Total Graphics Replacement discussion

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 31 Oct 2004 03:28

ok guys here is a test image i quickly fired together with mauddib's original blender file.

since both of us use blender, (he seems to be pretty damn good wiht it too) it makes it a whole pile easier to get graphics together quickly.

i made the fountain, trees, buildings (tall ones), footpaths, intersections(based on his original road and textures)

i edited his house a tiny bit, and a few of his tracks like a 2-track on one tile setup (which i think would be Sooooo usefull in the game)

the trucks use there are from a blender user called "Gaurav Nawani" and were downloaded from Blenderman.org's model repository (some have licences so cannot be used, others seem to be useable. this particular model was a refigeration truck he made, if we want it for in the game then i would be happy to request his permission to use it)

i think that any game distribution should have a list somewhere in the source naming every graphic/set and the aurthor (mainly if they don't use TTD like this guy probably doesn't)

Anyway here is the pic that you guys will be wanting, remember its all just tests nothing that could be used in a game (few errors here/there)

Alltaken

danomite · Post by **danomite** » 31 Oct 2004 05:49

Wow, very nice, if anything even close to this comes out for opentdd I would be very happy! Its great, keep up the good work.

Rob · Post by **Rob** » 31 Oct 2004 05:59

If these graphics were in Lomo I would have bought it, no doubt about that.

It really looksawesome.

Eddy · Post by **Eddy** » 31 Oct 2004 07:32

The pic is really great but I think the reflections in windows is a little bit too much for the coding part. Or isn't it?

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 31 Oct 2004 08:22

eddy well the disadvantage of a raytracer is it traces rays, and i counldn't be stuffed using the Enviroment map to fake a reflection.

in the final versions there are two options.

A) we have no reflections/ static fake reflections.

B) we have reflections. and my following idea of how to do that is coming.
(option to turn it on, but it would require artists to do some extra work for it)

we have say 8 colour PNGs for building reflections, and we assign magic colours to be the reflections. (with an alpha layer of this image denoting the amount of reflection. and the colour itself denoting the angle of reflection.

the below example, i have used
purple for south-east
green for south
yellow for south-west

you would have 5 other colours for, W, NW, N, NE, E

and i was thinking that if all the GFX are made in 90 degree rotations. then we can use the same technology as the windowing system to do reflections. treat each colour as a window and use the alphas of it as how much to reflect (rather than 100% all the time)

it could be easily done in a set of seperate Index coloured PNG's and could be outputted rather easily from a 3d package such as blender. (just need to change a material setting on the glas pains and then convert to Indexed PNG in PS or similar.)

this mockup of the idea was just done in photoshop.

for older computers or if the concept would just be to time consuming to make work (or not a priority) then i'd say just go with no reflections/fake reflections. things would look faker, and less 3d-worldish, but its not a big deal IMO not having reflections.

http://doug.mudpuddle.co.nz/albums/uplo ... xample.jpg

Hadez · Post by **Hadez** » 31 Oct 2004 08:51

Alltaken wrote:i have the file now anyway, thanks to mauddib.
will post some images of things i have done in a sec

WOW! A nice picture again. Btw I´ve Blender too

- but I´m not as good at it as you two...

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 31 Oct 2004 09:09

Hadez wrote:
Alltaken wrote:i have the file now anyway, thanks to mauddib.
will post some images of things i have done in a sec
WOW! A nice picture again. Btw I´ve Blender too - but I´m not as good at it as you two...

well i have a website dedicated to getting people quick, and good through 30 minute (or longer) Speed Modelling contests.

http://battles.mudpuddle.co.nz

if you don't know about it already http://www.elysiun.com if the blender community page where you get the most knowledge.

so check it all out. (this goes to everyone, blender is really good for doing graphics for this game, the more people we get doing the graphics in blender, the faster things will become (if they share their source files) because of common objects, lighting setups, camera/angle setups....

have fun everyone.

Alltaken

Post by **orudge** » 31 Oct 2004 11:07

Alltaken wrote:ok guys here is a test image i quickly fired together with mauddib's original blender file.

YUM! That is a very nice picture!

