Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by LaChupacabra »

Andrew350 wrote: 14 Jan 2021 19:37 Another attempt at drawing trains, this time I tried my hand at a pointy maglev:
They look nice. :)

But what about the monorail?
Some time ago and probably still on such tracks, rocket trains are tested. :twisted:
I had an idea for a long time for such a train, which would consist of segments like real space rockets. The first segment in combination with the last one would define the maximum speed, the middle would take up the load and fuel (of a very different types) giving or adding the power.

Tired Wastelanders

It's a good and bad idea at the same time. I like it because Wastelanders can have a return destination and can't be driven between mines. I don't like it because that's what a cargodist should do - the problem is that this one doesn't generate passengers or other specific carogoes in the return direction. I don't know if it will be fixed, if someone will find a way and willingness to do it, but it would certainly be much better than having to rebuild vehicles at both ends of the route for each such connection between the city and the mine. I like to made creative, non-standard combinations, but in such a common arrangement it becomes a bureaucracy. I just don't know if it's really worth going this way.

Mining industry

There is no information on how many Wastelanders were delivered / how many are in the mine and how many are needed for production to increase. Maybe it should be an amount proportional or partially proportional (20 + x) to the production?
I don't know why it says "optional" in the first line on the enterprises window. If it is only information that they can be provided, it seems redundant.

Cities development

What is currently missing is information about what the city needs. I don't know if newGRF can post information in a city window or at least in a storybook, but it would be useful.
I thought about adding a setting for Wasteland in the RWD script, but this is a completely different mechanic that would not fit here. I'm not a fan of scripts because as a player I can't combine the functions of different scripts, but I think for Wasteland creating a dedicated script could be a good solution. This would make it possible or not to determine the level of demand.

What would work very well is the city development mechanics created by TallTyler. It is a mechanism that allows only those parts of the city to develop, to which the relevant goods are delivered. In the case of ITL, these are passengers, and in the case of Wasteland, it could be building materials - where you deliver them, better quality buildings will arise

As for the graphics, I don't know why, but these skyscrapers cause a very marked drop in game speed. In the last game, while I had a maximum speed of x10-15 while looking at anything, after focusing my view on a developed city, the speed dropped to x3-4. No other add-ons cause such big effect. I don't know what is causing this.
Another thing is that while they look good individually, in larger quantities it is definitely worse.
As for the appearance of developed cities, Martian buildings could be an interesting direction. Both those from "OpenGFX + Mars" and "Toyland to Mars". Another interesting variant are the buildings from the amazing screenshots of Otto1988octavius topic ​​(south and east part - I don't know what the set is).
Depending on the direction, these buildings could have a completely different character. From dark or comic (depending on how you look at it), through functional to pure. Perhaps it would be possible to combine several types, and the one that will be created in the city would depend on the type of cargo delivered.
The way cities develop could also be related to industry - the more developed and advanced the better the buildings. Here, some companies could only be funded (perhaps the script could restrict access to them under certain conditions). They would use the same raw materials - everything would be based on a few basic mines and raw materials, but with more and more advanced technology, more and more advanced goods would be obtained - these would allow the construction of these best buildings. Generating the next type of cargo would unlock the possibility of building a more advanced processing facility and maybe another type of vehicles.

Electricity

A few years ago, the New World Disorder script was supposed to recognize electricity supply as one of the elements influencing the development of cities.
There, electricity supplies were to be counted in two or three ways:
1. Physical - by means of transport from power plants to specific enterprises assigned to cities (transformer stations). The candidates were WIRES and Wired, which was under development at the time and hoped for new interesting media to emerge.
2. Area - here supplies of coal or oil to power plants would supply all nearby cities with electricity. The advantage of this solution was to be freedom - player would not have to deal with everything (this is also the basic assumption of the NWD script)
3. Combined - here the electricity supplies to the transformer stations would supply the selected area or cities.
Each power plant or transformer station would be assigned cities. It would then supply them with electricity produced at the plant in a proportion depending on the size of the cities and distance from the plant (lower impact). In a similar way (area), the script counted the production volume, which was and is an element of Industry in it.
Any city of up to 10,000 inhabitants would have electricity by default. Only those that would grow in excess of this value would begin to struggle with the supply shortage. This, in turn, would affect all other elements, causing unemployment to rise, which in turn was closely related to the city's growth rate.
This idea is just an example of a possibility, but it wouldn't necessarily work well here.
[+] Spoiler
NWD - idea.png
NWD - idea.png (55.78 KiB) Viewed 3245 times
Prototype of the script - coded in paint-on :wink:

In the case of physical delivery, in order to encourage a player to supply more than one city, power receiving transformers could have limited capacity and a loss depending on the city size. The overproduction of electricity will be wasted - discharged, but no payment will be made.

