Zimmlocks creations develoment thread

Prof. Frink · Post by **Prof. Frink** » 13 Jan 2005 16:43

1st: definately too bright.
The other grey ones look alright.
The green one looks... wrong.

Sanchimaru · Post by **Sanchimaru** » 13 Jan 2005 16:44

Is it possible to put yourrating to 0 during the rest of the game automatically if you destroy the cathedral?

because it is such a Master Piece, that no better is deserved to you if you even think of getting rid of it...

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 13 Jan 2005 16:51

It seems to me that if the cathedral doesn't generate passengers on its own, but only when passengers are delivered to it, then it wouldn't twist the game very much. In the early years, there aren't many passengers around anyway, and the cathedral doesn't generate anything unless passengers are brought to it from somewhere. I suppose you could have bus stations on opposite sides of the cathedral, with busses just running shuttle back and forth, but there are natural limits to that because there's only so much space and capacity at a bus station. That's a reason why you should put the cathedral in a city - if it was in the middle of nowhere, there'd be plenty of room to do nasty cheats like that, except with long trains. If you did the cathedral like this, the cathedral-city might wind up being your passenger network hub, with all trains coming there and then returning with the produced passengers, in effect doubling your passenger revenues - but that might be just as well. It would allow for some very interesting operations, with a major central station(s), local trains to nearby towns, express trains to further towns, and all necessarily on the same high-intensity network (or several). Kind of like the London railway system.

OTOH, you could have the cathedral work like a temperate bank. That is, it both accepts passengers, and generates some constant quantity of them, with no relation to how many are delivered. That would be more likely to skew the game in the early years, because it would in effect be another resource, but it wouldn't have a major overwhelming effect on your overall network design.

As I think about it, it seems like you should do both. Have the cathedral in a city, producing passengers only when passengers are delivered to it, as described in my first paragraph. Then, have a tourist attraction (castle, ski area, whatever) OUTSIDE a city, that works as described in my second paragraph, and is a destination all its own - but a limited one.

lobster · Post by **lobster** » 13 Jan 2005 16:54

well, i like it in all colours, and in the end, it's the author that decides what is used and what not, so please Zimmlock, try not to bother pleasing everyone on this eh?

i personally like the dark grey on best, it reminds me of the black cathedral in Köln.

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 13 Jan 2005 17:03

Yes, and there are the pointy spires, too.

Zimmlock, I'm not telling you to change your cathedral. Keep it! I'm simply saying that there's the opportunity for several different variants. Of course you do not have to have them all in the same game, you could have them randomized, or have different versions for different climates. For instance, in the Tropic climate you could have one like this:

http://www.eveandersson.com/photos/phot ... size=large

Zimmlock · Post by **Zimmlock** » 13 Jan 2005 18:36

Here are the 4 versions in 4 colors that ll randomly appear at the beginning of the game.
(the browinsh redish brown version ll not change color)

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 13 Jan 2005 19:05

Gorgeous! The only thing I would change is, I think some of the grey ones should have the pointy spire.

Korenn · Post by **Korenn** » 13 Jan 2005 19:25

krtaylor wrote:Gorgeous! The only thing I would change is, I think some of the grey ones should have the pointy spire.

that's not possible is it? either the all have a spire, or none of them.

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 13 Jan 2005 19:39

Why? They're individual separate pictures. There isn't some random-color generator filling in the colors. They could all be totally different looking if we wanted, except of course that would take a lot of Zimmlock's time and be unnecessary.

lobster · Post by **lobster** » 13 Jan 2005 20:19

krtaylor wrote:Why? They're individual separate pictures. There isn't some random-color generator filling in the colors. They could all be totally different looking if we wanted, except of course that would take a lot of Zimmlock's time and be unnecessary.

seconded. nice work there, zimmlock. hurry the 2nd release!

Csaboka · Post by **Csaboka** » 13 Jan 2005 21:28

Sanchimaru wrote:Is it possible to put yourrating to 0 during the rest of the game automatically if you destroy the cathedral?
because it is such a Master Piece, that no better is deserved to you if you even think of getting rid of it...

You can't do that, but you can set the removal rating decrease very high, so your ratings drop very much. Say, you go from Excellent to Poor, and the LA refuses it if you're below Very Good.

krtaylor wrote:I suppose you could have bus stations on opposite sides of the cathedral, with busses just running shuttle back and forth, but there are natural limits to that because there's only so much space and capacity at a bus station.

