New Graphics - Blender ".blend" thread (Works In Progress)

Ben_Robbins_ · Post by **Ben_Robbins_** » 18 May 2007 08:29

peter1138: I was intending on making shrunken versions of the tiles at some point to keep them sharp when you zoom out. Depending on how you shrunk the screen shot the results may be different. Photoshop averages and blends slightly, while in game it’s just averaged, while in Paint it just takes every other pixel. I was intending on shrinking them in paint, shifting to Photoshop for the alpha and adding the grid as in the bottom image of the attached. Personally I think this is grainier than the original, and I was intending on going half way between to 2 programs resized tiles. Do you feel there too bland when resized in the paint (and/or paint+grid) image, or did they appear differently to this in the program you used to resize them?

Field-Mouse · Post by **Field-Mouse** » 18 May 2007 09:03

I think they look good

So far I see nothing to complain about!
Good work Ben!

EDIT:
Dont really understand your comparison there.. But yeah, the Game part looks a bit bland and blurry.
Paint + grid lines looks best I would say.
Or.. well perhaps the "game style" is good too.. hmm.. just might look bland in comparison to paint and the original...

TagDaze · Post by **TagDaze** » 19 May 2007 21:19

Wacki, could you send me a car, so I can smack it on the driveway of the Company HQ? Preferably in 3ds, but if you can't do that, I'll find a way to convert from the Blender format. Thanks.

GeekToo · Post by **GeekToo** » 03 Jun 2007 22:28

Just registered, and read thru this huge topic ( all pages of them !! ).

I just wondered, is this project in which i'm very interested, still alive or is it bleeding to death?

Ben_Robbins_ · Post by **Ben_Robbins_** » 04 Jun 2007 01:52

It’s not exactly moving very quickly, but I'm still working on things when I have the time, which at the second, I have little of. The grass, which I'm trying to get done, has become pretty tedious, and there is little or no interest in it it would seem, so it’s not particularly motivating.

If you wish to make graphics, then go for it. I'll really get back down to this again soon hopefully, although I'd like to think that others could keep things moving when I'm not...

GeekToo · Post by **GeekToo** » 06 Jun 2007 22:10

Well, I still have to find out whether I've got some graphic talent, but I'm an experienced C programmer, so maybe that can be of some use. Furthermore, I know PHP, HTML, CSS.

Reading thru this topic, some questions arose to me:

-Aren't there enough graphics available to start a kind of alfa test tars, so people can play around with the new graphics in the game, and comment on them. Suppose it could be motivating to the graphic artists too,seeing their graphics used in the game) I ask this question because after compiling the 32bpp sources I wanted to add some 32 bpp graphics, but couldn't find much. I did find the Russian site somewhere on this forum, but did not like it very much: some tars contain errors, graphics are used in the wrong context ( eg ordinary houses used in the hq sprites ), some graphics are just ugly, while better ones are available on the wiki, sprites not split into tiles, etc.

-Is anybody still working on the coding. Found some posts about Elgadil, but he doesnt seem to be very active on 32bpp at the moment

-Is there a project coordinator?

-Is there a bug list, specifically for 32 bpp, or a road map for which items will be adressed first.

-After experimenting with creating a tar file for my personal use, I encountered some problems: I split dmh_mac's sawmill in a number of tiles, and added them to a tar file. But it seems that the sawmill structure uses only 5 unique tiles, in two sequence configs, while mac's graphics contain nine unique tiles. How is this going to be solved?

If some of these question have been asked before, I'm sorry, but I've spent quite some time in reading various posts, and thought it would be more effective to just ask, maybe some other newbies have the same problem

Ben_Robbins_ · Post by **Ben_Robbins_** » 06 Jun 2007 22:40

There are already 'test' tars. I have posted some in this thread. There only grass though, so not too exciting, but they can be stuck in game and used.

Egladil got the coding done to a level that makes it possible for artists to get on with implementing graphics. As far as I'm aware he last worked on it a couple of months ago, even though his last post in here is considerably longer ago. I took on from Alltaken as project coordinator for graphics.

When graphics made don't replace tile for tile exactly then it’s going to involve somebody to do some coding. I can think of many things that have been discussed that require coding, so like graphics there is plenty to do.

I haven’t seen a bug list yet.

mexicoshanty was making a website as a place to store/display graphics, If you have the skills, I suggest you PM and ask him if he wants some help on that. Once that is done it will be considerably easier to find things, as it will no longer involve thread trawling to find things.

athanasios · Post by **athanasios** » 06 Jun 2007 22:56

Welcome to the forums!

And since you are an experienced programmer hope will help us a lot. (Many of us cannot code

).
As you may have noticed there are many graphics but almost nothing seriously tarred.
The only serious works are on ground tiles and the new toolbar (which is useless in 256 tileset). (Sorry if I ommit someone/something). Actually 256 tileset displays all standard (64) tar graphics 1/4 of their size. Even if you can help with this 'bug' you will be greatly appreciated. It is crazy to create x4 graphics (just pixel resize) to bypass this.
As regards the russian guy and his site and his russian forum, he has disappeared from this forum. (Maybe blocked for what he was doing? There was big war, if you have gone through some threads you will understand what I mean... He was doing a lot of crazy things. Personally I didn't care what he did with my graphics, but others did...)