I think the demand shouldn't be too great so that the player doesn't focus on just one.

Electricity transportation

I like unconventional ideas. :) Is it unreal? I think a man is still stupid and knows little about what is really possible (and the more he insists that he knows everything, the stupider he is). I would treat this cable as one of those advanced technologies. ;) I would rather dismantle the fence. Though, it's not bad at all. It would be nice for these pipes to look translucent. In them I would see fast or very fast moving, glowing, large "electrons". They would only glow when carrying something. The larger the load, the more it shines. That something could be electricity, of course, but also other cargoes. Maybe this is a teleport? Hmm ... As already, it's rather a hybrid, but it can be interesting anyway. :) Similar as for the conveyor belts, different pipes could be available. Square tubes perhaps wouldn't be bad either.

Given that the world is being built from rubble, these pipelines probably shouldn't be built right away. Perhaps a good first solution to the electricity problem would be local, not very efficient plants?

When it comes to profit from transporting electricity, it doesn't necessarily have to be directly financial. Electricity could also be supplied to some enterprises (anything at least once a month or a certain amount giving a certain impact). In general, my view of the rates is that the more difficult it is to obtain and transport it, the more it should be paid for. Although also not necessarily literally 1: 1.

View of the Setting window

Since I've already written too much, and also I like to pick on irrelevant things, I'll write a little more about. ;)

Including "Enable" / "Disable" is unnecessary and downright confusing. Everyone does it, but it doesn't make sense. In this form it should write "Enable" in any case.
Currently:
Red means Disable? But when enabling the setting, it still writes disable when it is green.
Green color means Enable? But when disabling the setting, it still says enable when the color is red.
To make it not too simple, the red color here also means Enable...
Switch a few settings randomly and see for yourself if it makes sense (you always have to think about what you just did)
Sometimes the simplest way is for the best - then you don't have to explain any complexities. ;)
[+] Spoiler
Wasteland - current parameters window.png
Wasteland - current parameters window.png (8.81 KiB) Viewed 3245 times
Wasteland - clear parameters.png
Wasteland - clear parameters.png (7.54 KiB) Viewed 3245 times
I am sorry for may English. I know is bed.
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

Thanks for your comments :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 But what about the monorail?
Some time ago and probably still on such tracks, rocket trains are tested. :twisted:
I ditched monorail because I couldn't think of a useful way to integrate it into the gameplay and progression. There will already be electrified rail and maglev, so monorail would just end up awkwardly in between them, providing no real benefit to anything.

The lack of rocket trains will definitely be a negative, but a necessary casualty :twisted:
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Tired Wastelanders

It's a good and bad idea at the same time. I like it because Wastelanders can have a return destination and can't be driven between mines. I don't like it because that's what a cargodist should do - the problem is that this one doesn't generate passengers or other specific carogoes in the return direction.
About cargodist - I don't use it :) I have no idea whether current or future versions of Wasteland will work nicely with it, but my suspicion is weird things may happen due to the way town growth works. That being said, adding a new cargo which is produced by industries to be delivered to towns shouldn't introduce any issues, since many industries do that already.

Having a separate cargo for the return trip is necessary to prevent town-to-town transport of wastelanders, which would somewhat spoil the point of having to rebuild cities in order to get passengers ;)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 I don't know if it will be fixed, if someone will find a way and willingness to do it, but it would certainly be much better than having to rebuild vehicles at both ends of the route for each such connection between the city and the mine. I like to made creative, non-standard combinations, but in such a common arrangement it becomes a bureaucracy. I just don't know if it's really worth going this way.
No need for separate vehicles, just use autorefit :) Or am I misunderstanding the issue?
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Mining industry

There is no information on how many Wastelanders were delivered / how many are in the mine and how many are needed for production to increase. Maybe it should be an amount proportional or partially proportional (20 + x) to the production?
Amount of wastelanders delivered is how many tired wastelanders are produced. Of course that only tells you last month's delivery, not a current count. Implementing such a counter by using the stockpile should be possible, but integrating that into the way I've made the code work would likely make that impossible, since the wastelanders being delivered are "consumed" instantly by the industry to produce the tired wastelanders. This feature would probably require someone smarter than me to implement properly ;) FIRS for example obviously implements production boosts in a different way which may make this easier, though I've never tried deciphering exactly how.
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 I don't know why it says "optional" in the first line on the enterprises window. If it is only information that they can be provided, it seems redundant.
I tacked optional on there because I didn't like how the (irremovable) word "Requires" implies something must be delivered, which is not the case. But you're right, it is probably redundant and should be removed :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Cities development

