New Feature in Trunk and Nightlies : newindustries

[belugas]

As some of you already know, newindustries have been enabled in nightlies.
This is a special project i've started more than a year ago.
Thanks to a lot of people [0] who gave me a lot of help, it has finally been realized.

What is newindustries?
It is a newgrf feature that TTDPatch team [1] has devellopped (and still improve it) a long time ago.
The idea is to be able to change properties and graphics of current industries.
It even can create brand new ones, allowing for a completely different game play.

How is OpenTTD's version different from TTDPatch's original implementation?
Not by much. There may be some features that we may have forgotten or overlooked.

The biggest difference, in my point of view, is the fact that we can have a total of 64 industries and 511 industry tiles,
compared to 37 and 350 (or349?). The difference stands more in the way it has been implemented rather than a desire to overdo.
There are technical reasons for those numbers to exist in TTDPatch that (fortunately for us) are not relevant in OpenTTD.
The minimap shows the correct list of industries, although I still have to implement a scroller, since right now, the list will be drawn without caring of the window boundaries.
Apart from that, it is pretty much the same (or so we hope it to be).

On the Todos, apart from the minimap subject, not much is on the drawing board.
There is the removal of a newindustry grf from the config (live or not) that will generate errors.
Work has already been started to handle it nicely.
Maybe find ways to expand the system, but always in cooperation with TTDPatch's dev team.

Which brings me to another subject: Bug report
I know it may be difficult for some, but it would really be appreciated if all bug reports are:
1) filled in in bugs.openttd.org
2) submitted with the savegame and list of grf used
3) verified against a session in TTDPatch as to know if it is a grf bug or a OpenTTD one
4) if ever posted on forums, not been posted in TTDPatch's forum, but in OpenTTD one.

Even if all the points are important, the two last points are een more, but for different reasons.
We do not want to harass these guys with stuff they are in no position to verify,
or to send them on a goose chase just to find out it has nothing to do with their code.
The same thing apply for us too. If the bug can be reproduced in both games, it is thus a grf bug.
In which case, you'll have to advice the author of the given grf.

Don't forget to do some backups of your savegames!
And Enjoy this new feature

[0] Csaboka, Oskar, Dalestan (understanding the secrets)
Maedhros, Peter1138, Rubidium, glx (helping hand)
Pikkabird, George (explaining the magic)
and of course all the users who tested nightlies (while I was implementing parts of it) and reported my numerous and sometimes funny bugs

[1] actually Csaboka (newindustries) and Oscar (moreindustries)

[Ben_K]

Well done Belugas. From what little we see from here and from the changelogs that you've done a hell of a lot of work on this.
Have yourself a pint of beer in celebration!

[XeryusTC]

Nice one Belugas, after months of secretly following your conversations and sometimes asking questions etc it is finally done .
I hope you don't have to do much bugfixing, and if you do: may the ducttape be with you.

[Bot_40]

Amazing work, thanks for all your hard effort and putting up with everybody moaning about when it will be added!

[PikkaBird]

Good work! Now to test it.

[CMircea]

Hooray! Can't wait for it to compile. Also, it's Oscar not Ocsar

[DaleStan]

No. It's neither of those. It's "Oskar".

[DeletedUser21]

Good job you did there! Congratulations! I bring a toast to the devs!

[belugas]

No. It's neither of those. It's "Oskar".

And now, it's fixed
Sorry Oskar

[athanasios]

Congratulations. A dream came true!

[CMircea]

That cake looks so real! Can we eat it?

[Chatyking]

Edit- solved

[belugas]

Congratulations. A dream came true!

athanasios, thank you very very very much. You have really made my day
It feels good inside

When I first saw this wonderfull cake of yours, I ran into our bedroom and woke up my wife to show her
She mumbled a lot, but when she realized what you did (and i'm totally convinced this is not a fake), she could not believe her eyes !

Well.. i still can't

Request: could you send the the full size original picture? I'll print it on paper

[FooBar]

I'll print it on paper

Print it on eatable paper, with non-toxic ink

Anyways, wonderful job you pulled off bringing newindustries to OTTD. Thanks a lot for all your effort and dedication!

[cmoiromain]

and i'm totally convinced this is not a fake

sorry to deceive you, the letters that write Belugas are fake... But the cake (which is real) does look pretty good, and i'd fancy a tiny bit of it

And well done for all this hard work, the feature arrived quicker than I expected

[Csaboka]

Congratulations, belugas!

I've tried the latest OpenTTD nightly during the weekend (with PBI and UKRS on temperate), and it worked nicely. The only problem I could find isn't a problem of newindustries per se, but it still interferes with it in an annoying way.

Looking at the source code, it seems you're still using a simple 256 element long array for the list of animated tiles. This may have worked until now, but newhouses and newindustries use the animation feature more heavily than original TTD did, and I've found that I've run out of animated tiles on a 1024x1024 map. You can verify it yourself by starting a big map with PBI enabled, then looking for an oil wells industry. All those industries should have the "nodding donkeys" animated all the time, but only a few of them is animated for me. I'm not sure if I should report this in your bugtracker, it's not a bug after all, but a limitation.

I have solved the same problem in TTDPatch with the "moreanimation" switch, but fortunately you have a nicer way to do it. You can allocate memory during the game, so you can make the array bigger on the fly when you run out of slots. Saving the list could be in a lenght-prefixed format, so it doesn't take more space than needed (this would require bumping the savegame version, though).

Handling animation for all tiles is very important because some of the houses and industries (especially George's ECS vectors) use animation for state changes, and they will break if their animation is ignored.

[dev|ant]

Congratulations Belugas, that is fantastic work. It brings a whole new level of customisation to the game, which I'm eager to get into.

Now I just have to wait until I get home to try it out.

[kilo.dollar]

Let's all
to Belugas

[Nite Owl]

Much appreciation to all involved and an extra Thank You to Belugas for taking the lead on this project. Without such developmental dedication these great games would have died a slow death long ago.

[Xaykev]

Thank you, Belugas and the rest of you guys!!
Awesome