OpenGFX - Graphics Base Set

[2TallTyler]

Looks fantastic!

[arikover]

Wow! Amazing work!

[Zephyris]

Testing out some new/revised arctic and tropical town sprites... Tropical ones mostly revised from OpenGFX sources, arctic ones more often drawn from scratch.

[2TallTyler]

Fantastic. They look so much sharper and more colorful than the old sprites. Do I notice a change to the Food Processing Plant sprites, as well?

[Zephyris]

Looking again, some roof colours need to be lighter, especially in the arctic. I'm also wondering if I should flip around some of my shading. At the moment the right wall is lighter and the top right of that wall is lighter, but that leads to a 'pillow shading' effect. The opposite might work better, and I think that's also what the original graphics tended to use.

@2TallTyler - You're right, it's a new food processing plant. I've revisited a few industries using the same approach to revamp the buildings: coal mine & power station, farm, steel mill & factory, food processing plant, sawmill... You can spot a couple in the previous temperate screenshot.

Edit: Should've mentioned too, these sprites all use appropriate restricted palettes meaning that all palette swap recolourings and all animated sprite entries work as expected.

[supermop]

Trying out some town roads and paving. Significantly lighter, with a paving pattern and kerb stones more similar to the original graphics...

screenshot#10_crop.png

This looks great! I've been working with the current dark OGFX pavement texture in Hale for paved surfaces to blend in, but seeing this progress, and how much better it looks, these pavement textures would be a much better fit for the lighter coloring I'm using in my buildings. Would you be willing to share a png of the paved tile / curbs that I could layer in?

Thanks!

[Zephyris]

Of course! Still work in progress, so will probably change, but these are the ground tiles and town roads as they currently stand.

[Zephyris]

watertrial.gif (196.61 KiB) Viewed 9687 times

Trialling some improved water... I find a little bit of 'sparkle' greatly enhances the water, so I added a minimal quantity (5 px/tile). Also, much as I love lepkka's water, I find the shores/waves much too synchronised giving a synchronised flash... So I added a rolling down shore effect, matching the implied wind direction of the rest of the water, and broke up the remaining waves a little. Lastly, it behaves nicely on zoom out - strategic pixels are non-animated blue so that you see fewer and fewer animated pixels as you zoom out.

[The stutter in the water animation is because the normal water and sparkling water animation cycles seem not to sync... Is their exact colour cycle and timings documented anywhere?]

[andythenorth]

OpenGFX Revival!

Good to see.

[Quast65]

Trialling some improved water...

Wow!

This may take some getting used to though...
A couple of parameters may be needed, so that people can choose to use the changes or not...

I personally do not like the extra sparkle.
Sorry, its a matter of taste, but to me it makes it look a bit more like "old fashioned" Transport Tycoon water.
For me it would be a "will not use" issue..

The new waves are very cool, like it!
But it has a disadvantage and that is that the lines of the same watercycle-colors are now not continious anymore.
Bit difficult to explain
At some spots some "connections" are missing and that shows a 1 pixel "gap"
Bit difficult to make a screenshot, but hope this for example shows a pixel that may be the wrong color, there is one more on the same tile I think:

Example713.png (43.87 KiB) Viewed 9663 times

This may need some more work to get the waves looking just right, but is promising.

EDIT:
Also the wave-sequence starting at the spot with the red arrow looks unnatural to me, dont know why though...

Example714.png (29.03 KiB) Viewed 9649 times

On the exact other side (green arrow) it does look good to me.

It may have something to do with that it looks more natural for me that waves start at the points where the land goes further in the water.
A wave starting in very deep water may be a bit strange.
Again, personal opinion, I may be very wrong

[ebla71]

I personally do not like the extra sparkle.
Sorry, its a matter of taste, but to me it makes it look a bit more like "old fashioned" Transport Tycoon water.
For me it would be a "will not use" issue..

I agree - it is somewhat too regular ...

[supermop]

watertrial.gif
Trialling some improved water... I find a little bit of 'sparkle' greatly enhances the water, so I added a minimal quantity (5 px/tile). Also, much as I love lepkka's water, I find the shores/waves much too synchronised giving a synchronised flash... So I added a rolling down shore effect, matching the implied wind direction of the rest of the water, and broke up the remaining waves a little. Lastly, it behaves nicely on zoom out - strategic pixels are non-animated blue so that you see fewer and fewer animated pixels as you zoom out.