What is currently missing is information about what the city needs. I don't know if newGRF can post information in a city window or at least in a storybook, but it would be useful.
I thought about adding a setting for Wasteland in the RWD script, but this is a completely different mechanic that would not fit here. I'm not a fan of scripts because as a player I can't combine the functions of different scripts, but I think for Wasteland creating a dedicated script could be a good solution. This would make it possible or not to determine the level of demand.
NewGRF cannot alter the town information window, which makes communicating any new town growth requirements impossible. I think it is a bit of a missing feature, but it has been decided in the past that only GS should be allowed to modify the town window, because features shouldn't "interfere" with each other. The recent proposal to allow GS to add information to the industry window alongside NewGRFs seems like a bit of a step backwards on that stance though, so maybe the opinion will change. It's also probably no small feat to extend the window in a sane way, so I'm sure the big blocker to such feature is just someone willing to do it :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 What would work very well is the city development mechanics created by TallTyler. It is a mechanism that allows only those parts of the city to develop, to which the relevant goods are delivered. In the case of ITL, these are passengers, and in the case of Wasteland, it could be building materials - where you deliver them, better quality buildings will arise
I'm assuming you meant something like a "neighborhoods" feature, since wasteland already changes houses based on cargo delivery; that's been the main feature since the beginning :P

I briefly touched on the possibility of making cities unique in my previous mega-post, but as I said it's a bit out-of-scope for now :) I need to focus on the main content, extra stuff can come later. I would love to see a house set where each town develops it's own character, or towns develop differently with industry connections, and all that other good stuff. But, priorities ;) I'm sure 2TallTyler will make that a reality before I could ever hope to, so I'm content to just wait patiently for that so I can steal it later :P
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 As for the graphics, I don't know why, but these skyscrapers cause a very marked drop in game speed. In the last game, while I had a maximum speed of x10-15 while looking at anything, after focusing my view on a developed city, the speed dropped to x3-4. No other add-ons cause such big effect. I don't know what is causing this.
Interesting. I've noticed slow downs in my test games, but I attributed that to having several thousand vehicles driving around everywhere. If there is a performance hit from houses, it would likely be from the way a house checks for cargo delivery, by performing a tile-by-tile check in a grid pattern around itself. This might cause a slight drop in performance with a lot of houses, but I would think that would affect the game speed regardless of whether they were in the viewport or not. I'll look more closely when I play next time to see if I notice anything :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Another thing is that while they look good individually, in larger quantities it is definitely worse.
As for the appearance of developed cities, Martian buildings could be an interesting direction. Both those from "OpenGFX + Mars" and "Toyland to Mars". Another interesting variant are the buildings from the amazing screenshots of Otto1988octavius topic ​​(south and east part - I don't know what the set is).
Depending on the direction, these buildings could have a completely different character. From dark or comic (depending on how you look at it), through functional to pure.
As I've said before, the graphics currently in Wasteland are just placeholders, not the final product. There will certainly be more variety to keep towns from looking like a sea of white skyscrapers, it just takes time to make them. Ideas are always welcome of course :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Perhaps it would be possible to combine several types, and the one that will be created in the city would depend on the type of cargo delivered.
The way cities develop could also be related to industry - the more developed and advanced the better the buildings. Here, some companies could only be funded (perhaps the script could restrict access to them under certain conditions). They would use the same raw materials - everything would be based on a few basic mines and raw materials, but with more and more advanced technology, more and more advanced goods would be obtained - these would allow the construction of these best buildings.
See my above remarks - priorities, etc. :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Generating the next type of cargo would unlock the possibility of building a more advanced processing facility and maybe another type of vehicles.
I would love a tech-tree. But that's not (currently) possible :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Electricity

A few years ago, the New World Disorder script was supposed to recognize electricity supply as one of the elements influencing the development of cities.
There, electricity supplies were to be counted in two or three ways:
1. Physical - by means of transport from power plants to specific enterprises assigned to cities (transformer stations). The candidates were WIRES and Wired, which was under development at the time and hoped for new interesting media to emerge.
2. Area - here supplies of coal or oil to power plants would supply all nearby cities with electricity. The advantage of this solution was to be freedom - player would not have to deal with everything (this is also the basic assumption of the NWD script)
3. Combined - here the electricity supplies to the transformer stations would supply the selected area or cities.
Each power plant or transformer station would be assigned cities. It would then supply them with electricity produced at the plant in a proportion depending on the size of the cities and distance from the plant (lower impact). In a similar way (area), the script counted the production volume, which was and is an element of Industry in it.
Any city of up to 10,000 inhabitants would have electricity by default. Only those that would grow in excess of this value would begin to struggle with the supply shortage. This, in turn, would affect all other elements, causing unemployment to rise, which in turn was closely related to the city's growth rate.
This idea is just an example of a possibility, but it wouldn't necessarily work well here.
[+] Spoiler
NWD - idea.png
Prototype of the script - coded in paint-on :wink:

