Transport Tycoon Forums

I noticed the top row of each of the -- side views is missing the alpha blue edge on the right... I suppose that will cause white errors ... unless you are using a seriously weird spriteset template..

In general I would give you a few hints for drawing:

I would first of all strongly advise to use more shades of colours to cause a loooot more contrast, the current sprites look totally flat and without much detail.

In the attachment you can see how many colour shades do I use when drawing - it makes trains look less flat and gives better visual outcome. Also, bright pixels are good to use for things which define the structure of the train, while the darker ones are less important.

In general contrast is very important - note how I did the doorway, the corner pixels are a bit brighter so that the sharp corner is not as visible.

When it comes to choosing colours, I would make the roof in the metallic grey as a whole, and as you can see I added 7 shades of it so it looks a lot more plastic. Also, making the brightest pixels be neighboured by 3rd brightest pixels (not 2nd), it makes even more contrast and thus simulates a reflection which makes more of impression of metallic/a bit shiny roof.

The red you use is one of the pink-ish shades, I personally would use company colour, if not at least the "fire-like" red.

Windows could probably use more contrast too but those are not as important here

IMHO too much shading makes the sprites look dirty and messy, I prefer the current clear-looking ones. The red is perfectly fine too, I see those things here nearly every day.

juzza1 wrote:Long time no see. I've begun to program the set in the DevZone environment. Stay tuned for more news!

Awesome news! Maybe we will still someday see Finnish trains in action in TT world...

Thanks for the advice. The sprites were drawn by several people over the course of almost ten years, so there are some differences in their artistic style. Currently there is no code, so writing that is my 1st priority. Some of the sprites could be redone on a later date.

Thumbs up for this project, it will be great to see VR set happen, even if it would take until company's 200th anniversary.

VR orders more driving and restaurant cars:
http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/pass ... -cars.html
As seen, there is the new Edo driving coach. It could be drawn, but current OpenTTD implementation does not support "reversing trains without turning train", so that Edo coach could be only for the looks at the rear.

Anybody looking for drawing freight wagons? There's plenty of them waiting for drawing, such as new Uan-T and Sgmmns-w, Russian Vok-wagons (etc...), which have no artist yet. List here: http://users.tt-forums.net/finnish/table/ftsfreight.htm

This new NML-coding and implementation is looking good so far, hope to see a new beta in near future.

Vessajono wrote:

kyosuke1989 wrote:
EDIT: Btw johannes, where did you get that heightmap? I was searching it for long time, but the heightmap was cut off just south of Finland on NASA files..
I would have created scenery based on heightmap.

I tried to create one myself by screwing around on some colored heightmap picture on photoshop...It kinda worked out but i wasn't satisfied with the lakes in the more high parts of the map. The slopes between land and water were too steep imho.

Double post, but BUMP and semi-topic:

This problem will be eventually solved, when Extended heightmap format on OpenTTD comes out. Then, things such as water (lakes and rivers), can be marked on heightmap as layer, and *poof*, there's those 10000 lakes. As rivers. Not so simple as it sounds, but nearly. All water can be then placed using that on Gimp or Photoshop. Some fixes may be necessary using manual operations. And when water level changes (on heightmap), between them will be some canals and locks, as in reality.

http://wiki.openttd.org/Terkhen/Scenario_format
http://wiki.openttd.org/Terkhen/Scenari ... ater_layer

That saves the day then. Meanwhile, let's make and play some semi-realistic Finnish-themed scenarios.

I have no idea what edo means, but you can control the appearance of various vehicles in the train just by checking things like position_in_consist or even position_in_consist_from_end by various switches ... might be helpful

kyosuke1989 wrote:As seen, there is the new Edo driving coach. It could be drawn, but current OpenTTD implementation does not support "reversing trains without turning train", so that Edo coach could be only for the looks at the rear.

Not true, DACH and Canadian sets have working control cars.

well... technically they have "illusions" of working cab control cars...

Eddi wrote:well... technically they have "illusions" of working cab control cars...

And, depending on how complex you want your set to get, it can be a REAL pain to implement

NARS also have illusion about control cabs with Bombardier Bilevel at least, but I don't think that tricks like this is first think to do. I think simple coding some trains to run and adding difficulty tricks later. Edo cab cars - more pictures, here is link for more pictures if someone decided to draw it. And if Danmack is reading this could you change title and remove that poll thing and also update first post with link to Devzone?

Together with juzza1 i've been ironing out the first release of this set in ... how many years? If i remember correctly, the last "offical" was Finnish Train Set Taster, which was released... At 3rd January 2005. That makes it little over eight years..... Should be a matter of few days, finally. Anyone then intrested of OpenTTD MP with Finnish Scenery?

