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Hy ... few months ago I decided to create a new industry set that would have thought-through functional system, and look nice.

First and most key is the system, as this scheme illustrates:


full size: http://dev.openttdcoop.org/attachments/ ... e03-01.png

1. all chains are working together
- no BAD FEATURE like cargoes nobody has a reason to transport because they are not useful

2. core system similar to original industries + 2 types of supplies
- core industry production is determined from current date
- Workers - increase industry production. At the same time, industry will drop to 0 without workers. Worker Yards produce small amount of workers even without any cargo delivered, so you always have some Workers, but you Have to start with them.
- Machinery - increases effectiveness of Workers

- there should either be a cap of 500-1000 production as max (less likely)
OR
- reaching maximum production around 2000 should require so many supplies that the rest of your industries would be rather poor (more likely as it motivates the player to distribute their supplies more evenly)


3. - unsure how it will work - Amount of Workers determined from town population X food/building materials delivered?
Basically a question whether town growth is required or not.

4. Same but Diverse
all chains work basically the same way to avoid player confusion - pickup, deliver, produce, deal with the rest.
The difference however lies in the effect the products have:

Machinery - gives more production for the amount of workers you got
Food - increases amount of workers per town citizen
Building Materials - lets town to grow
In case worker count was determined directly by food+building materials amout delivered at the Worker Yard, they would simply multiply in some way, so delivering both food and BDMT would give more workers than only food, or only bdmt.


As a big reason why I am doing this is because I am improving in modelling with 3DS MAX, and I can recommend anybody to try making a newGRF just because it is not "wasted time", you learn a lot of things, while you have fun with doing something for the game.

Which brings the next step,

Visual Part:

I decided to make models of 16 animated industries, currently 3-X Machinery Factory is closest to how I imagine a nice and fully animated industry should be done.

For now, there is an overview page at the devzone http://dev.openttdcoop.org/projects/yeti/wiki/Previews

as currently the only animation, 3-X can currently only be found in Files, http://dev.openttdcoop.org/attachments/ ... 3-X_f1.wmv


Coming to your fruit store within several weeks.

Lets see what valuable opinions (tm) there shall be

V

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On day 1, I started with trying to create a camera and light system that would work for me.

In the end I ended up with an ortographic (obviously) Targeted Camera that would aim exactly at the center of my 4x4 industries, and be just far away to get the 256(1024) pixels of the 4x4 area would spread over the whole sprite. So far I use 1280 height so that things like tall buildings can fit in.

As for lighting, I use Vray for rendering, therefore most convenient is to use VraySun, my current conclusion is that having it on coordinates [5000, -1000, 5000] works quite well.
It might not correspond with the "real TTD light" entirely, but it is close and the shadows look less brutal than if it was at [5000, 1000, 5000] which would be closer to what most(tm) people might consider "correct".

Sun gets intensity multiplier of 0.015 and it keeps the default VraySky environment.

One TTD tile has 10x10 meters for me. The scale is not anyhow important to the size of the models, and Especially not to the size of texture mapping. No texture will probably ever be used in "real world scale" because I belive that is most of why e.g. zbase looks "empty" (not only) in x1 zoom.

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Looks amazing! You just do not stop!

Thanks ... finishing NUTS was time consuming and hard, finishing this might be time consuming, but I learn a lot of useful things. So I would say chances I will not stop are good

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Looks very promising, but I have a few questions:
- No steel for building materials?
- only workers needed for raw material production?
- I wouldn't make food increase % of workers/town population. Just have food limit town population like building materials. (but you need both for a town to grow) Because late game -> big towns -> more workers anyway. Increasing the % aswell will create too much workers, so you would only need building materials.

- how are intermediates handled?
my suggestions (If you don't like it, don't use it ):
Raw materials (11), accept machinery, petrol and workers, produces returning workers:
- oil wells + oil rigs -> oil
- iron mine -> iron
- coal mine -> coal
- forest -> logs
- clay pit -> clay
- lime quarry -> lime
- sand quarry -> sand
- gravel quarry -> gravel
- farm -> crops
- orchard -> fruit

Processing factories (8), accept machinery* and workers, produces returning workers:
- refinary: oil -> rubber + petrol + fertilizer
- steel mill: iron + coal -> steel
- machine factory* (name?): steel + rubber -> machinery
machinery is for all industry
petrol is for raw material indystry (oil, iron, coal, logs, clay, lime, gravel, sand, crops and fruit).
fertilizer is for crops and fruit industry
*doesn't accept machinery

- sawmill: logs -> wood
- brickworks: clay + coal -> bricks
- cement factory: lime + sand + gravel -> cement
bricks, cement, wood and steel are building materials

- livestock farm (name?): crops -> livestock + fertilizer
- food factory: crops -> food, livestock -> food, fruit -> food (only 1 of three is needed)
perhaps livestock could be used as machinery too?
fertilizer is for grain and fruit industry

Specials:
- power plant: accepts coal or petrol and workers; produces returning workers
- houses: accept passengers, mail, returning workers and food; produces workers, passengers and mail
- Construciont facility: accepts building materials, machinery, petrol and workers; produces returning workers

No steel for building materials for the sake of system functionality

The exact way how worker number is to be determined is yet unsure, it could be unrelated to the town just as well since town growth usually just "remains" after grown.

Your suggestion makes some sense but in general the system would be rather overwhelming when starting with it, while not gaining anything specific from that.

How I would imagine someone would play such a system:
"Attempt to get the right mix of industries"

While with my system I want every industry to be able to contribute to "the greater good of the system" in some way and the player does not have to remember much. (like looking which industry type it is, which type of supply it wants - I want it to be unified for all types)
And if I make all industries equal, none may make something key like oil-petrol.

