Transport Tycoon Forums

I love digging through various archives on TT-Forums, GRFCrawler and other sites discovering the past of TTD and OpenTTD. There are quite a few things that have been forgotten over the years for a variety of reasons: unfinished projects, projects started and abandoned by developers, or just lack of interest. So, ever so often as I come across something interesting, I will go find out as much as I can about it and post it here.

For our first featured set, check out the Real Arcade Town Set by PeCeT_full. PeCeT_full started out with making small modifications to the original TTD sprites, and was encouraged to develop sprites of his own. Over several months he eventually cranked out a few buildings which blend in nicely with the original TTD graphics. The set includes a restaurant/bar, house and office tiles. He also created another stand-alone NewGRF, a 2x2 pharmacy building.

Nice idea. I look forward to seeing more of these.

Okay, well, it doesn't appear that Real Arcade Town Set will load in the newest OpenTTD, so let's move on to something you CAN play with!

Streetlights for #WWOTTDGD

A few years back, dihedral and several other users came up with the idea for a World-Wide OpenTTD Game Day, and wanted to have some unique NewGRFs to throw in. Lord Azamath came up with this nice piece of eyecandy that shows up inside of towns. Mind you, the lights act more like strobes than street lights, but then again it's never dark in TTD (at least, not without a little help).

Nice idea for a topic! I've literally got dozens of pages bookmarked for obscure grfs that can't be found outside these forums. Never seen those streetlights before though.

Yep, nice idea indeed. I'll allow it.

kamnet wrote:For our first featured set, check out the Real Arcade Town Set by PeCeT_full. PeCeT_full started out with making small modifications to the original TTD sprites, and was encouraged to develop sprites of his own. Over several months he eventually cranked out a few buildings which blend in nicely with the original TTD graphics. The set includes a restaurant/bar, house and office tiles. He also created another stand-alone NewGRF, a 2x2 pharmacy building.

Hello

As you may know it, I am the creator of RATS and I am pretty amazed of hearing from you that you have found something good in this set, though. I made it back in 2006 but I didn't think someone would say ANY word about it nowadays. Due to the fact I have many other things to do, I claim this set along with the Pharmacy buildings to be under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Unfortunately, I won't make it compatible with the newest version of OpenTTD because I used GRFMaker to create GRF files and I focused mostly on porting GRFs to TTDPatch. Anyway, have fun with my artwork.

See ya,
PeCeT_full

PeCeT_full wrote:

kamnet wrote:For our first featured set, check out the Real Arcade Town Set by PeCeT_full. PeCeT_full started out with making small modifications to the original TTD sprites, and was encouraged to develop sprites of his own. Over several months he eventually cranked out a few buildings which blend in nicely with the original TTD graphics. The set includes a restaurant/bar, house and office tiles. He also created another stand-alone NewGRF, a 2x2 pharmacy building.

Hello

As you may know it, I am the creator of RATS and I am pretty amazed of hearing from you that you have found something good in this set, though. I made it back in 2006 but I didn't think someone would say ANY word about it nowadays. Due to the fact I have many other things to do, I claim this set along with the Pharmacy buildings to be under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Unfortunately, I won't make it compatible with the newest version of OpenTTD because I used GRFMaker to create GRF files and I focused mostly on porting GRFs to TTDPatch. Anyway, have fun with my artwork.

See ya,
PeCeT_full

Welcome back, and thank you for taking the time to respond! Thank you also for releasing your sprites under Creative Commons. A few hours ago, on a lark, I decompiled the .grf and found the problem, an Action 4 that had nothing defined. I went ahead and removed this line, and combined the pharmacy building code with it, re-compiled and everything works wonderfully again. I'll post it in your original development thread.

It's Wednesday, so it's time to feature a new Forgotten NewGRF...