In the case of physical delivery, in order to encourage a player to supply more than one city, power receiving transformers could have limited capacity and a loss depending on the city size. The overproduction of electricity will be wasted - discharged, but no payment will be made.

I think the demand shouldn't be too great so that the player doesn't focus on just one.
Some of this is interesting, but a bit out of scope here. I want to avoid becoming a PUD and town happiness simulator :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 Electricity transportation

I like unconventional ideas. :) Is it unreal? I think a man is still stupid and knows little about what is really possible (and the more he insists that he knows everything, the stupider he is). I would treat this cable as one of those advanced technologies. ;) I would rather dismantle the fence. Though, it's not bad at all. It would be nice for these pipes to look translucent. In them I would see fast or very fast moving, glowing, large "electrons". They would only glow when carrying something. The larger the load, the more it shines. That something could be electricity, of course, but also other cargoes. Maybe this is a teleport? Hmm ... As already, it's rather a hybrid, but it can be interesting anyway. :) Similar as for the conveyor belts, different pipes could be available. Square tubes perhaps wouldn't be bad either.

Given that the world is being built from rubble, these pipelines probably shouldn't be built right away. Perhaps a good first solution to the electricity problem would be local, not very efficient plants?

When it comes to profit from transporting electricity, it doesn't necessarily have to be directly financial. Electricity could also be supplied to some enterprises (anything at least once a month or a certain amount giving a certain impact). In general, my view of the rates is that the more difficult it is to obtain and transport it, the more it should be paid for. Although also not necessarily literally 1: 1.
As I said in my previous mega-post, I'm wary of making electricity transport too complicated since I'm not sure what it really brings to gameplay. Sending electricity to industries may work for the late-game stuff, but not initially. But I have to try it first before I can judge too harshly :)
LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 View of the Setting window

Since I've already written too much, and also I like to pick on irrelevant things, I'll write a little more about. ;)

Including "Enable" / "Disable" is unnecessary and downright confusing. Everyone does it, but it doesn't make sense. In this form it should write "Enable" in any case.
Currently:
Red means Disable? But when enabling the setting, it still writes disable when it is green.
Green color means Enable? But when disabling the setting, it still says enable when the color is red.
To make it not too simple, the red color here also means Enable...
Switch a few settings randomly and see for yourself if it makes sense (you always have to think about what you just did)
Sometimes the simplest way is for the best - then you don't have to explain any complexities. ;)
[+] Spoiler
Wasteland - current parameters window.png

Wasteland - clear parameters.png
Completely agree, will definitely change it :)
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

LaChupacabra wrote: 18 Jan 2021 00:32 As for the graphics, I don't know why, but these skyscrapers cause a very marked drop in game speed.
I decided to look into this and see if I could notice any slowdown, and indeed there is a little hit to performance. I did a test in the scenario editor where I placed one town on a blank 512x512 map and grew it to 2,000 houses (enough to fill the screen), with the viewport centered on the town label. I did this once with Wasteland (just destroyed houses), once with TTRS, and once with default houses, while comparing the graphics rendering speed in the frame rate window. The average result of each:

Wasteland: ~1.35 ms
TTRS: ~0.85 ms
Default: ~0.10 ms

So it seems Wasteland is about 60% slower than Total Town Replacement Set when it comes to rendering houses. I guess that could lead to a noticeable effect, although in my test games it seems the slowdown caused by houses is negligible compared to everything else :)

=========================================

I also did another test with my busy test save, but this time comparing rendering speeds between different versions of OpenTTD, and the results were kind of interesting :) Once again I kept the variables the same for each test, this time I loaded the same save, kept the viewport on the same location (biggest town on the map), and let the game run for 1 month to allow it to normalize. I then took a screenshot of each for comparison:

OpenTTD Stable 1.10.3:
Takeover Inc, 2350-01-31.png
(761.25 KiB) Not downloaded yet
OpenTTD Nightly 2021-01-19:
Takeover Inc, 2350-01-31#3.png
(761.97 KiB) Not downloaded yet
JGR's Patch Pack 0.39.2:
Takeover Inc, 2350-01-31#2.png
(761.72 KiB) Not downloaded yet
(I know screenshots are just one frame, but I can assure you the values seen here are very representative of the actual performance seen in real time :) )

OpenTTD Stable is definitely the worst performer, a little over 3 ms slower than the nightlies, so if you're still using that then updating OpenTTD to a newer version might help slightly :D I was quite surprised to see that JGR seemed to perform much better overall than vanilla, I was really expecting it to be slower with all the extra features going on, but there's obviously been quite a bit of optimization to improve the performance. Indeed it even shaved a little over 1 ms off the graphics rendering time :) The only drawback is that is seems JGR does something weird with the random house colors and groups them all together for some reason, which looks a little odd. But that issue will be fixed with better graphics that aren't so ugly and repeating, so no big deal.

Some relevant info about the test game: it's a 1,024x1,024 map and at the date shown the game has been running for about 273 years. Current vehicle counts:

1,405 trains
776 road vehicles
191 ships
285 aircraft
-----------------
2,657 total vehicles

It lags pretty hard on the laptop when fully zoomed out, and fast forward just...doesn't anymore, only getting to about x1.04 speed at most :lol: I don't notice any real drop in overall performance when focusing on towns specifically, but that may be due to such poor performance overall that I can't tell the difference. I don't have any "lighter" test games at the moment so that's about all I can say for now, but your experience may be valid :)

As for what I can do to improve it? No clue, but I have a couple ideas I need to try first to see if I can rule anything out.
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

More show-off, but something other than a train this time. I've been implementing some of the economy changes related to making building materials more complex to produce, and that means a few new industries must be added.

The plan for now is that the Steel Mill will now produce steel (made from iron ore and coal), which must be delivered alongside gravel and sand to a prefab manufacturing plant to finally produce building materials. The new coal mine and prefab plant will just use OpenGFX sprites like everything else for now, but the sand quarry required some different graphics. The initial plan was to simply rip the existing quarry sprites straight from FIRS, but I couldn't help but do some modification to make the pit a little different:

sand_quarry.png
sand_quarry.png (99.18 KiB) Viewed 3040 times
I'll be refining it a bit more eventually, adding some details and changing more of the sprites, but this will do as a basic implementation for now :)
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by arikover »

Nice!
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

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arikover wrote: 25 Jan 2021 11:24Nice!
Thanks :)

Today's work: doing some nuclear train prototyping :D WIP shown here with a 'standard' locomotive for comparison:

nuclear_1.png
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Due to their immense size and weight, nuclear locos have to run on special broad gauge tracks. While these trains are faster than standard gauge trains, the real advantage is the massive power and tractive effort they supply, making these locos perfect for hauling the large amounts of cargo later in the game when production volumes are high. Due to health and safety concerns however, they aren't suitable for passenger travel. Passengers prefer the speed and comfort of electric and maglev trains :)
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Aegir »

Andrew350 wrote: 25 Jan 2021 22:16
arikover wrote: 25 Jan 2021 11:24Nice!
Thanks :)

Today's work: doing some nuclear train prototyping :D WIP shown here with a 'standard' locomotive for comparison:


nuclear_1.png

Due to their immense size and weight, nuclear locos have to run on special broad gauge tracks. While these trains are faster than standard gauge trains, the real advantage is the massive power and tractive effort they supply, making these locos perfect for hauling the large amounts of cargo later in the game when production volumes are high. Due to health and safety concerns however, they aren't suitable for passenger travel. Passengers prefer the speed and comfort of electric and maglev trains :)
I freakin' love that. Any chance for a parameter to allow these trains to run in all climates? I'd really love some more future/near future train options for long games in other climates. I'm not sure if the major track sets have specifically implemented a broad gauge track option though.
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

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Aegir wrote: 26 Jan 2021 04:54 I freakin' love that. Any chance for a parameter to allow these trains to run in all climates? I'd really love some more future/near future train options for long games in other climates. I'm not sure if the major track sets have specifically implemented a broad gauge track option though.
Everything functions fine in any climate, other than some landscape graphics may look a bit off outside temperate (which could be fixed but I can't be bothered for now), so I see no reason to disable anything for different climates, especially vehicles :)

[+] Spoiler
In fact, currently Wasteland doesn't have any hard-coded restrictions, including by climate, conflicts with other grfs, etc.. I take the risk that you know better than to load e.g. FIRS alongside it, or complain that toyland looks funny, or whatever. With the right settings just about anything "works", and in 6+ years I've never seen a single mention of an issue, so *shrug* :P I guess the average Wasteland player is smart enough to avoid obvious conflicts. I'll eventually take the time to make some restrictions for the obvious broken cases, but for now anything is fair game if you can get it to work.

