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

[Zephyris]

Application could be done via something as "simple" as forcing the 22 degree view to appear for the first movement tick of every sprite transition. This would have a similar result to as is currently seen for 90 degree corners where the "/" views are used. If this was rotation direction-sensitive careful definition of sprite offsets would let you make the carriage appear as if it is rotating due to two bogeys instead of its centre. I think this could work well for normal zoom levels (at least according to my mockups ) but as for higher zoom levels I'm not so sure...

[GeekToo]

Great to hear about your work on the longer trains. If you want any longer trains, of any specific length, then I'll stretch the one I made in the last train.tar for experimenting with.

That would be nice. To get an idea how long they would have to be, a screenshot of the max distance I've been able to get ingame. Still lots of problems, but we have to start somewhere.

[Ben_Robbins_]

Awesum!...

I've made 1 sprite, which isn't perfect, but I need to some bit's of slye_fox really. I can't sort the alignment, so you'll have to do that, and if that's OK I can render off the other angles, but they take some time, so I don't want to do them incorrectly. (Currently set to "x_offs=-83 y_offs=-43 1")

Just working that bit longer is a lot better, I feel like a dog let off my lead!

[athanasios]

Happy to see my nagging brought some results.
{
You made my day! Since I am in good mood:
http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/amc0733l.jpg
}

regards
athanasios

[Bad_Brett]

Problem with that is that that particular angle will only fit exactly one position in the curve. What should happen when the wagon is slightly further on?

If that's possible, then it wouldn't be to hard to include more angles, right? Since it's all in 3d, it wouldn't take very long to create 64 angles or something like that. I guess you could make an gif-animation of it rotating and pick sprites from it. 256 colours should be enough for a single sprite. I'm sure Ben would do this if it was technically possible.

Personally, I really hope that you take your time and give it a try. This would solve the problem with long engines and make the game seem much more realistic.

[DeletedUser5]

Using gif? No. It needs transparency and gif is limited to 256 colours. Maybe mng? Animation as gif but all other things as in png.

[Ben_Robbins_]

When talking about that many sprites, it's no harder than rendering 4 angles, but for that last train as an example, 64 angles would take about 16 hours to render. (and some stuff takes considerably longer) If that was the standard then as well as artist's and programmers, this project would need people just rendering solidly.

[Bad_Brett]

When talking about that many sprites, it's no harder than rendering 4 angles, but for that last train as an example. 64 angles would take about 16 hours to render. (and some stuff takes considerably longer) If that was the standard then as well as artist's and programmers, this project would need people just rendering solidly.

Yeah I know, but I'm certain that this wouldn't become a big problem. Most people sleep work 8 hours and sleep 8 hours every day. Plus, with objects like trains, you can hardly notice a difference between ray traced shadows and area shadows. Besides Ben, you should support this idea so that you don't have to cut these beautiful models.

[Ben_Robbins_]

I didn't say I'm not supporting the idea, I just raised a concern. Another concern is that the lengths of sprites for the -- l angles is around 135% the size of the / \ angles. With a fluid turning effect created by increased sprites, there would also be a fluid distortion effect. It wouldn't matter much if trains just turn 45 degrees, but if you had one running in circles it may start to look a bit odd. Although I think that this is a minor concern in relation to the aesthetic advantages created with more sprites.

Need to find some way of making max run through an animation sequence and save individual frames as it goes...must be a way. But yes it would be possible to do a lot of rendering over night/while away, but my previous point was stressing that the bottle neck would move from being the texturing of models, to being the rendering, although I imagine some people would pitch in and just render.

[Gramble]

@Ben / Waves:
I does not know if you've understood it right. If you say, that your animated wave (not the texture), have got a motion in one dimension. In you look from the side of the tiles from left to right. But as the isn't one direction for the waves on open sea, they are distorted. An most of the time it looks like the waves are going up and down. In the animation there would be a second movement in a second dimension. So, while the waves are going from the left side to the right side, they also move up and down.