Wile E. Coyote's Automotive Plant Industry

Eventually superseded by the auto plant industry in George's ECS industry set, Wile E. Coyote gave this a go several years ago as an stand-alone NewGRF. It sets up an industry chain of feeding sand and clay into a glass factory, and the glass and steel to an automotive plant, which produces cars that are distributed via several styles of small car dealerships inside towns. Not all of the intended graphics for this set were finished, notably it recycles the diamond mind from the sub-tropical environment as the graphics for the clay mine. Wile E. Coyote ran out of free time to finish the set.

I have actually attempted to run this set alongside FIRS. You have to load it after FIRS for the industry chains to work correctly. I didn't play for very long, but it does appear that everything does work fine in both sets, and you will see two sets of both clay mines and glass factories. No idea how balanced the payments and profits are, though. Enjoy!

It could indeed be a nice addition to the FIRS set (as that doesn't have a carfactory), but it will need some tweaking in the NFO to make it up to date.
For example if you start a game after 2001 it won't generate cardealershops, so you can't get the cars anywhere delivered.
Also it would be nice if the cardealershops can be built by the player, so that they won't dissapear when you have got the construction/deliverylines up.
And it would be nice if you have a choice in the different dealershops that can be built, I've never gotten the Mercedesdealer and that building looks so great.

It could indeed be a nice addition to the FIRS set (as that doesn't have a carfactory)

thats a good point - i didn´t know why this nice newgrf was forgotten in a dark room ...

but i see some problems, special with FIRS & ECS:

- without FIRS & ECS there is no industry producing rubber
- with FIRS only the Recycling Depot, with ECS the Touristic Center (^^) produces rupper

only a short list of FIRS-"problems":
- 2 Steel Mills - one produces steel, one metal (Steel can only transported by an newgrf-trainset, rubber too)
- Glass will by accepted at the fishing harbour, the brewery & other
- the Arable produces steel - the sugar refinery needs steel & glass
- ...

maybe someone have a idea to get it right ?

FIRS' metal is internally the same as steel, just with a different name. So that shouldn't give problems.

FIRS' metal is internally the same as steel, just with a different name. So that shouldn't give problems.

maybe its a coding problem (don´t ask me, i can´t code), but also its a transport problem: the automotive plant only accepts steel, no metal and "metal" is used by FIRS

The NewGRF is not meant to be used with FIRS. If you want to make it FIRS-compatible, you'll have to refrain from defining all cargos but the vehicle cargo - and that in the right cargo slot.

There are also some other issues when you use this GRF with FIRS:
- Productiongoods gets replaced by Cars
- Cotton gets replaced by Glass

Also the carfactory can only be placed in the near vicinity of a citycenter, I would place a carfactory well outside of a town

So this potentially very nice addition would need a major coding overhaul.

Generally, both ECS and FIRS are only compatible with specifically crafted add-on NewGRFs. For both cases you need to know which industry IDs and cargoIDs are taken by the set you want to write the add-on for. And then you can define new industries and cargos only for those IDs which are not taken by ECS or FIRS respectively.

What is described here is just a result of attaching a new layout and new cargo acceptance to some of the existing industries. With strange effects. Like keeping the placement restrictions imposed in this case by FIRS onto the industry which now is overwritten. Probably it was the construction yard or similar. And you can also end up with two types of steel. Or steel and metal alongside. Hard to distinguish for the user - if at all - but different by cargoID.

Except the graphics it will need a complete re-write to become usable with FIRS. And the same probably holds true for modern ECS, too.

Maybe easier and also a nice additional Industrychain would be if the carfactory and cardealer gets incorporated into FIRS? The graphics are too nice to be forgotten forever.

FIRS will gain an auto-plant and auto parts cargo in a specific economy. If economies ever get done. Strong case of 'real life intervenes' right now

ZIMMLOCK'S PRISON

It's been a few weeks since I've had a chance to post one of these, but tonight I just happened to stumble over Zimmlock's prison. This was the sprite that would kick of what would become Total Town Replacement Set. Originally it was designed to replace the stadium, but Oracle re-coded it so that it it could either show up as a 2x2 building replacement, as a random replacement for the stadium, or replace all stadiums.

Nice sprite - it would be nice to have it as an eye candy object...