Transport Tycoon Forums

Hi,

I'm looking to do all sprite overhaul (120k) with minimal change to Vanilla, possibly changing names of vehicles.

My request is for information on setting up to see in game reflections of changes as quickly as possible.

This would (in my head) include:
Where to get necessary source files,
In game terminal commands,
External software available on Linux for task at hand,
Some compiling information would be useful,
Any tips and tricks.

Nml is installed and ready to go, I've simply on idea where to start.

Options would be

* provide your own baseset grf (substituting for original baseset or OpenGFX or ZBase etc)
* a non-baseset grf that replaces all the things you want to change

I'm not the best person to explain the differences. Base sets have much less flexibility about *everything* but are the conventional way to do a full replacement of sprites without changing any other properties. https://wiki.openttd.org/Base_graphics

Vehicle names are a bit of a curve ball, I don't know if they can be changed in basesets or not. It will depend where the strings come from, I would guess they're OpenTTD strings, but I haven't checked.

If you discover that a baseset is the way to go, then you'll want to fork from OpenGFX https://github.com/openTTD/opengfx

If you need to write non-baseset grfs, then there are many options, either start from scratch, or fork some of the other grfs, like OpenGFX+ grfs etc.

Yes, base vehicle names are internal "core" strings, I don't think a GRF (NewGRF or baseset) can override those. You'll either have to create a separate "translation" of the game that changes the vehicle names, replace the base vehicles with NewGRF ones that are identical except for name.

In order to add what andy and jfs said:

If you're all for graphics and want a graphical overhaul, then going for a base set is - at least - initially easier. Grab the source of zBase or OpenGFX and start to replace sprites as you see fit and wherever you feel like. You hardly need to change any of the code itself, just adopt the file names and positions where inside the files the sprites are found.

Likely though, you will come to a point where you feel the limitations imposed by base set which offer no flexibility at all in terms of how big entities are, what cargo they refit to / accept etc. So you might want to go the NewGRF route eventually.

what works well for me: grab one of the many many projects, and use that as means to guide you through it. Make use of the documentation in the NewGRF wiki to fill in the gaps - and try and improve

And of course there's IRC and this forum.

there is also an option inbetween "Base Set" and "NewGRF": A static NewGRF, which has the following advantages:

• you don't have to provide ALL sprites, you can start with a few that you care about the most and build from there (like with NewGRFs)
• people with and without your static NewGRF can play together in multiplayer servers (like with Base Sets)

however, the OpenTTD GUI currently misses an option to set up static NewGRFs, and you have to edit the openttd.cfg file directly. not many people will know how to do this.

Static NewGRFs have fairly limited things that they can actually do, i'm not sure if they can even do anything beyond what a Base Set already does.

@andythenorth
Sprites are my main goal, the less coding the better. I've aquired a copy of opengfx, though I was looking forward to a 32bbp skin. zbase isn't downloading for me for some reason.

@jfs
I am curious, is it possible to have more than one UFO sprite?

@planetmaker
The freenode irc wasn't working for me, I'll have to look into it again.

@Eddi
Cool, thanks.

Thanks again.

paritcl3s wrote: ↑17 Jun 2020 21:37 @jfs
I am curious, is it possible to have more than one UFO sprite?

As far as I remember there's the "small UFO" and "big UFO", which are different disasters and use different sprites. But there's no way to change the behaviour of disasters at all, the way the game is currently implemented. So no, you can't add a third UFO sprite and expect it to be used for disasters, but you could of course use it as a player-built vehicle.