This wouldn't be a too big problem IMO. It's very unlikely to get 100% rating, so you would lose passengers every time if you didn't bring people from other sources. And remember, the income depends on the distance between the two points, so you would barely profit from a delivery of three tiles.

Now that's how I think things should work: The cathedral is implemented as a town building. It generates relatively many passengers and some mail (tourist sending postcards). (Unfortunately, since the passenger generation is linked to the population of the building, the cathedral boosts the town population as well.) It accepts passengers all by itself, but since it's a town building, the passengers will be credited to the town, making it grow faster. I accept this setup makes things a bit too easy, but since the number of cathedrals will be fairly low (no more than 5 on a map), it wouldn't break the balance too much IMO.

The tourist attraction is implemented as an industry, far from towns, accepting and producing passengers. It generates passengers only if it gets some first, everyone who gets in, gets out, but not necessarily use your train to go back. I don't think this one could be exploited, either, since you always need a real town in your system, that compensates the loss of passengers (the ones that won't use your services to get back home). As a secondary industry, it could be subject to closedowns. (TTD's rule is that a secondary industry has a chance to close down if it doesn't get raw materials for more than five years.) So you could get news messages like: "Low popularity forces Edinburgh Tourist Attraction to close". Altough allowing this may be a bad idea, since people don't tear down a castle just because it isn't profitable... Or maybe it shouldn't be a castle, but something like a theme park.

krtaylor wrote:Why? They're individual separate pictures. There isn't some random-color generator filling in the colors.

Well, in fact I think they are generated by the recoloring routine of TTD. GL2 created a tool some time ago that could apply TTD's recolorings to any picture, I think Zimmlock used it to demonstrate how it will be recolored in the game. The benefit of using TTD's recoloring that you don't need a separate sprite for every version.

krtaylor wrote:They could all be totally different looking if we wanted, except of course that would take a lot of Zimmlock's time and be unnecessary.

I agree with that one. Although using the recoloring system saves sprites, it doesn't prevent you from adding other variations. The only difference is that recoloring a sprite can be done automatically, while other variations need extra time from the artist.

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 13 Jan 2005 22:45

I completely agree with your views on how it should work, with one exception. You say there should be no more than 5 cathedrals on a map. I don't think there should be more than 1 or 2.

One other small thought - One of the Patch features is the ability to set how many towns are likely to grow large. Is it possible to have the cathedral appear only in towns that are foreordained to grow large? Seems more appropriate.

Colonel32 · Post by **Colonel32** » 13 Jan 2005 22:59

the fence is too bright, IMHO - I would go without those small red pylons...

but the rest... damn. It's better then it could have ever been. How are you doing this?

Raichase · Post by **Raichase** » 13 Jan 2005 23:26

Zimmlock - it's very much breathtaking! Such a nice building! I am looking forward to surrounding it with railway!

Keep up the VERY good work mate!

Csaboka · Post by **Csaboka** » 13 Jan 2005 23:33

@krtaylor:
After a second thought I agree, five is really too much. With an usual 30-town map, every sixth town would have one of those, which would be unrealistic indeed.

For the second paragraph: There's currently no support for that, but can be added relatively easily.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 13 Jan 2005 23:48

Looking at it again I I think trees are fine but perhaps something larger or more variation in the trees?

Zimmlock · Post by **Zimmlock** » 14 Jan 2005 10:49

Thanks for all nice comments,

From my point of view, i would say a absolute maximum of 3 Cathedral/game generated randomly but never by accident the same colored version. (if possible exclude after the first random choice the one already chozen and so on)

The different colors are not renerated with the tool of GL2 what can color the random colors but, colored with the other one (sprite) where you can choose the sprites to recolor. This means there are 12, each containing 8 different sprites, sprites.
So a greater variation is possible, trees, towers, fences and so on. Ill change only one of the versions and add a spite to the tower, remove the fence and add other trees to the tree versions on this one colored row.

For the those who are interested it took me 48 hours (real working hours) to make the Cathedral pixel by pixel.

Csaboka · Post by **Csaboka** » 14 Jan 2005 11:01

Zimmlock wrote:From my point of view, i would say a absolute maximum of 3 Cathedral/game generated randomly but never by accident the same colored version. (if possible exclude after the first random choice the one already chozen and so on)

If everything goes well, this will be possible in the next official alpha, with some extra coding, so the timing is just lucky

Zimmlock · Post by **Zimmlock** » 14 Jan 2005 13:21

Have eddited 1 of the 4 colored versions.

krtaylor · Post by **krtaylor** » 14 Jan 2005 14:36

Wow. Great.

They should have you redo the buildings for LoMo.

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