Sugestions to make a mappers life easyer

[Whopper]

Hi folks,

Haven't posted in a while, we are still working on the BIG cindini map project. I have some problems with the map editor and sugestions that could make my life as a mapper a whole lot easyer!

- More custom names!, I am nearing the limit of number of custom names which I can use, this will mean I can never really finish the map properly

- Trees don't appear/dissapear!, I hate it when I carefully placed certain ranges of forest, trees in a park or such, come back later and see things completely messed up.

- Custom placable buildings!, This would save us many many hours of deleting and expanding a city again just to get a certain buildin on a certain spot.

Thanks for your time!, we will post more stuff from our map very soon

[Wolf01]

more custom names is needed, indeed

about the other two suggestions, is actually possible with a patch made by me and Frostregen (give a look here http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... t=eyecandy ), we only needed for the grf support and it was complete, but we left it in a corner

[Frostregen]

Hi Wolf

Eyecandy objects do not serve any purpose:
They are no real houses - so no passenger production / acception.

On the other hand:
The GUI from Eyecandy could be used to display a list of available houses,
which then could be built in the scenario editor. (as real houses - not eyecandy)

Should not be to hard to implement.

@Whooper:
I think there is a patch already, which lets you modify the map array directly.
(So you could change the house-id)
Somewhere here in the forums...
Not exactly what you need, but could speed up things a bit.

[Wolf01]

I think the main target of this patch is to build objects in the map to make the things nice, like trees along streets which don't disappear (i don't mean like city roads), roadsigns, transmitters, electric pylons (like in locomotion or SAC's ones) and most things you now can build with newstations (and offten you can't because local authority doesn't allow you to place stations)

placing active buildings should be another different patch, maybe compatible with eyecandy gui or extended eyecandy
with some code changes we might give some active role to the eyecandy objects, like houses accepting and generate passengers (but they should cost a lot, like industries, but not too much, since you must build at least 3 of them to make them accept passengers)
with newindustries now in trunk we can also build castles, towers, parks etc which accept tourists

[Whopper]

Thanks for the reply Wolf and Frost ! but I don't really like to use eye-candy, because I want to use the stuff in the map editor only and I want the map to be playable by the standard OpenTTD without the need of any adds. Further than that it's a must that the buildings placed are normal houses that accept cargo and generate passangers.

[Wolf01]

the idea is to make the patch in trunk, so it will be a standard

[Frostregen]

Which version are you working with? 0.5.3 or 0.6.0-beta2 ?

The tree growing/dissappearing problem is solved really easily...

EDIT:
Hmm, custom placing real houses is also not very complicated:

EDIT again:
-windows binaries (based on 0.6.0 beta2) added.

features:
-scenarios created with this modified version should load in plain 0.6.0-beta2
-trees do not grow nor vanish
-custom housebuilding:
First click on the lower of the two blue buttons, then click on a house from an existing town.
Then click the upper of the blue buttons to place a house.
The number on the right displays the HouseID.
The House will belong to the town you selected with the lower button.

It is up to you to figure out the valid house-id's.
At least i did not have any crashes from building something wrong,
but you'll never know
(Values from 0-109 should be valid house-ids)

Use this version only for editing scenarios!

[athanasios]

I want to have this in trunk. Very cool stuff.

[Bilbo]

There is patch to stop self-growing trees: http://openttdcoop.ppcis.org/ammler/noS ... Trees.diff

Perhaps making it into something turnable on/off would be good enough for it to make into trunk. It would be nice in scenario editor but perhaps even in some games.

EDIT again:
-windows binaries (based on 0.6.0 beta2) added.

Seems the patch itself have been probably accidentlly deleted.

[one billion daleks]

Great stuff Frostregen!

I just tried this out, and it looks very useful for city-builders like myself

It's a pity though it's only available within the Scenario Editor ... what I'd really like is to use it within the game for things like creating fully populated city-blocks (bigger than the usual 3x3).

