Darkvater wrote:Of course for this to work it needs some more work; a lot more work.
- which climate to identify this new one with?
- probably would break a lot of newgrf stuff
- clean up the mess of industries/cargos
- new graphcs, mainly temperate > desert, temperate > rainforest, snow > rainforest
- probably some few more, but it would be absolutely stunning
And I would then create my USA scenario (2048x1024) which needs every climate from green flatlands and temperate forest, Rocky Mountains in snow with high altitude forests, Cuba & Mexico with tropical forests, deserts for Arizona etc. I have the terrain map, but it desperately needs multi-climate support. I didnt want to populate the map with towns & cities until the map could support more climates.
Newgrf has the problem that many of the newgrfs hard-replace graphics inside the core sets to achieve a pseudo-effect. This OTTD solution would be true extension of the climates, not faking replacement/addition of new industries.
As I see it, there are 3 major task areas:
1) Modify map for desert bits to co-exist with snow. Maybe not too difficult - but would need to carefully add a translator for old games. I will investigate this for TGP4. If I can get desert graphics into the temperate map, then that is getting close to preferred multi-climate effect. (but with restriction that only temperate vehicles & industries are available). It does raise the question of how to decide if some terrain is desert... ok for ScenGen scenarios, where the player can "paint" desert on (especially using my dither tool for delicate feathering of the edges), but in an auto-generated game, the decision is harder to make.
2) Industry graphics already work 100% in all climates. Some graphics though have the ground tile painted in (eg. temperate iron ore mine), so on the "wrong" terrain, the graphic looks odd. The whole arrangement of ground tile and building tile is a mess. For some, there is a proper ground sprite, and a separate building sprite with transparent base. However, some have a fixed-climate base, and some have the building sprite in the ground sprite itself. A mess in other words.
OTTD cargo scheme has hard-coded overlaps, and in my view, best solution is to abandon current OTTD cargo definitions for the TTDP global cargo definitions. A big job, in many areas. However, some of the mechanisms are already in place within the newgrf code to translate from TTDP to OTTD cargos. All we need to do is not convert - but use the TTDP values throughout. Again a translator is required for savegames.
3) Allow multiple vehicle sets to co-exist at the same time. This is a really big and nasty piece - definitely need lots of peter1138's experience here. I have little idea of what knock-on effects this may have, but its the sort of thing that IMO would in itself raise the release a whole point... ie. 0.5.0 to 0.6.0. Big nasty - dont want to think about it.
) nearby, it was better to build the settlement there (fish, trade).
