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

[Trond]

OMG! These wagons look awesome in game! And so does that building from geektoo!

[DeletedUser5]

Great work on bridge. Good to see coded some wagons, one train and two more rail tracks. And those stations look good too.
However, wagons aren't visible in normal zoom.

[athanasios]

Sorry to say this, but the train looks suitable for toyland only.

Not that your work is not OK Ben, on the contrary they are very nice but with current compressed length I think they are way far from what they should look like. For me there is no other way than to change the scale.
The above screenshot reminds of another commercial game - aiming younger gamers. It shouldn't be like that.

regards
athanasios

[LordOfThePigs]

I must say I like the wagons. The scale if off as far as real life is concerned, but it doesn't matter since we shouldn't change the scale of anything in game, just provide some nice 32bpp replacement sprites. Replacement means what it means, it replaces exisiting sprites, so scale change is not on the agenda.

[GeekToo]

Soeb, I tried the train with my V9 patch, and the wagons also appear as intended on the normal zoom level, did anyone else have the problem of the wagons not visible on normal zoom?

Athanasios: I agree that scale really is a worry. I do have an issue with it with my bridge. I found that I modelled the slopes incorrectly (angle was too steep), when I corrected that I had very little room under the bridge. So I did calculate some things: with the 12.5 m per tile size, the height under the bridge is just 1,55 m.
No way we're able to get a 4m high truck or train under that.

When the trains are more correctly scaled, that leaves less room for details: max vehicle length is half a tile. I did some searching and train parts are between 15 and 25 m long. So if 25m would be a half tile (128 px), the rails would have to be only 7px( 5px per m times 1.435 m) apart in full zoom. Also all the details of the front of the train would have to fit in 20px height and width ). So more correct proportions will result in less detail, even with the extra zoom levels.
I have not really mady up my mind personally which direction we should go on this, I really would like to see more opinions on this.

// edit: crossposted with lord of the pigs, that's at least one opinion

[athanasios]

I was very happy when Simutrans went 128. The same for OpenTTD. Now 256 is even better and allows us to change the scale and loose some details. But with this size things that were not so evident with 64 size (like bridge height) will disturb more the eye. I don't mind about loosing details. It is better than barrel-shaped kid style sprites. dmh_mac's house sprite doesn't follow the 12.5 rule and looks pretty cool. (The original sprites give the intension that they are not 12.5 meters but more-excluding Toyland where there is no scale at all. ) Guessing from car lines and number of apartments it is between 16 and 20 meters.
In the area I live in, land is ideally 15m width x 30m depth. A building of 8m width (2 rooms of 3m + corridor of 1m + walls) fits nicely in such a piece of land. Now take into consideration that in game we have grids of 2x2 or 3x3. In real life there are less roads and more pieces of land in a block. It is normal to have 8x2 (120mx60m).
So I suggest a scale of 15 to 20 meters.
As I am not a 3D artist I am the least to have an opinion. Still, I would be grateful, if someone who has the spare time, renders a couple of buildings and vehicles in the above mentioned scales, so we can compare, as was done with the train engine.

regards
athanasios

[GeekToo]

I made a quick render of the bus and photoshopped the eurostar in it, on a scale that uses realistic proportions, and the maximum amount of pixels to work in game. Also I changed the elements of the bridge to match that scale ( about 25 m / tile diagonal ).
For comparison, my old (unrealistic scaled) bus is in the background. As you can see, details get lost, but the height of the bridge is a fixed number of pixels ( so no matter what scale we choose, that is the maximum height in pixels, or else glitches will appear, and depending on the scale it is 1.55m or 3m etc).
The picture is not very high quality, but is meant to give input to the discussion about the scales.

[athanasios]

The unrealistic scaled bus cannot go under the bridge for sure. Now I 'd suggest you check how the other scale bus looks passing under a bridge and see if you can make it slightly bigger (2 or 3 pixels higher?) without looking bad under the bridge.

A quick 113% bus looks already much big to me.

[GeekToo]

Then it would be like this ( never mind the lighting ).

[Slye_Fox]

the slope seems abit shallow

[Purno]

With slopes like that you'll never have mountains, merely hills...

And the bridge still isn't high enough, trucks are usually higher than buses.

[GeekToo]

Funny what different graphics can do: the slope really isn't that different from the original game.

[athanasios]

That's why I proposed bridges and tunnels to be 2 heights.
But don't worry about this now. In game it will look much better.

