Transport Tycoon Forums

A little teaser...

Wooo! A Zephyris is back Looking good!

Awesome!

Back indeed! Though I'd forgotten how much of a pain it is drawing and aligning infrastructure sprites...

... and some maglev.

A 'policy' note:

At 1x zoom level I'm not necessarily precisely duplicating OpenGFX, there may well be some small changes. In particular I'm using a new dithering algorithm which makes the conversion from 32bpp to 8bpp a little different.

I'm also potentially changing the style of the OpenGFX graphics a little, typically to more closely match the original graphics. While making OpenGFX all those years ago the priority was very much completeness. Now there's the luxury of a bit more flexibility I'm trying to make the graphics a bit better! The new maglev is a good example of this.

The final thing is that I'm trying to make the 2x and 4x graphics clear and in the feel of the original graphics. This means it isn't necessarily 'realistic', and often it's intentionally stylised to make it more usable. The rail sprites are a good example of this; big sleepers help make the junctions clearer & that's very much the priority.

Monorail done

I'm doing some trials for buildings... Trying to capture the slightly exaggerated/cartoonish feel of the original graphics (and match the contrast) but with fairly realistic textures. Thoughts/feelings?

Hi Zephyris, I think this stuff is seriously awesome but I would be more brave in pushing the contrasts and really highlighting some light and shadows. I tried to make a quick edit, of course making it tile properly puts it in a different level...

I painted over it in Photoshop in RGB mode and then used my RGBA conversion script to put it back to 8bpp

Zephyris wrote:I'm doing some trials for buildings... Trying to capture the slightly exaggerated/cartoonish feel of the original graphics (and match the contrast) but with fairly realistic textures. Thoughts/feelings?

I think this looks quite good.

Did you render it or it is drawn?

V453000 :) wrote:I would be more brave in pushing the contrasts and really highlighting some light and shadows.

i personally would not go very far with this. Some of the original graphics are in my opinion too contrasty. This is of course only my personal opinion.

V453000 :) wrote:Hi Zephyris, I think this stuff is seriously awesome but I would be more brave in pushing the contrasts and really highlighting some light and shadows. I tried to make a quick edit, of course making it tile properly puts it in a different level...

Looks epic. Thanks! I'm very aware players spend 90% of their time looking at rail or maglev networks so that's what needs to be best. I'll have a go at some hand paint overs myself.

luxtram wrote:Did you render it or it is drawn?

These are all hand drawn, I found I couldn't get the right 'feel' to match the style of the normal zoom graphics with renders. That's why I'm also keen to get a bit more contrast in the sprites, to match the feel, but I'll make sure it can be dialed up/down to get it feeling right.

A preview of the temperate buildings so far. I'm planning to just make the 1x and 4x zoom sprites for these, the 2x downsize of the 4x to 2x normally works OK. Unlike the current OpenGFX sprites (which were just grabbed from my UK town set) I've tried to match the layout of the buildings in the original graphics quite closely. I've added a bit more variety though, e.g. the two old buildings with red roofs were originally just mirrored. I'll probably do a quick grunge/shadow paintover (ala V453000) at some point too.

Zephyris wrote:I've tried to match the layout of the buildings in the original graphics quite closely..

For which era you plan these buildings? Large, rectangular, fully glazed windows in brick buildings looks too modern in my opinion.

TadeuszD wrote:For which era you plan these buildings? Large, rectangular, fully glazed windows in brick buildings looks too modern in my opinion.

These buildings appear all through the game, from 1950. It's pretty typical for the UK though: https://fet.uwe.ac.uk/conweb/house_ages ... ction3.htm

Zephyris wrote:These buildings appear all through the game, from 1950.

Ah, OK. 1950s are relatively modern for me...

These look great! I hope that when you get to the capsule tower, you might be able to hew a little closer to the real prototype than the ogfx one did.

supermop wrote:I hope that when you get to the capsule tower, you might be able to hew a little closer to the real prototype than the ogfx one did.

Yeah, that's definitely on my "to improve" list. In general, the town buildings were some of the last graphics done and were definitely rushed a bit.

In other news, all the temperate houses. I'm not quite happy with the grey ones (they are a replacement for the grey bungalow), but it matches the color scheme of that building. I'll see how it looks in game.

Zephyris wrote:In other news, all the temperate houses. I'm not quite happy with the grey ones (they are a replacement for the grey bungalow), but it matches the color scheme of that building. I'll see how it looks in game.

Try a color paint on 'trim' woodwork, such as doors, window frames, etc. Might be out of scope for this project, but a few variations in trim color could be nice. Are you drawing these in pixeltool?

I'm only doing the vehicles in PixelTool, it's the multiple views I struggle to get right without help.

The buildings are drawn by hand. I've setup the source files so I specify base shading in false colour: grays (r=g=b) for primary walls, purples (r=b g=0) for secondary walls, teal (g=b r=0) for roofs, green (b=r=0) for woodwork, red (g=b=0) for ironwork and yellow (r=g b=0) for glass. I start by drawing the normal zoom shading, scale it up 2x using EPX/Scale2x and tidy it, scale it up 2x and tidy again, then add detail.
It's then very easy to quickly swap in colours from the TTD palette and do some extra highlighting/shadowing to make the final sprite. Because of the simple perpendicular shapes of buildings doing a left/right flip and reshade is quite easy.

*edit* Oh, forgot to say: Changing color of window frames/soffit/fascia boards is easy because I just block change the transformation from green (woodwork) in the false color image to a new choice of values from the TTD palette. I can reuse the existing shading etc.

Nice work!

So I think it's about time people have a play with these graphics... These are my working grf files for the landscape (including infrastructure like road and rail) and trains. Let me know what you think; horrible or nice to use?

*edit* Should've said these are a few steps behind the absolute cutting edge, so have slightly older maglev and arctic ground tile graphics.

Also, it'd be good to get feedback whether I should try to make the graphics more like the original. Eg. The arctic ground tiles are a fair bit darker than the original windows graphics, should I alter the OpenGFX extra zoom sprites to better match that?