However I should point out (since it may not be obvious) that currently all vehicles are part of the core grf, NOT separate ones. Perhaps once I get the graphics more fleshed out and it starts looking like a more presentable set I'll spin it off into it's own NewGRF capable of working nicely with other industry sets (maybe in time for the NewGRF competition? :wink: ), but for now it's locked into the core set. That said, given the right setting of parameters it is also possible to disable all features except the trains, which would effectively make Wasteland function as a standalone train set, although currently there is no setting to turn off things like landscape, etc., so I'm not sure how useful that is :P
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

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Andrew350 wrote: 28 Jan 2021 12:57
Aegir wrote: 26 Jan 2021 04:54 I freakin' love that. Any chance for a parameter to allow these trains to run in all climates? I'd really love some more future/near future train options for long games in other climates. I'm not sure if the major track sets have specifically implemented a broad gauge track option though.
Everything functions fine in any climate, other than some landscape graphics may look a bit off outside temperate (which could be fixed but I can't be bothered for now), so I see no reason to disable anything for different climates, especially vehicles :)

[+] Spoiler
In fact, currently Wasteland doesn't have any hard-coded restrictions, including by climate, conflicts with other grfs, etc.. I take the risk that you know better than to load e.g. FIRS alongside it, or complain that toyland looks funny, or whatever. With the right settings just about anything "works", and in 6+ years I've never seen a single mention of an issue, so *shrug* :P I guess the average Wasteland player is smart enough to avoid obvious conflicts. I'll eventually take the time to make some restrictions for the obvious broken cases, but for now anything is fair game if you can get it to work.

However I should point out (since it may not be obvious) that currently all vehicles are part of the core grf, NOT separate ones. Perhaps once I get the graphics more fleshed out and it starts looking like a more presentable set I'll spin it off into it's own NewGRF capable of working nicely with other industry sets (maybe in time for the NewGRF competition? :wink: ), but for now it's locked into the core set. That said, given the right setting of parameters it is also possible to disable all features except the trains, which would effectively make Wasteland function as a standalone train set, although currently there is no setting to turn off things like landscape, etc., so I'm not sure how useful that is :P
You're right, I had a play and I was impressed with how many options the .grf provided in order to disable functions/features, and yes, the one thing I did notice was there was no function to disable the landscape replacement. I mean, that would be nice *wink wink nudge nudge*. Regardless, that big stonkin' atomic train looks fantastic!
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

Aegir wrote: 28 Jan 2021 13:13 You're right, I had a play and I was impressed with how many options the .grf provided in order to disable functions/features, and yes, the one thing I did notice was there was no function to disable the landscape replacement. I mean, that would be nice *wink wink nudge nudge*. Regardless, that big stonkin' atomic train looks fantastic!
I could certainly add a parameter for that if it's desired. There may be some weird corner cases to cover to make sure all of it turns off, but it should be relatively easy otherwise.

On that note, I've added a couple more parameters recently to help with testing, but I might just leave them in for fun. The first one is to disable the roadtypes in order to allow AIs to build road vehicles (since none of them work with NRT), which is useful to me since I like to use the AIs as a quick and lazy way to roughly gauge how useful vehicles are, but it might be nice to have for players who want to use road-based AIs as well.

The other parameter overrides the natural town growth progression so you can start with any of the four types of houses. This is very useful for testing changes to the new town growth mechanics, but I could also see it being fun for people who would rather skip the town growth part and just build a "regular" network in the post-apocalypse. I mean, it sort of defeats the whole point of Wasteland to skip that, but since it doesn't necessarily break anything (it just ruins the challenge!) I may as well keep it as an option :)

=========================

When I posted the teaser pic of the nuclear loco above, I had just quickly scratched together a rough sprite for the rails to go underneath it. Yesterday I went ahead and actually drew proper sprites for the broad gauge railtype for the new trains to run on:

broad_gauge_comparison.png
broad_gauge_comparison.png (57.42 KiB) Viewed 2717 times
The standard gauge railtype (which currently just uses sprites from OpenGFX) is shown underneath for comparison. If you're curious, these new sprites are 2px wider than standard, which equates to a 40% increase in width. If I assume the TTD rails represent standard gauge or about 1435mm, then that makes these tracks just over 2,000mm wide. I'm not sure if 2-meter gauge rail has ever been a thing, but I guess it is now :mrgreen:
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by trainman1432 »

My broad gauge fantasies have finally been realized!