[GeekToo]

But don't worry about this now.

I don't

I just worried about the scale of the vehicles, but suddenly the discussion diverted to the slope of the bridge.

[Ben_Robbins_]

athanasios: The train is modelled to a realistic length, therefore if it becomes possible to have vehicles of realistic length then it can be made bigger, but it's not yet possible, therefore please just criticise it within the current limitations. I didn't make it short through choice.
Having a scale of 15-20 metres would mean roads and rail become very narrow which I don't like the idea of. Of course it could just be argued that there is no scale for all, but at high zoom it's just too obvious when things are incorrectly scaled relative.

Soeb: I checked them all before posting, and they all worked, so that is strange. I am yet to try V9, but when I do some more work on the train bits, I'll just check again.

The slopes in tt are shallower than the shading makes them appear, so when just 1 sprite is shown it appears quite flat. Tunnels are more of an issue I think because the entrance goes directly down either side of the vehicle to the ground, while for a bridge the points where it touches the ground are further away, therefore a vehicle somehow fitting under something it shouldn't just about works.

<edit> Took another look at the sea sprites that I experimented with quite a while back. I concluded, when away, that the sea has 5 elements. The swells which move, then the small 'peaks', which are small and everywhere, but stay around the same spot, then the froth which also stays about the same, although it's reduces behind a wave as it gets pulled back under, the breaking waves pushed up by the coast, and then the froth at the shore line. Making these for a tiled sprite seems near impossible though, but I have made the first 2 steps (in the sprite attached). It partly uses the sea I made before, but is basically redone in a better way. I've made a mock-up also to check it tiled and against the land (lacking any coast sprites yet obviously.)

There is also the question of what is/will be possible with the sea tiles. This gif is 16 sprites... (The animated .gif is here as it's rather large. (slightly shrunk I think)

[AndersI]

Beautiful water! But I think I would get sea-sick looking at a whole ocean of them...

Edit: Looked at the large gif, and yes, I will almost certainly get sea-sick. For some reason, I can only see the swell as going from upper right towards lower left, while the white breaks are moving left to right. I'm getting mixed messages...

[DaleStan]

It looks to me like the swells have extra-high spots at approximately the tile corners. This may be why I can't get the swells to move; the sea just periodically bulges in a nice lattice.

[Ben_Robbins_]

There are 2 swells, one from top right to bottom left, and one adjacent. The centre edge points move slightly less than the corners because of the merging of the 2 swells. Although the centre point of the tiles reaches the same max and minimum heights. I figured that to tile and not really look like everything is going in one direction the swells would need to work less like a snake or fish and more like a stingray which clearly shows movement but not in the same singular directional way that a fish's tail does.

I could switch the white breaks to go right-left quite easily, so could do that, although as I just said there is a top right/bottom left swell also, plus the mini waves, or just general choppiness seems to stay relatively still I have noticed (in reality).

I could double the morphs reference mesh's so that there are 4 waves (there are currently 2), with a new one going top/bottom and one left/right. I don't think this would make much different though. Any ideas welcome though, because tiling waves has got to one of the trickiest things I've tried. Some things in life just weren't made to be tiled.

As for the sea sickness...well like so many people, I suggest you stick to planes and trains!

[GeekToo]

This really is looking good! At first sight, I thought it was a movie of a real sea.

When I took a better look, I have to agree with DaleStan, some spots are somewhat distracting, and take away the feeling of realism. I marked them ( it's in frame 10, but some other frames have them too ). Furthermore, the amplitude of the big wave can be decreased a little in my opinion, it does look kind of stormy on the sunny OTTD days.

At least, you made me think about how to implement animation in 32bpp. For sure, I don't like pixel palette animation.
First ideas that crossed my mind: create a png with all the frames in it, and indicate by means of pngcodec how many frames are present.
Then the code would have to be changed so it would show different frames at different time intervals. I do not have any idea how difficult it would be to implement, we'll have to find out. Another possibilty: use the mng format ( kind of like a moving png, like an animated gif compares to gif). Again, no idea whether open source libraries exist for loading the format, I'm just brainstorming.
Thanks for providing inspiration to some interesting thoughts !

[Zephyris]

So there are two waves, one top right to bottom left and one top left to bottom right? Have you considered making one frequency f and one frequency 3/2 f? I think this would help the squareness which is evident...