Halftile foundations (in trunk since r11321)

[FooBar]

Awesome!

This patch really deserves a place in my 'best features ever'-list.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible! Finally we can have some realistic construction in those mountains!

[Ben_K]

That looks excellent! Well done Frosch!!

[Scia]

This will really take mountain routes to a new level. Good work!

[frosch]

Thanks everyone for the nice feedback. I would also like to thank some (alphabetically):

Acerbus: As Roujin pointed out: The anti-zig-zag foundations would never have been created, if you had not created that mock-up. Initially I though of drawing some extra graphics for all slopes, but that was way too much work. You showed me a way to create a nice looking foundation with the existing graphics.

Rubidium: Thanks for the lot of work reviewing the patch as well as giving nice feedback. And finally thanks for updating the NewGrfSpecs Wiki. I was going to insert a paragraph this morning, but it was already done

About NewGrf: I was asked how the NewGrf support works in detail. Last friday I quietly placed an example newgrf in the second post, that demonstrates the usage. Basically 16 sprites got appended at the end of the usual Action5 block. However to tell the truth I could not be bothered to draw 16 most identical sprites. I only drew the horizontal bar (last sprite if you decode the example grf), the rest is automatically generated out of that.
So if you want to draw new halftile-foundations, you may only have to draw that horizontal bar. Then you can send me your sprite and I will simply pipe it in my small tool to generate the rest.

[m3henry]

Yay!
A idea I had in 2006, has come around successfully and been proven worthwhile!

[Wolf01]

for the "who had the idea for first" contest
an idea i had in 2005, with the basetunnels too: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... 377&hilit=

[NukeBuster]

very nice if only different tracktypes were allowed on one tile, we could build a nice trace for monorail/maglev

ok, we can, but not in curves with the new halftiles. only if it were the same track type

Frosch, I think you read over this post. Do you think it would be hard to do something like this? As you also made a patch that will allow you to build on the other side of the track while a train runs over it...

A link to an example...
http://www.tt-forums.net/download.php?id=79324

[sir_msgs]

very nice if only different tracktypes were allowed on one tile, we could build a nice trace for monorail/maglev

ok, we can, but not in curves with the new halftiles. only if it were the same track type

Frosch, I think you read over this post. Do you think it would be hard to do something like this? As you also made a patch that will allow you to build on the other side of the track while a train runs over it...

A link to an example...
http://www.tt-forums.net/download.php?id=79324

And same applies to building a track on a halftile already owned by a different company...

EDIT screenshot

[Mchl]

I suppose this one would be much more difficult. A tile can have only one owner at the moment, and only one rail type assigned IIRC. I think that map array is a limitation here.

Anyway, these features would be useful indeed

[Darkvater]

for the "who had the idea for first" contest
an idea i had in 2005, with the basetunnels too: https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... 377&hilit=

Euhm; 2003 August 13

New foundation graphics for diagonal tracks?



/me vanishes

[Wolf01]

and the winner is.... "Darkvater"

ehm, where have you been hidden?

[frosch]

Lol. I did not knew how often this was suggested, and to be honest I cannot remember if I ever browsed the TTDP Suggestion Forum (the OTTD one was boring enough after some weeks). But I want to quote one of my lecturers: If you search long enough, you will discover everything to be written earlier by someone.

More interesting for me: Who suggested first to extent the clipping of sprites at viewport boundaries to generally draw rectangular parts of sprites?

About building different railtypes of different companies on one tile:
First you will have to define how the elrail/normal-rail conversion tool should work on such tiles.
About the coding: The sprite drawing is easy. Everything can be created from the existing sprites with the above technique (also note that this will therefore not break any newgrf).
The main task is to find a nice way to store everything in the map array. Btw. you can then extent this to also allow different grass growth on the halftiles. At a first glance there are plenty of free bits in the rail tiles. But at a second: Every patch that deals with railways like Routemarkers, grass growth on unused tracks, ... wastes nearly all of them. As they are all nice features you will need to find a way, which nicely combines them.

Overall I think it would be an easy task to code something that works, but it is a bit harder to find something nice.

The bad news for you: I will not code it as I am not really interested in it. So you have to find someone else.

[athanasios]

That's bad news.

Darkvater: With your long absence from the forums I though you were abducted! So you are still around.

[Ameecher]

I thought I'd let you guys know that there is now a brick foundation grf that works with the anti-zig-zag patch. Congratulations to frosch on this patch, it looks very good.

One thing I do request is that someone takes a screenshot of the .grf file in use on a _ build on slope so that I can add it to my site, (I'm a TTDP user so can't do this myself). Thanks very much and enjoy