factory.
Tree farm, supplying trees and wood pulp.
Glitter catcher.
Tree decorator, decorating trees with glitter to make festive trees.
Some kind of toy factory.
Wrapping paper mill, turning wood pulp into wrapping paper.
Present wrapping workshop, wrapping toys and sweaters in wrapping paper.
Giant "Chimney" industry built inside towns, that accepts presents and candy canes.
Mail is renamed to Greeting cards.

I also want to replace the ground sprites with all snow, and all town buildings to use snow-covered versions, but that's kind of optional.

[kamnet]

To make setting up and connecting to the game easier, I'd suggest playing with OpenTTD 12.0-RC1.

Playing with FIRS 4 should alleviate the distance problem, as a lot of the primary cargoes have a fairly flat payment rate to negate decay. Passengers still require some priority, though, so there's still challenges to be had.

As for Christmas-themed stuff, first set of the theme with the right music - Traditional Winter Holiday Music Pack, available from the in-game content server.
Also available in-game is Hungarian Stations (get all three versions), which have nice old-style grand stations as well as snowy Christmas-themed markets and tiles to place.
Swedish Houses have nice decorations year-around, and if you enable the flag parameter, they change to Christmas trees in December and January.
OpenGFX+ Trees has an option for nice coniferous trees. You can enable them all by default, or enable just options #12-19 for snow-topped trees.

Every town should have a Christmas tree, and with this NewGRF, you can do just that every time you build a statue in a town: viewtopic.php?t=35107
This is also available as an Object NewGRF, so you can plant them anywhere you want: viewtopic.php?p=987019#p987019
Wallyweb made a nice snow-aware holiday-themed bandstand that you can build a park around: viewtopic.php?p=1238582#p1238582
And, more trees... I mentioned OpenGFX+ Trees, but one really popular set of trees has been SAC's "Stolen Trees"/"testw.grf" file. She released an improved update awhile ago, known as INFRA Trees, and these are a bit more vibrant than OpenGFX+ Trees. http://www.simuscape.net/simutalk/viewt ... =163&t=152
You'll have to manually download these and put them in your newgrf/ folder (not content_download/newgrf/).

If you want to go all-in, you could try playing with this Christmas-themed town names set: viewtopic.php?p=1216421#p1216421
And for some more cheeky fun, download Kaaskrokets Fictional Aircraft (in-game download), and enable Santa Claus and his Reindeer!

And I think that about covers it. Have fun!

[Rocko Bonaparte]

Are there some face NewGRFs with beards? We want to have ourselves a nice Santa CEO.

I also made the mistake of showing my wife Toyland.

[Eddi]

could be worse, could have showed toyland with original GFX set