So far this is my idea, it is possible that smaller details will change but the core system will proooobably stay.

PS:
- power plant as a "dead-end" industry is basically useless to the player as you could always make use of the cargoes dumped there instead
- industry can accept at maximum only 3 and produce 2 cargoes I think
- returning workers are an interesting idea I already did consider. The question is what does it bring however - the trains bring workers to the industry, and go back to town empty. The only difference would be that it would also load again and come back full, too. It is possible that used workers could appear but lets see.

Thank you for your input, I can clearly see that you thought about it which I appreciate - by the way drawing a scheme helps a great deal with trying to make a system it does not have to be nice, but it helps

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OK, I understand.


So you want to limit the processing industries to 3? One for food, one for building materials and one for machinery?
If so, thats actually not a bad idea, it would make it a bit like the factory in the standard game.


I suspect workers will be produced in bulk like goods. (meaning that every ... days you suddenly get a bunch of workers, compared to passengers that are spread much more evenly over the month) Workers need to get to their job on time, so value/tile should degrade quicker than for passengers.
Meaning that you should have more capacity then needed on a per month basis => vehicles or often waiting for cargo => less profit for those vehicles. Having returning workers, would make that much less of a problem.
Also, it would be more realistic without any downside. And my opinion is that realism is good as long as it doesn't harm gameplay.


Ah, so that's why you had no workers/machinery for your processing industries. What about having only 7 raw materials:
iron+coal -> steel
oil
- steel + oil -> machine factory
- wood + clay -> building material factory (name?)
- livestock + crops -> food factory

This way all the processing factories have a spare slot for workers. You lose stone as a raw material, but clay would be transferred into bricks in the building material factory. You also lose fruit, but crops would include fruit, meaning that grain+fruit need to be transported in a food wagon. (grain in open hoppers is weird anyway )

EDIT: picture:

The exact number of primaries can change drastically in quite easy manner - e.g. I just turn the stone mine into a factory, which accepts another 3 new raw cargoes from 3 different new primary industries, and make the factory produce something delivered to building material factory... the system is very flexible in that, but I see little reason to do so, 9 primaries is in my eyes around just the right number that is fun and diverse, but not overwhelming - does not cause you to search for the destination for a long time.

The profit of trains is unimportant... firstly, with higher traffic you would get workers all the time even if you get them "all at once" per every arriving train, secondly, irrelevant of that mechanic, their delivery profit would still be determined from way how quickly they are delivered, and from their price for delivery.
So far my "more detailed" imagination of workers is that you get like totally FEW of them (could even be one worker per wagon or similar amount) and they will just get a high delivery price. But how will it turn out in the end could change.
Still, returning workers might be nice indeed.

Secondary industries could indeed be reduced by one incoming cargo - even without reducing amount of primaries, but by adding some extra secondaries... but I see little use in it; I think the secondary should just output cargo as is, upon delivery, perhaps over time. But ratio of delivered:produced I think should be determined from a simple factor whether you deliver 1, 2 or all 3 inputs (motivating to connect all kinds of cargoes), so the supplies (workers/machinery) are going to be just and only for primaries

Your scheme is nice, quite close to my system

By the way, primary vehicle set is probably going to be NUTS, but most of the cargoes should already be known already ... so other train sets should be able to deal with it quite well, too - except for the worker part, there having like 1 worker per wagon would probably cause bad things with other train sets. But having like 60 workers per wagon is just unthinkably unfitting my long term scheme - YETI is not just a name, the Workers are actually giant YETIs which will be animated on the industries, performing various tasks like chopping wood, etc, depending on the industry. Therefore 60 giant yetis on one wagon is just not a very good idea At the same time, I cant imagine a train set breaking YETI... but lets see about that later.

Thank you for your input

V

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Yet another industry joins the previews.

Death Steel Mill melts boxes of Iron Ore from Iron Ore Mine by superior volume into Balls of Steel, then cools them down and lets them take an Awesome Totally Not Roller Coaster Ride.

Yetis approve.

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Aaand while I already got the one cube of iron ore, I could rather quickly make an Iron Ore Mine It lacks a lot of details and interesting parts, but those will come later with some workers and machinery there, for now this

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Cannot decide if it should be a COAL or URANIUM mine (mainly because I cannot decide HOW should Uranium look like), but here is a coal/uranium mine (:

Also, I have made my sun a bit more intense (0.17 now) and moved it to 5000, 500, 5000 so the contrast is a bit better.
Most of the images on the previews page is rendered with the new setting.

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Uranium ore (pitchblende) is greyish-black, but if you want both coal and uranium cargoes, you could make the uranium look like "yellowcake", a concentrated uranium powder.
The yellowcake is not precisely yellow, but ingame, that should help differentiate uranium from coal.

Amazing graphics !

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Some screenshots of mine...

Thanks for your input. I am wondering about the specific colour of uranium because even if the industry is not mixed (it is coal only, or uranium only), even in such a case the cargo needs to clearly differ from others (like NUTS), which is why I so far tried to give it something like green (or gray brick with green details like crystals)... Simply because yellow already is represented by grain for YETI light green ish would be unique.

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It seems legit. A glowing green color would definitely give the cargo a radioactive aspect, like in the Simpsons...

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Some screenshots of mine...

After some edits, changes, creating new materials, tearing my hair, creating new materials, changes, and edits, I have come to this result of an Uranium mine. Also, the robots have been redone, now also fully animated (:

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And since I had multiple things started-but-unfinished, here is an advanced state of an oil well

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And to complete the Machinery chain, here is the almighty Uranium Power Plant ... producing TRANSPORTABLE POWER - Batteries.

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Now we only need houses that accept power, and we can have good looking power lines!

power actually goes into machinery no power lines

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I have no input, but I'm very much looking forward to this set.

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