Transport Tycoon Forums

one billion daleks wrote:This GRF is mainly intended for single-player games, and for players with a 'city-building' approach to the game, but it can also be used in multiplayer games. At the moment it only works in Temperate, but I am happy to modify it to include other climates if there is a demand. In the option where the "Purchase Land" sign is completely removed, I may in the future add some coloured-coded flowers to represent company ownership ... they'll just be a few pixels scattered about, made to look like daisies or something. And lastly, I might replace the gridline pixels, so that multiple tiles look more like a continuous expanse of grass and flowers ...

What this GRF does ...
This GRF increases the usefulness of the 'Purchase Land' button, by enabling it to function as a simple landscaping tool, as detailed under Benefits below. Eyecandy is also enhanced by removing all the brown tiles from the game. The "Purchase Land" sign can be left on, or switched off completely. If the sign is retained, it will be displayed on a more attractive green tile. But whether you choose to keep the sign switched on, or switched off, any land tile that you apply this button to will still become 'owned' by the player.

Benefits
This GRF enables you to 'open up' your cities so that you can see what's going on, without having to make the buildings transparent. If your view is obstructed by a few skyscrapers, just replace them with a nice green park! I particularly wanted to do this so I could see my motorways and intersections working within cities (see image below).

Similarly, you can add grass to the end of your airport runways, to create a more realistic approach-path for aircraft ... instead of them supposedly dodging skyscrapers as they come in to land!

And if you're fed up with the game building surplus bridges across rivers every couple of tiles, then just delete them and plant a patch of grass ... no more unwanted bridges on that spot! (Note though that on coastline tiles you'll lose the beach).

And those large distracting 'landslides' caused by AI players, when they're mucking about with the landscape, become far less noticeable, as they will now be green instead of brown.

Another thing you can do is control the shape of cityblocks, because you'll own the land ... so you can create more varied city layouts with green tiles.

Other ideas ... you could enhance your parks a little by adding a one-tile canal at the center of a 3x3 park, to repesent a pleasant water feature. Or you could perhaps individualise your cities a bit, by replacing say - all the pyramid-shaped skyscrapers - with a green tile, or a canal-tile.

Another possible use of this GRF is to control town growth. From what I've seen in the game, town growth proceeds one row / column at a time - it doesn't seem able to jump over two rows / columns of 'obstruction'. So if you were to place two parallel lines of this 'owned' grass along say, the western boundary of a city, it should halt any further expansion in that direction. I haven't actually tested this yet, but if it works it'll be useful for stopping buildings from appearing all over my intersections outside of cities!

Note: When you demolish something, or raise some land - you won't see any more brown tiles. These actions will now remain green. When new construction begins though, you'll still see the animations from brown building site through to completed building.

Minor side-effect
A very minor side-effect that I haven't managed to fix, is that the toolbar button for "Purchase Land" gets blanked if the sign is switched off - no image of the sign on the button anymore. As far as I can tell this is controlled by program code, so isn't something that can be addressed by a GRF.

Parameters
1 = no brown tiles, sign on.
None (default) = no brown tiles, sign off.

The attached image file shows an ingame screen with the 'standard' game, grassyknoll-signon, and grassyknoll-signoff.

hectobar wrote:

one billion daleks wrote:mega snip

hey thanks thats really usefull and i like it thumbs up 10/10 100% yay!!!

richk67 wrote:

hectobar wrote:

one billion daleks wrote:mega snip

snip

hectobar: please do not quote a lengthy post just to add one sentence. If you have to do a "me too" post, then please do a quote-snip as shown above.