[The stutter in the water animation is because the normal water and sparkling water animation cycles seem not to sync... Is their exact colour cycle and timings documented anywhere?]

Surf Breaks! I love the new water and the sparkling whitecaps. They don't sync up because water cycle is 7 colors and the breakers cycle is 3, so basically are only going to line up every 21 frames? I think this is intentional to make the water look less synchronized. We need some coastal Ogfx+ objects that have big wave rolling in from the tile next to coast!

[Zephyris]

Aaah, the controversy over 5 pixels.

The challenge with sparkles is that there are 5 bright water cycle pixels. To minimise flash you need to use an equal number of each. The original graphics flout this rule: 4, 4, 3, 0, 2. Then, to minimise overall sparklyness you need to use as few as possible. Therefore my version has: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. It's ~3x less sparkly and much less flashy than the originals. But, it's a tiled single square, so there will always bee some kind of repetitive feel.

Having said all that... part of my aim on revisiting sprites is to make their assembly from parts modular. The shore sprites are generated by grabbing the terrain slopes, the flat water tile, the 8bpp pixel art shoreline/surf detail, and an overlay mode shading layer. Python does the hard lifting, so making variants (like a no sparkle) variant is much simpler.

It's all just a trial though and I still need to polish the surf, sort out a few stray pixels and tiling issues.

[Quast65]

I think water will always be a big issue...

In some places a lot of animation really works, in other places maybe not so much

For example, I could maybe see the sparkles work for seawater, but what about lakes (so fully landlocked waters, so to say)?
There it is a bit too much maybe...

On the other hand, the surf at the shores of those kind of waters is now also already a bit weird in current OpenTTD

Overall, maybe also consider them as objects...

[supermop]

I think water will always be a big issue...

In some places a lot of animation really works, in other places maybe not so much

For example, I could maybe see the sparkles work for seawater, but what about lakes (so fully landlocked waters, so to say)?
There it is a bit too much maybe...

On the other hand, the surf at the shores of those kind of waters is now also already a bit weird in current OpenTTD

Overall, maybe also consider them as objects...

There are certainly plenty of white-capped waves on the Great Lakes - Essentially any small enclosed sea-level sea or lake is basically just a tiny ocean in game, and only those made of river tiles are particularly 'lake like'. I think visible waves on sea level water even if very small is acceptable in the spirit of the game, especially considering the waves in the temperate hotel swimming pool!

[Zephyris]

Well, there are smaller waves in that hotel's pool now...

I've looked back at the sparkles with a critical eye and I'm still very keen on them. A (perhaps the) major issue with opengfx is contrast giving a flat and dull feel. Putting those five pixels in massively increases the contrast and lifts the mood. I'm trying to increase contrast in the farm fields too.

Another contentious question is the orange sand in the tropical climate. Looking back with a critical eye of original vs opengfx the orange sand brings out a cyan shade of the tropical grass, overall making a more vibrant teal/orange-esque colour grading. Any thoughts?

[2TallTyler]

I'm in favor of both sparkly water and orange sand. More vibrance is good, in my opinion.

[Zephyris]

Testing some brighter and higher contrast fields... (Farm and sawmill also revisited, rebuilt from my original OpenGFX sources, road revisited with more grass verge detail).

highcontrastfields.png (90.14 KiB) Viewed 9232 times

[2TallTyler]

Love the fields and the new Sawmill buildings. One suggestion: The logs are quite different in color from the brown logs in TTD graphics, but it's the latter that's used in many vehicle and station sets such as CHIPS, Industrial Stations Renewal, Iron Horse, NARS, and more. It would be nice if they would match those instead of trying to set a new standard.

[WolfRamXx]

It would be nice if they would match those instead of trying to set a new standard.

I dont think that would be that good looking, like this there is some color variety, with the "generic" logs it would be just 50 shades of brown... Also i think that some actual variety for log colors/shapes on vehicles wouldnt hurt either when we are at it.

Anyway, i really like these new graphics! Somewhat makes the game look nicer while gives slightly retro TTD feeling. I hope that there will be possibility of keeping current graphics and adding these as option, similar way as zBase and NightGFX.