I updated Finnish Trainset Webpage. Has few stats and cargos corrected now.

In time of little over a week, this set has gone from scratch to pre-alpha. Soon, playtesting and DevZone-reporting of bugs needed. Do PM me if you are intrested. I'll left alpha-announcement to juzza1.

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After initial playtesting, i noticed that there is very few drawn stock in mineral&open wagons category. Anyone intrested drawing those?

kyosuke1989 wrote:Anyone then intrested of OpenTTD MP with Finnish Scenery?

Count me in.

Hello!
First of all great thanks for huge step forward in recent development of this set. I have probably found a bug in recently compiled nightly bundle (r46). Recently added EMUs and DMUs dont load passengers.

WLK wrote:Hello!
First of all great thanks for huge step forward in recent development of this set. I have probably found a bug in recently compiled nightly bundle (r46). Recently added EMUs and DMUs dont load passengers.

I just noted that same thing, was just writing a DevZone ticket for that.
I didn't advertise about nightlies here yet, because passenger coaches aren't coded yet, and there's few other things to do before the real first release, public alpha. Works in progress....

Yes, the nightly is not intended to be fully playable, since many elements are simply not coded yet. If you find a bug you should mainly create an issue in the Finnish Trainset DevZone, because I might not remember to read this thread on a regular basis.

Downloaded nightly. Quality is so nice. I can't wait to get nightly with passenger wagons coded and then I will start my first game with this set. Hope that someone will create 2048 x 2048 scenario of Finland someday because quality of 512x512 scenario isn't so good and big towns are not cities and some random towns are. I tried to made heightmap with instructions on this forum, but sadly it doesn't included northern areas like Finland or Scandinavia at all.

Katve wrote:Downloaded nightly. Quality is so nice. I can't wait to get nightly with passenger wagons coded and then I will start my first game with this set. Hope that someone will create 2048 x 2048 scenario of Finland someday because quality of 512x512 scenario isn't so good and big towns are not cities and some random towns are. I tried to made heightmap with instructions on this forum, but sadly it doesn't included northern areas like Finland or Scandinavia at all.

I found some heightmaps here previously: http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html , last time i created a heightmap, used those. They do cover all Finland easily. They are in 1"x1" arc second squares, also 3" and 15" available. A program called 3DEM is used to convert those hgt-files to png or bmp greyscale heightmap files, which can be put together on GIMP or Photoshop, and scaled/cropped then to suitable size, for example, 2048x2048. It's a puzzle then. But they all must be converted at same scale of height so they can be put together easily without ----------------- lines going in borders of squares in scenarios. That's what i learnt on the last time i did those. Also, the files seem to be square but they are somehow stretched in North-South direction, and that has to be fixed too.

As i mentioned ^ there, all we can do now is to assemble those heightmaps together using 3DEM and other tools. Importing them to OpenTTD isn't currently feasible because of numerous lakes on different height levels (and hand placing of them is a pain), but if someone implements that extended heightmap feature on OpenTTD, then it can be looked futher forwards, so lakes can be placed then automatically as rivers.

And if you lowered all lakes to sea level, you'll end up having cliffs next to lakes.

Also, basically the 2048x2048 scenario can't cover Finland from up to down (about 1200 km's from top to the Gulf of Finland) (and width about 550 km's at max), as the distances would be really too short then (scale of about 2 tiles per kilometre won't make any sense). On my 1st attempt to build Finnish-style scenario, i had a scale of 660 tiles per 80 kilometres (8,25 tiles per kilometre). That scale can be degraded, but it is harder to make realistic railyards below that scale. 660/100 makes maximum size of scenario on 2048x2048 = 248 across 248 kilometres. 30% smaller scale can be feasibly achieved, but.... It's always compromise between quality and distances to cover.

Larger maps patch in trunk could make Finnish scenarios far easier to produce. 4096x2048 map could be 496 across 248 kilometres, which could include 1/4 of Finland with that 8,25 tiles per kilometre scale.
8192x4096 map could include 992 across 496 kilometres, which could handle most of Finnish rail network with finescale. Only Joensuu-Ilomantsi railway would be left few kilometres short. Currently Kolari is northernmoust point of Finnish rail network, and from Kolari to Hanko there is about 850 kilomeres in north-south-direction. 8192x4096 map could be feasible to build. North-South direction should be \.

Okay, here's something I found:

-Hkb is classified as covered van instead of flatcar
-Hain is classified as flatcar instead of covered wagon
-Dm7 comes with attached car
-Sm1 has a brown livery that never existed
-Sr2 sounds like combination of car horn and level crossing bells

Also:

-I don't think the "Class" is necessary in the names.