Darkvater · Post by **Darkvater** » 31 Oct 2004 11:20

I must say those graphics made me drool all over my keyboard. This is not OpenTTD quality, this is professional 2005 game quality

However there are some problems that make this look great as a concept art but needs more thinking coding-wise:
1. reflections. Alltaken has written something down of which I frankly don't understand much; I am not a graphic artist. We obviously cannot go for the true reflection since that'll require a full 3D environment which would mean a lot more processing power for the game. Alltaken's idea might help; True reflections would of course also mean reflections of trucks, etc. going by the building

2. parallel tracks. Needs a full code rewrite, but of course that is our problem

The most I like about this concept picture are the real size-differences. Trucks now really look like trucks and not like some oversized mega-spaceships on wheels (eg. bigger then most buildings). Damn, that picture looks cool!

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 31 Oct 2004 11:54

darkvater. i have a model of a building here that if i put in full size it will be about 8x8 squares LOL. it has its own road/bridge going to it.

its the somthing al-arab its a hotel, and it has a heliport on the top (which looks tiny compared to the roof)

infact the building is so large that the GFX file would be about 1Mb by itself for one angle of it at full scale.

google image search al-arab, and you will know what i am talking about.

Alltaken

Rob · Post by **Rob** » 31 Oct 2004 12:08

Or look at my TTD HQ version of it.

MeusH · Post by **MeusH** » 31 Oct 2004 13:03

Is it Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe?

Oh man! wonderful!

ThorRune · Post by **ThorRune** » 31 Oct 2004 14:24

that looks even 10 times better then transport giant!

Post by **orudge** » 31 Oct 2004 14:25

MeusH wrote:Is it Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe?
Oh man! wonderful!

It's only a preview graphic, it's not integrated into the game or anything just now. It'll be quite some time before it is, but you never know, one day.

Celestar · Post by **Celestar** » 31 Oct 2004 16:06

Alltaken:

this is very good work. Should you be interested in drawing single tiles, here's some information on the map (old and new)

currently there are 19 tiles per landscape set, each of them identified by a "tileh".

tileh is a just a number that is made up of the corner heights. Should the western tile be elevated, 1 is added, for southern 2, for eastern 4 and for the northern tile 8. So you can have tileh from 0 (flat) to 14. 15 doesn't make sense as all tiles are elevated and you get a flat tile again.

For the steeper slopes, where one corner is 2 units higher than the diagonal one, it is made up as the corner in question is just one level higher and 16 is added, so that you get (23, 27, 29, 30 being (1+2+4+16, 1+2+8+16, 1+4+8+16 and 2+4+8+16 respectively).

Now for the new map, we'll need such a tileh as well, but we have more possible levels, cliffs and such, so each corner will have three bits. the lowest 3 bits will be the east corner, then the south corner, then the west corner and then the north corner. So a tileh value of 1 will have the east corner raised one level (half the amount of today's level). and a value of 000100011010 will have the east corner raised 2 levels, the south corner 3 levels, the west corner 4 levels and the north corner 0 levels. So that's 12 bits. Should you want to have the curvy tiles (I like them), then bit 12 will tell if the northeastern edge is curvy, bit 13 for the southeastern, bit 14 for the southwestern and bit 15 for the northwestern edge. The only question is which tiles can be filtered out, otherwise we'll have to draw 65k sprites for every landscape set (which will probably boost the game to around 400MB download).

I'll think of what sprites we need and what not, and post some information here.

Celestar

Darkvater · Post by **Darkvater** » 31 Oct 2004 16:57

Since that is too much bitmagic for the average man, I've whipped up a picture a few months back clearin up these things:

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 31 Oct 2004 18:24

i think mauddib is doing the tiles. but from my guess's there could be way more than 19.

it depends how smooth we want the slopes i guess. you coder people can work the rest out

Alltaken

Celestar · Post by **Celestar** » 31 Oct 2004 18:31

The problem is that "we coders" need to find out what kind of sprites we require first. Possibly we will have "only" 72 different sprites per landscape set (not including the smooth ones, which would be an additional 8-16).

Celestar

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 31 Oct 2004 18:55

i'll try to calculate it all, might take a while.

Alltaken

George · Post by **George** » 31 Oct 2004 22:43

mauddib wrote:I hear all of you talking about how great it would be to have 64 or maybe 128 pixel graphics. Well, as I've been a longwithstanding fan of TTD and always had an urge to make new graphics I took some time thinking of some concepts. Please read below and try to comment on the concepts. In the end I'll post a screenshot implementing some of these concepts in an example screenshot made in Blender.
Discussion

And what about 'player colours'?

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