Timberwolf's Boats

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Taschi
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Taschi »

Timberwolf wrote: 29 Apr 2021 10:28 Gentle reminder that I'm doing boats, I don't currently have (nor do I have plans for) an aircraft set. It's nice for everyone to be enthusiastic but also a little unhelpful if the development thread gets buried in requests for something I'm not making. One of the things I'm trying to get away from is doing newGRFs where I can't even announce a minor bugfix release without being bombarded with lists of things to add, because it makes something which should be fun start feeling like work.
Sorry, I just thought the idea of a UK plane set was kind of funny. Not expecting you to do actually do it.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

No worries, I enjoyed the joke myself but it looked like it was going to get out of hand with people not realising it was just a quick joke so thought it best to have a bit of a "c'mon, back on topic and let's not make this an endless request thread" before it travelled too far away from navigable waters.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Electricfox »

Hot damn, this is fantastic stuff! Canal mania here we come! :D
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Rezot »

Timberwolf wrote: 29 Apr 2021 13:48 At the moment, what I'm really looking for is some overviews of specific areas of maritime history (passenger carriage, riverboats, ocean-going cargo) so I can get a feeling for what happened and why. Things like that narrowboat history are really useful, the biggest thing I lack at the moment is context and what general trends were at any one time.

The rough aim for the set is to have a meaningful journey through inland, coastal and ocean shipping from the 1700s to the present day. Probably more of a "greatest hits" than a detailed anthology, but I'd like it to be representative and make sense. That's why overviews and resources which give me a 50-70 year (or longer) slice of history are so helpful, because I can get a feel for what needs to go where gameplay-wise. There's a lot I need to learn, for example I have a reasonable idea of what happened to passenger ferries from about 1950 onwards, but absolutely no idea how we got from "I'll take you across the river in me coracle for half a sheep of wool" to driving your Austin 1100 up a metal ramp to the boat.

With that in mind I'd like to avoid requests for individual types of ship as much as possible, partly because such things tend to take over a thread to the exclusion of all else but also because I'd like the first roster to be a bit of a surprise, with a few "wow, I didn't realise you'd include that!" as the screenshots emerge :)
Sounds like a good approach :-)

Whilst this really sits before the 1700s.. this is quite an interesting 'starter for 10' that sets the context for subsequent developments in transport and shipping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdguh1D-fOk

Also, this channel might have some handy videos on shipping from the Mid 1800s to Mid 1900:
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheGreatBigMove/videos

Hope those help!
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

Not too much visible progress since the last update. Looking at the scale vs. existing models, I have an interesting new problem in my voxel pipeline in that the SS Great Eastern (spoiler alert!) and modern cargo ships will require voxel objects more than 256 voxels in length, which exceeds the MagicaVoxel limit for a single sub-object.

Good news: MagicaVoxel has its own inbuilt scenegraph, so you can build a file from multiple subobjects. Something like this, if you'll excuse the hastily put together test object:

Image

Not so good news: none of my voxel tooling (GoRender, Cargopositor, Humber) currently understands the scenegraph format, it just takes whatever the last object in the file happens to be. So objects like this currently can't be rendered properly. Boo.

One thing I've been doing with the voxel tooling is moving all the load/save operations to a single library, which I call Gandalf because naming all my software with awkward puns felt like a good idea at the time. Early experiments suggest Gandalf can be updated to read these multi-model files and convert them into a single large voxel model, so the next step is to clean that up and make it robust, then add the ability to save such a file so Humber and Cargopositor will be able to create boat-sized voxel objects. So there's more coding to be done, then maybe I'll be able to do some test builds and test renders of the largest ships from the set to make sure the scale is viable.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

Productive weekend coding, and now Gandalf handles both loading and saving multi-part voxel objects. Amusingly the ship I wanted to test scale with only has a length of 276 voxels, which seems almost pointless when a bit of caricaturing would get it back under the limits of a single 256x256x256 cube, but some of the bigger modern freighters will be more into the mid-300s at which point the new features are definitely needed.

Anyway, scale test!

Image

I think this logarithmic type scale is viable, at least for OpenTTD's world of squashed and stretched sizes. The large sailing steamship is using something like 1.3 voxels/m whereas the narrowboat is 4.5 voxels/m, but I think they're all still surprisingly proportionate to each other and the game world. Guess I should now add some sort of modern supertanker to be absolutely sure the scale works (and I've not created some weird situation that only works between 17 and 220 metres), but I feel confident I'm not going to have to throw away or rescale a bunch of early models when a later creation undermines the whole scale.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Taschi »

Personally I think the scales look very nice in relation to one another.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

Fun scale stuff!

