OpenGFX - Graphics Base Set

[Zephyris]

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.

These kinds of comments are super useful, thanks. I totally agree, and it helps players to see consistent visual language which helps tie together different parts of the gameplay.

[Zephyris]

Vivid tropical desert test...

tropicaldesert.png (39.54 KiB) Viewed 8644 times

[Zephyris]

Testing some snowline improvements... 1) The patchyness now respects tile perspective, 2) the patches now tile nicely across gridlines and 3) the least snowy flat tile tile now has at least some snow on it. The last one is particularly important for gameplay/usability (although it does slightly interrupt the smooth blend) - eg. it impacts where farms can be founded and where they place fields, and ensures consistency with the land area info.

snowline.png (65.28 KiB) Viewed 8624 times

[Aegir]

Testing some snowline improvements... 1) The patchyness now respects tile perspective, 2) the patches now tile nicely across gridlines and 3) the least snowy flat tile tile now has at least some snow on it. The last one is particularly important for gameplay/usability (although it does slightly interrupt the smooth blend) - eg. it impacts where farms can be founded and where they place fields, and ensures consistency with the land area info.

Looks good! The snowline always bugged me because with a variable snowline and lots of rocks you'd end up with this shifting band of bare dirt that no rocks showed on. Are you going to do the Alpine green sprites as well? They're a favorite of mine.

Also are those angled views brighter now? That should really make mountains pop.

Also plz make rocks stick out more (but not as much as original TTD graphics), I like rocks

[Zephyris]

Rocks are next on my terrain to do list... I'm a bit stuck for ideas that wouldn't look too repetitive, so feel free to link concepts or other game art...

And yup, there are some shading adjustments to make the terrain shape pop

[Aegir]

Rocks are next on my terrain to do list... I'm a bit stuck for ideas that wouldn't look too repetitive, so feel free to link concepts or other game art...

And yup, there are some shading adjustments to make the terrain shape pop

Worst case scenario with the rocks, if you end up with any rejected concepts/etc let me know because we can always work them into a newobjects set with auto spawning on game creation - I've been doing the same with GarryG's shrubs lately and I'm starting to really like the results, most of the development progress has been over on the Discord however.

[jfs]

Oh neat to see OpenGFX worked on.
When I've worked on my Deep Water patch (been a good while since I did anything on that) I considered trying to add a way for more variations of base sprites, to be able to break up the monotony too. Going back to the water sparkles and repeating patterns from previous page, I wonder if it would be an idea to add a way for a baseset to offer multiple variations of each tile, which would be functionally identical, just picked at random, or at "random". That would let large oceans, and stretches of flat land, get less of a repeating pattern. Could perhaps even let houses and other things have more variation if someone wants to put in the work.

[Zephyris]

In short, no... There's no way to code that yet. I suspect that it would be computationally feasible to have, say, 7 different tiles selected based on (x+y*256)%7=n though.

[odisseus]

It would also make every tile set 7 times larger, and the number of possible edge combinations (whose alignment the graphic developer needs to check) would increase 49-fold.

[luk3Z]

Vivid tropical desert test...
tropicaldesert.png

It looks very good (very similar to Mars surface). What about the other ?

[kulacskarcsi]

Some screenies of the temperate towns... I also remade the statue (inc. company statue) and fountain, only the parks remain untouched.

These reworked buildings look amazing, I love how vivid they look! I really look forward to these!

[Zephyris]

Another year, another shameless bump. These revamped graphics are pretty complete, I'd really like to see them make their way into OpenGFX, or at least have a good debate over whether they should be. How can I help? They're all logically organised and coded... arguably more logical than current OpenGFX... but I don't really understand how the base set is coded.

[kamnet]

If you've not already done so, I'd suggest opening up discussion on Github, as well as joining the developer channel on Discord.

[FLHerne]

Elaborating on what kamnet said: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX

Could submit a pull request with the changes, or file an issue with links to the sprites.

[andythenorth]

There's no current maintainer for OpenGFX

But there are a handful of us who add missing sprites for new OpenTTD features, fix bugs etc as needed and do the releases.

I'm a die-hard user of the original base set, but I'd be happy to put some more time into OpenGFX. The improved sprites are great, and I'm sure others could be persuaded to help merge, release etc.

For straightforward sprite substitution in the base set, then we can just do those and make a release. Best done via Github issue or PR.

If varaction 2 chains are needed, then the base set can't do that and we'd need an alternative plan, like reviving OpenGFX+ Landscape or similar.

I have way too many projects, but happy to help with this.

[Aegir]

Hey Zephyris,

I've been doing some experiments with some new JGRPP features to allow rocks in arctic and tropic above the snowline/in the desert, currently this is targeting an un-released Alpine climate mod for the original base set and a port over of PikkaBird's Pineapple landscape as a separate .grf. JGRPP's feature also supports randomization as well as different sprites per snow level as well.

As of yet unreleased Pineapple Landscape + Rocks

Screenshot 2023-02-01 192239.png (386.44 KiB) Viewed 4127 times

If you do want to have a think about rocks in these climates, and also random variations for rocks, I would be more than happy to write the .grf.

Tweaks and amendments to OpenGFX+ Landscape as well aren't out of the question, I'm assuming it was coded in NML? Not immediately jumping in to take over maintenance of it but I could code a version with your updated landscape sprites? Best outcome would be to merge with OpenTTD trunk though, they really are a marked improvement from what we currently have.

[Zephyris]

Thanks for all of the pointers! I'll look into it.

I know significant restructures are the bane of open source projects, but I do suspect a significant restructure would be a good way to go. Lots of the current OpenGFX source files are pretty eccentric, mostly my fault, encoded and decoded through grfcodec to give sprite sheets and similar. But it'd not be an empty restructure - I can provide nice NML and corresponding sprite sheets! Everything is simple sprite replacements, GRF Action 5 and A / NML replace.

Because so many of the really numerous infrastructure, landscape and town sprites were mine I've got all of the 32bpp sources. I've been able to go back to the original files, make new (extra zoom-compatible) nml templates, make better 32 to 8bpp conversion scripts and generally get it all tidier. Including nice things like sprite splitters (for the multi-tile buildings), proper handling of the animated colours, ability to overlay a pixel-pushed 8bpp details layer on the converted 32bpp base sprites and similar. Currently written in bash and python, so not too eccentric.

If anyone would like to take a look I can give a dropbox link, drop me a message. I'd rather not link it totally publicly as it's not well-checked for stuff that shouldn't be there

[Zephyris]

I finally taught myself git and have got this tidied up and up on github - you can see everything at https://github.com/zephyris/opengfx2

[Zephyris]

A few people asked for my in-development grfs, and it seems that the large files of the new git for my opengfx development repo have already taken it over a bandwidth limit! Attached for your perusal...

[alike]

Are we able to play with these improvements yet ? I love it!

The current graphics is the sole reason I dont play the game