I also like to customise cities so they look unique - at the moment I have to run about with the demolish tool and delete buildings I don't want, then just hope something more appropiate is planted in their place!

It would also be very handy for replacing tall buildings that block your view of airports etc

So, any chance of adding this function to the ingame drop-down menu under Landscaping ...?

PS: I already tried the eyecandy patch, but it seems to be out-of-date - it won't compile successfully with recent versions of OpenTTD.

Thank Q!

[Frostregen]

@Bilbo:
It is not enough to remove the "OnTick_Trees" call.
There is still the "TileLoop_Trees" which will create trees on neighbour tiles too. (And also grows more trees on the same tile)
This call may not be completely removed, or you end up with brown dirt under all trees.

I did not post the .patch because it is:
-very simple to code. (MakeTownHouse(townid, houseid) is enough...) 20 minutes of work...
-embarrassing to publish such hackish code

It's a pity though it's only available within the Scenario Editor ...
[...]
So, any chance of adding this function to the ingame drop-down menu under Landscaping ...?

No, as it would alter gameplay.
One of the current "ingame-goals" is to help the town-growth of a city.
If you could just build the houses you want, the challenge has gone.
"Oh, i need ware-acceptance for this station...click-click-click-done"

Maybe as a cheat/patch setting though...

[Bilbo]

I did not post the .patch because it is:
-very simple to code. (MakeTownHouse(townid, houseid) is enough...) 20 minutes of work...
-embarrassing to publish such hackish code :P

But how can I combine it with other patches and compile it then? Posting binary only is quite useless for me.

[DaleStan]

But how can I combine it with other patches and compile it then? Posting binary only is quite useless for me.

Not to mention illegal. As you should well know, Frostregen.

[Frostregen]

*sigh* somehow i knew YOU would mention this
Patchfile added.


Currently I'm rewriting/separating the "tree" part as a switchable patchsetting
for inclusion into trunk.

EDIT:
Seperate "Disable Tree Growth" patch: http://bugs.openttd.org/task/1605

[trainmaster611]

@frostregen

The idea of placing buildings exactly where you want them to be is interesting. However, I haven't seen those blue buttons under the town option. Is it only for the 0.6.0 beta2?

[Frostregen]

I modified the source for 0.6.0-beta2 only.
It will never be part of any official 0.6. release.

To test this:
You will have to download the 0.6 beta2,
then extract the archive some posts above over the 0.6 beta2.

If there is enough interest in this topic,
and the devs are willing to include something like this into trunk,
then I will work out a more sophisticated GUI.
(Which then may be included into official 0.7)

-Display size of house when placing onto map
-Display some list of available housetypes in GUI
-Display preview of house in GUI.
-Display name of currently selected Town in GUI.
-Center map on Town if you click on Town name
-Some checks if housetype is valid in current climate + location. (I don't know if this is really necessary)
-Support for newgrf housetype's.

Only to name some points which will have to be done.

[Bilbo]

If there is enough interest in this topic,
and the devs are willing to include something like this into trunk,
then I will work out a more sophisticated GUI.
(Which then may be included into official 0.7)

If you'll get it fast, you may get this even in 0.6.0-final :)

[Frostregen]

New features are only added when jumping from 0.5 to 0.6
or 0.6 to 0.7.
Everything intermediate are only bugfix releases.

At least most of the time

[Bilbo]

New features are only added when jumping from 0.5 to 0.6
or 0.6 to 0.7.
Everything intermediate are only bugfix releases.

At least most of the time ;)

Yes, but new features still can be added to trunk, and thus still can appear in 0.6.0-final (or first in 0.6.0-RC1 once 0.6 get forked from the trunk)

Currently the 0.6.0-beta is just "named" revision in the trunk, no 0.6 branch AFAIK exist.

[Frostregen]

Oh right...i just looked into the repository.
Maybe the "beta" got me to believe they really mean "beta", not alpha