Code: Select all

y: additional movement (up and down, a bit like sinus curve)
^                  
|               OOO    
|              OOOOO     <- Wave
|             OOOOOOOO
~~~~~~~~~~~~OOOOOOOOOOOO~~~~~~~~~ (0 level)
#------------------------------------------------------>  x: normal movement like in you animations

Sorry for that bad picture. Tried to make a animated gif, but Gimp got some weird problems.


@longer vehicles: Bad_Brett's idea reminds me a bit on Locomotion, where it works very well.

[GeekToo]

Thanks Ben, for the longer locs.

Just because it is so nice to look at, I 'll post a picture of a loc and two grain wagons, where the sprites were replaced with that longer sprite. Offsets not correct, nothing that cant be fixed

[LordAzamath]

How does this spreading effect plain 8bpp in normal zoom? Like with newgrfs etc.

[GeekToo]

The code change you see here effects all the graphics, including 8bpp ( I only have not yet implemented the extra zooms for the 8bpp blitter, in some funny way I'm more motivated to improve the 32bpp code...).
The normal graphics now look funny because the default distance is increased, leaving a gap between the wagons( like in the picture in one of my posts above). With newgraphs it is possible to define a shortening offset, so wagons are diplayed shorter.

[LordAzamath]

But there will be errors then... I mean in normal zoom your trains take 5 tiles and in zoom-in they take 8 tiles.... That's dangerous isn't it?
OT: My 1000th post yaaay.

[GeekToo]

They take the same amount of tiles, only the tiles are smaller. If you mean compatibility between trunk and my zoom in patch, then you're right, if it stays a fixed(hardcoded) distance. I think the way to go there is to make the default distance the way it was in the original game, and provide a way to create longer vehicles by pngcodecing or some other way of variable distances. So this still is very experimental, exploring the possibilities, and find out the problems.

[Ben_Robbins_]

Gramble: Apologies for the lack of understanding, but as I understand it your saying rather than having just 1 wave move from 1 side to the opposite, there should be a 2nd adjacent wave. But this is what I originally had, so is this what you mean, or have I misunderstood it again?!. You may have to make an string of images/diagram to make clear what you mean.

Geektoo. That is awesum, although the train is a little long, so I shall shrink it slightly and do the other angles at some point, but probably not until after the weekend I'm afraid.

I have a relatively simple request if someone has the time. If not I shall do it when I can. In the Grass.rar files linked to on the wiki, I have found 3 sprites that are not aligned correctly or have semi-opaque pixels. Diagram attached if someone's up for sorting that. I'll stick them in the rar's after with credit. No idea how these are still there, since I remember this tile being a pain and I thought I checked each tile...but apparently not. The .bat file was also uploaded so easiest to just tweak that, for the semi-opaque pixels, find the equivalent soil sprite and place it underneath, as it appears to be fine.

[DeletedUser5]

I started working on fixing your offset my own way some time ago. You'll see fixed tar soon.

[LordAzamath]

If anyone wants to make a big HQ, I have the base wip from some ancient time.. I myself won't bother to hassle with it, but you may

[RSpeed tycoonfreak]

Right, Spent all this weekend making grass.... I'm really sick of grass now. So this is basically it I think, cause I have really had enough now!. 708 sprites done. I've attached a .txt which was the todo list, now done, so that lists the changes. But basically some stuff wasn't aligned correct, there were holes, I wasn't happy with some of the lines, and the growing grass needed to be done, as well as the z1, z2 zoom levels for multiple things. For the no lines set, they are the same as lines, without lines!. Seems obvious, but actually a no line set will probably need to have less variation in the texture to make it tile better, as a grid system makes tileing far easier. I personally prefer having lines, so made the tiles primerally with that in mind. Alterations are welcome.

I suppose for easy reference this is v2 for everything. The 'ground' set is split up so its uploadable. We do now need a place to upload/download these from/to, as the forum isn't really the place to continually upload to for various reasons. The bat file and pngcodec are in the small folder if people want to make changes themselves. (Might be best if any of the files people have uploaded with the grass/soil/rocks as it was prier to this get removed to avoid confusion.)

Anyway, here they all are...Mind out below....

I have to unpack these files to /data/sprites/trg1r right?
I can find data but where can I find a map called sprites??

[Trond]

just create the maps within your data folder if they aren't there