GeekToo · Post by **GeekToo** » 07 Jun 2007 22:21

athanasios wrote:Actually 256 tileset displays all standard (64) tar graphics 1/4 of their size. Even if you can help with this 'bug' you will be greatly appreciated. It is crazy to create x4 graphics (just pixel resize) to bypass this.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. I understood that in 32 bpp a tile was 256x127 px. So if you've got an image of 64px wide, isn't it supposed to be the quarter of a tile?
I took a quick look in the code, and think it would be possible by a little code patch, and abusing the compression flags in the info file, but the result would not look good: every pixel of the original image would take 4 pixels on the screen, ie very blocky. So why would you want to do that? When the 32 bpp project is finished, all graphs would have to be 256 px to look good. And if you want to use existing 64 px images until that moment, you could use a program like IrfanView to convert them in batch mode.

@ Ben: I've found your grass.tar, and my game certainly looks a lot better now! Compliments. Also the opening screen is affected by this,
the grass is not that blocky image any more.

athanasios · Post by **athanasios** » 08 Jun 2007 23:34

GeekToo wrote:I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. I understood that in 32 bpp a tile was 256x127 px. So if you've got an image of 64px wide, isn't it supposed to be the quarter of a tile?
I took a quick look in the code, and think it would be possible by a little code patch, and abusing the compression flags in the info file, but the result would not look good: every pixel of the original image would take 4 pixels on the screen, ie very blocky. So why would you want to do that? When the 32 bpp project is finished, all graphs would have to be 256 px to look good. And if you want to use existing 64 px images until that moment, you could use a program like IrfanView to convert them in batch mode.

Don't say this unless you want DaleStan to open his mouth again...

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... ht=#571721
You can see that the problem-bug is with menus, where buttons should remain same size regardless of zoom, but currently they don't. Just use the new toolbar to understand me.

Using an extention _z0, _z1, _z2 ... the png replaces the original sprite in the specific zoom only (256, 128, 64...). The problem is that if you use a 64px png-sprite with extension _z2 (zoom level = normal 64px) only, the code cannot accept it as it protests that it is missing sprites for z0. IT is very stupid. If you can fix it you are top coder,

, and we will appreciate you!

GeekToo · Post by **GeekToo** » 09 Jun 2007 21:52

athanasios,

I've downloaded one of your toolbar tars, and now I clearly can see your problem. The images in the toolbar buttons are shown very small. Imo it's not a problem with the zoomlevel ( z0..z2 ) in the infofile because it should be 22 px at zoomlevel 0, which, at my monitor should display with a size of app. 3/4 of a cm ( 1024x768 res). But it displays with a size of app. 2 mm.
I'll investigate this further in the code, please give me some time, 'cause this application is completely new to me wrt the code.
I suggest to not pollute this thread with this issue any more, and continue this discussion in the thread you mentioned above.

Field-Mouse · Post by **Field-Mouse** » 09 Jun 2007 23:18

Nice to see a coder, I believe we really need a coder here!
Welcome to the project, I hope you will like it here, hehe =D

GeekToo · Post by **GeekToo** » 09 Jun 2007 23:54

Thanks for the welcome, and no worries, uptil now I do like it here

@athanasios: I've added something to:
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=595778#595778

PluueeR · Post by **PluueeR** » 12 Jun 2007 10:27

Alltaken has some nice OpenTTD graphics on his side for roads, railroads, lands, shote, airports etc. Why are these not available for OpenTTD 32bit yet?

There where lots of contributions in this topic a couple of months ago now it seems that there isn't much going on.

Ben_Robbins_ · Post by **Ben_Robbins_** » 12 Jun 2007 16:06

Alltaken's work is all GPL so if you want to take on from where he left off go for it. Most of the graphics your refering to are not complete though, and are half the zoom level. I can only speak for myself, but the reason there isn't much going on in my case is because I'm very busy, and shall be for the next 2/3 weeks.

There are things that can be done that don't require more models though others could be doing Such as the grass. Each of those tiles needs resizing to z1 and z2 for example to keep detail sharp on lower zooms.

athanasios · Post by **athanasios** » 13 Jun 2007 06:19

And that is not an easy task also. Going 256 there are so many details to be added... We need a lot of artists. I must admit that most will use 128 or 64 while constructing, but 256 is so nice to look at and admire. When graphics are 'fine tuned' (:various sprites are compared as a total in game) we will have an amazing result. That's bad news for commercial games. OpenTTD will set the standards so high...

GeekToo · Post by **GeekToo** » 15 Jun 2007 21:56

Since yesterday, the 32bpp loading of sprites is available in trunk!
Great news, this means it is part of the mainstream development, and no longer a separate branch.

I've been doing some testing, and think it works very well, although the max zoom level at the moment is 64 px/tile

To show some results, I need to cooperate with the graphics artists, and because I think these can be found mainly in this topic, I request you to read the following:

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=597373#597373

Ben_Robbins_ · Post by **Ben_Robbins_** » 16 Jun 2007 06:31

Still working in the build with full zoom here, but I spent last night working on a couple of things. I've made the roads darker, but not incredibly dark. It seemed before that it was split on how dark people wanted it, but people that liked it light seemed to be less shore, so I’ve gone slightly darker. This tone also is a lot closer to the original which I think is most important for replacing graphics. I've also put in the bungalow just for fun which I made some time ago, and it's now split up into the ground tile and building tile so it sits up to the pavement better. This was a lot more fun making that ground tiles, defiantly more motivating.

In game shot attached.

DeletedUser21 · Post by **DeletedUser21** » 16 Jun 2007 11:07

That looks super cool! Wow! It's almost freaky.

I can't wait...

Chicago Rail Authority · Post by **Chicago Rail Authority** » 16 Jun 2007 20:35

Well done, Ben. Well done.

The roads look great as-is, especially as base-replacements. The grass is amazing, too.

I think that the rails need a bit more definition, though. Perhaps it is just me - but it seems that the grass-blade height is actually higher than the rail itself...

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