Speaking of passengers only on maglev and electric, will we get broad gauge electric/diesel trains to have the option of broad-gauge only late-game?
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

Currently only the big nuclear locos are running on broad gauge - electric and diesel trains are standard gauge only. The size difference of the trains would mean the "regular" locos would look a bit silly on the fat broad gauge tracks. Though I am considering adding a dual-gauge tracktype to help make the transition of late-game freight networks easier, so theoretically you could have standard and broad gauge trains running together that way :)

Sadly there's no (practical) way to add the same convenience for pax networks, since electric rails and maglev just don't fit together at all. So I guess you'll have to initially keep maglev for long express routes and electric trains on their own local networks, until you feel the need to upgrade all services (though you don't have to).
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Shinkansen500 »

First all, i would like to thanks the massive work you create If this set. I use them combine if Mars NewGRF too, and create a very interesting scifi setting.

But i Very interesting in concept of your super broad train
How many engines the broad lines would have? I can imagine that massive trains running on my super urban dense maps too :D

By them way, found a interesting scifi engine design too on web that could make a nice broad and standart loco too.

Image

Image

Keep coming If great work.
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

Shinkansen500 wrote: 09 Feb 2021 20:30 How many engines the broad lines would have? I can imagine that massive trains running on my super urban dense maps too :D
Currently planning on about 8 or so engines, but if I eventually end up drawing more I will try to include them, as there is a definite shortage of such futuristic trains in the game :)


On a related note, last night I finally dove in to figure out how to code these long vehicles without glitches. I had been avoiding it thinking it would be super complex to code, but I had a revelation when playing with Timberwolf's trains in the sprite aligner that the magic was actually much simpler than I thought - It seems to just turn the leading and trailing sprites off and use a single sprite when traversing hills and corners. For some reason I expected complicated algorithms or something to detect and finetune offsets when the leading and trailing vehicles went around corners, but it seems I might have overestimated the complexity of what is really possible there :mrgreen:

To be fair I'm not sure if the actual logic in his (and other LV sets) is really that simple, but it seems to work fine for me 95% of the time, at least the slight glitching is no worse than what I observe in similarly-scaled trainsets. Sooo, yeah, now the big train(s) actually work properly :) All that's left now is to actually draw the remaining nuclear trains + all the wagons. Easy, right? ;)
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Michpi »

First of all, thank you for this great set!

In my current playthrough, I noticed a strange thing. One of my cities received "blue" houses without passengers service. Might it be because I deliver passengers to the Offshore Colony, which is 63 tiles away from the city, but belongs to it?
(Add) Not, it's not about Offshore Colony :( Another city received "blue" houses without passengers service. I supply clean food, water and building materials only.

A few thoughts that came to me during the game:

Building materials are one of the most common cargo. But they are accepted by "yellow" houses only. And as far as cities grow bigger, there is no any other sink for building materials. I think, it's a good idea, if Trading post will accept building material too.

New roadtypes. I really miss a new roadtype, which will have no speed limit and along which no houses will be able to built.

Wastelanders are found in red and yellow buildings. So if I want to use wastelanders to boost some industries, then I choose one of the cities and supply this city with cleen food and water only. And send wastelanders from it to industries. But this city can't be rebuild in order not to stop producing wastelanders. I think it's not so good. Maybe passengers should boost industries too?
Also, in the beginning, it's a little confusing that all of the houses produce passengers. It seems to me, that red and yellow building shouldn't produce them.
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

Michpi wrote: 12 Feb 2021 19:46 First of all, thank you for this great set!
Thank you :)
Michpi wrote: 12 Feb 2021 19:46 In my current playthrough, I noticed a strange thing. One of my cities received "blue" houses without passengers service. Might it be because I deliver passengers to the Offshore Colony, which is 63 tiles away from the city, but belongs to it?
(Add) Not, it's not about Offshore Colony Another city received "blue" houses without passengers service. I supply clean food, water and building materials only.
Passenger service is not a requirement to receive blue houses. Currently only food, water, and building materials are required, and once a town grows to a certain size, the blue houses will automatically begin to appear, with or without passenger service.