I put together a quick hull with the dimensions of the Knock Nevis (and whatever other 300 names it's been called) to test that the scale is viable for every extreme.

Image

The conclusion is the relative scale works as a concept... but not as a thing to actually go in the game! I think this will be too glitchy and weird, then of course there's the question of how you ever make loading one of these things viable for a typical player who's not amassing 10,000+ tons of cargo in one place every month. Well, I guess redFISH suggests if the capacity is there, someone will find a way to make use of it, but I still don't want to release a set where vehicles are regularly clipping through fences or popping in front of buildings - even Trains in full late game insanity will only clip in a small number of situations involving foundation tiles while going uphill or through a corner, whereas a ship that size will be broken the moment it enters a narrow channel.

OK, time for round two. What if we peg our biggest ships at Panamax? (The old Panamax, before they went upgrading locks and allowing big things in)

Image

Right. Needs alignment. But it looks feasible. "Ships designed for canal in real life also work in canal in OpenTTD when scale is designed vaguely reasonably" shocker. I think capping the size at Panamax is a reasonable tenet, it gives things a little more focus and keeps the ships roughly comparable to the other vehicles. Gameplay-wise I'm looking for something between the base game and SQUID/FISH 2, where ships are a bit more useful without become a gamebreaking, no-infrastructure-required powerhouse. I'm looking at the vehicle variables and trying to think of something horrible and Timberwolfean - no firm ideas yet but you might find some unexpected penalties for leaving ships loading at docks or running them mostly empty. (Making recessions absolutely lethal for a company which doesn't run a diverse enough transport empire. Ooh, I like that as a solution for the "one player has spent twenty minutes building ships, but somehow now earns more revenue than any of the players who've spent days on their train network" problem in MP games.)
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Electricfox »

Something tells me that there's going to be a certain infamous container ship in the pack, isn't there? :lol:

Will you be doing fishing vessels for FIRS?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Rezot »

Looking really nice, there! Particularly the lovely paddle steamer!

Felt I should share this- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJubi9_ZYdw
Nice snapshot of the variety of vessels meandering around coastal waters at one time, even if not of the best quality footage!
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Timberwolf »

Slowly moving on. Things are still at the stage where adding something requires a rewrite of at least one part of the tooling. I wasn't entirely happy with Humber's ability to represent hull shapes with compound curves, so added the option to use a Catmull-Rom spline for the hull profile which gives a lot more flexibility.

New addition of an early 20th century harbour oiler spotted in Rezot's video link:

Image

I quite like this coastal scale, the more I draw in it the more I find myself feeling it's more appropriate to a Sawyergame than giant freighters and huge capacities. That's not to say there won't be some big ships at the far end of the tech tree, but I'm planning to optimise for small boats scurrying about over much of a typical playthrough. (Oh, and Ever Given is right out... as a Suezmax ship it's a good 100m or so longer than will fit in the available range of sizes if I want to start the scale at narrowboats)
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by Argus »

Any idea when roughly we can look forward to the test version?
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by adpro »

Timberwolf wrote: 03 May 2021 16:21 I think this logarithmic type scale is viable, at least for OpenTTD's world of squashed and stretched sizes. The large sailing steamship is using something like 1.3 voxels/m whereas the narrowboat is 4.5 voxels/m, but I think they're all still surprisingly proportionate to each other and the game world.
I think using a logarithmic scale is an interesting idea. However, can you describe the practical calculation in more detail? If I have objects (eg. ships) of size 30m x 10m x 8m (l x w x h) and 160x20x15, how do you calculate the corresponding scale? After all, it is not possible to apply log (x) to every dimension, thus losing the aspect ratio. Can you explain the calculations in practice? Thanks.
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Re: Timberwolf's Boats

Post by 304 001 »

Problem with large ships and boats, is that they clip through the sides of locks as they move up and down inside them. Even the stock hovercraft and freight ship (Bakewell?) clip through the sides and bottom of the locks, which is jarring to watch.

We could really do with larger and/or wider locks in-game so that bigger ships don't clip through them, but as I have absolutely no idea about game coding, I don't know if that is possible or how difficult it may be to implement into OpenTTD.

Large vehicles of any type are great, but also kind of pointless if they can't move more than three tiles without clipping through every other object on the map. :P
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