In the upcoming version this will change so the blue houses will take a little bit more to begin appearing :)
Michpi wrote: 12 Feb 2021 19:46 Building materials are one of the most common cargo. But they are accepted by "yellow" houses only. And as far as cities grow bigger, there is no any other sink for building materials. I think, it's a good idea, if Trading post will accept building material too.
In the upcoming version building materials will be more difficult to produce (and only produced by one industry instead of two), and will continue to be accepted by towns through the green stage of houses. For late-game there will be "black hole" industries for building materials and electricity, so once there are no towns to deliver to (or if you want to skip town growth) there will always be somewhere to send those cargoes.
Michpi wrote: 12 Feb 2021 19:46 New roadtypes. I really miss a new roadtype, which will have no speed limit and along which no houses will be able to built.
Ah yes, it also bothered me that there was no roadtype to prevent houses spreading out everywhere, so I already fixed that as well :D I forgot to mention it in my updates since it was just a small thing:

Unnamed, 2077-01-02#1.png
Unnamed, 2077-01-02#1.png (116.08 KiB) Viewed 2321 times
I've split the asphalt road into two types, one which allows houses and one which doesn't, with slight visual differences in the markings to show which one is which. Should help keep towns contained :)
Michpi wrote: 12 Feb 2021 19:46 Wastelanders are found in red and yellow buildings. So if I want to use wastelanders to boost some industries, then I choose one of the cities and supply this city with cleen food and water only. And send wastelanders from it to industries. But this city can't be rebuild in order not to stop producing wastelanders. I think it's not so good. Maybe passengers should boost industries too?
That's part of the strategy though: deciding which towns to keep for workers and which to continue building to get passengers. If passengers counted as workers too, there would be no need to build company towns to boost industry production, and then part of the challenge is lost ;)
Michpi wrote: 12 Feb 2021 19:46 Also, in the beginning, it's a little confusing that all of the houses produce passengers. It seems to me, that red and yellow building shouldn't produce them.
If I could do that in a nice way I would, but this is one place where I hit a game limitation. Unfortunately towns cannot spawn with a population of 0, since the game sees that as a "fail" condition and tries again somewhere else. As a result, at least some buildings must contain a population >0 in order to allow towns to generate on map creation, which means there will always be some passengers generated.

Currently all houses have a population of 1, which guarantees placement (and makes a handy way to spot at a glance which towns are largest, since # of houses = population ;) ). If I reduce the number buildings with a population, it would reduce the amount of passengers, but also increase the likelihood of towns failing to spawn on map creation (this would mostly affect small towns). Finding a good balance for that is likely to be more work than it's worth, especially since 0 passenger generation is impossible, so that's why I compromise and just make every house have 1 person.

Hopefully that makes some sense :) And thank you for your input, I can't wait to let everyone try the new version!
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by 2TallTyler »

Andrew350 wrote: 13 Feb 2021 20:02 especially since 0 passenger generation is impossible, so that's why I compromise and just make every house have 1 person.
It sounds like you've already found a workable solution, but if you want to have passenger production independent of house population, you can use the 'cargo_production' callback to override the default production. I did this in Improved Town Layouts to generate Waste, and also had to produce Passengers and Mail. (Note that the specific production for each house is given as arguments in the function call. This is not possible in the latest 0.5.3 NML release, so you'd need to build it from source.)
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

2TallTyler wrote: 13 Feb 2021 22:12 It sounds like you've already found a workable solution, but if you want to have passenger production independent of house population, you can use the 'cargo_production' callback to override the default production. I did this in Improved Town Layouts to generate Waste, and also had to produce Passengers and Mail. (Note that the specific production for each house is given as arguments in the function call. This is not possible in the latest 0.5.3 NML release, so you'd need to build it from source.)
Hmm, somehow I never considered using a production callback to zero-out passenger production, I guess I was focused on other things and gave up too early :lol: Maybe it is that simple, I'll have to look into it. Though if it is something that requires building NML it'll have to wait since I'm not really set up to do that. Thanks for bringing it up :)
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Michpi »

Andrew350 wrote: 13 Feb 2021 20:02 I've split the asphalt road into two types, one which allows houses and one which doesn't, with slight visual differences in the markings to show which one is which.
Cool!
Is it a part of strategy that the player should manually convert destroyed road into asphalt road?
Andrew350 wrote: 13 Feb 2021 20:02 In the upcoming version this will change so the blue houses will take a little bit more to begin appearing
...
In the upcoming version building materials will be more difficult to produce (and only produced by one industry instead of two), and will continue to be accepted by towns through the green stage of houses.
I'm looking forward to the new version
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Re: Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

Post by Andrew350 »

Michpi wrote: 15 Feb 2021 06:53 Is it a part of strategy that the player should manually convert destroyed road into asphalt road?
If you want to avoid vehicles going very slowly, yes. Though if you find the destroyed roads too annoying you could always start the game a year later or so to force towns to have fresh asphalt from the beginning :)
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