Timberwolf's UK Road Vehicles

[STD]

Trolleybuses would be interesting. With new road types having been added to trunk since I began the set, I would like to take advantage of that and pick a road/tramway set to support with things like whether trams require electricity, minimum road grades for vehicles and so on. Trolleybuses would fit nicely into that. Are there any good road sets that include trolleybus wires?

In other news there's a minor update (2.1.1) now on BaNaNaS which improves some vehicle alignments, particularly the light rail and hybrid tram ones which were incorrect when used as rail vehicles. Since this also coincided with a fairly major update of GoRender (improving the ability to make sprites of arbitrary sizes and correcting a few normal calculation bugs) let me know if you see any weird sprites, vehicles that don't point in the same direction as the roads or other graphical bugs.

Road sets that include trolleybus wires:
[NRT] RattRoads - 1.0.2 released 05-17-20!
[NRT]Ufiby's Road, Tram, Trolleybus and Rail track (15.05.2020)
Unspooled

I checked this set for all sorts of errors. No invalid sprites have been detected at this time. But some types of vehicles do not have sound effects: Leyland Tiger TS, Wrightbus New Routemaster, Ford Transit Mk3 Minibus, Vauxhall Omega, Renault Traffic Minibus, BMW 335d Touring.

[Timberwolf]

Which sound package are you using? Original sample.cat, OpenSFX or something else? All of those are working in my current build - what's interesting is those vehicles all have different sound effects, but they are also in most cases shared with other vehicles. (Except the BMW which is a custom sound file, although it's mixed a bit quieter than the other vehicles)

I've pushed a new build (2.1.2) in which I've double-checked all those vehicles to make sure they have sounds on my game, although I didn't change anything in the templates so I doubt it'd resolve any existing machine or version-specific problem - this also has a few further improvements to sprite alignment.

[Lex-Pelham]

Hey Timberwolf,

I would like the say to you, your NewGRF of the UK Road Vehicles set is great. It comes in handy with the other UK-based GRF sets in my collection.

Keep up the good work and keep expanding the road fleet with more future updates.

UK Transport fan from across the pond.
Lex-Pelham

[Valle]

Fantastic work, Timberwolf. Thank you so much! In my opinion, there is only one more thing that I feel like it would noticeably benefit from a change: applying the vans' mail capacity multiplier to trucks as well.

I really like the elevated mail capacities you implemented for the vans (in realistic capacity mode), because that makes them useful for local distribution or to connect remote villages. Also, it would feel a bit weird if one could only fit 3 bags of mail into a Sprinter, as they're pretty enormous inside. The additional usefulness of the larger trucks over the vans currently seems quite limited for me - and also when comparing it against some other truck sets, where a boosted mail capacity just feels right to me.

Right now, I mostly use the small Avia mail truck from CZTR for connecting smaller hubs (e.g. railway stations to larger villages that have a van running to the most remote villages) and find myself only rarely using the larger mail vehicles from your set apart from the small vans. The DAF LF that even comes with a mail livery is never used for mail on my maps, because it's so small in capacity. Right now, the Foden Alpha would be the closest match to the CZTR Avia for a non-articulated mail truck (23 bags), although it's a much larger vehicle that offers a larger physical volume for cargo. I think if your entire truck range could get mail capacity multipliers in realistic mode as well, it would improve the gameplay. Given that for mail, the main concern in real life is capacity rather than payload, I would suggest the following approach to take that into account:

Vans: retain as-is (mail capacity x3)
LDT: mail capacity x3 (e.g. Ford Cargo, Iveco Eurocargo)
MDT: mail capacity x3 (e.g. DAF LF, Saviem SM Europe)
HDT: mail capacity x2 (e.g. ERF C/E-Series, Foden Alpha & all articulated semi trucks, because the physical volume for cargo does not rise as fast as the available payload)

This would render the DAF LF equal with the CZTR Avia (24 bags instead of eight), while the largest articulated lorries would carry 60 instead of 30 bags to offer a tangible added value for the connection of smaller hubs. That would make these trucks nicely fill the niche between "It feels wasteful to run so many little distribution trucks" and "I can hardly justify a mail train here" for some connections.

What do you think about this idea?

[Timberwolf]

I think that works quite nicely - may be a bit of a challenge to fit the logic into my templates but it'd be a nice gameplay mechanic (and increase the usefulness of the smaller vehicles).

[Timberwolf]

It's been a while since the last release so I thought I'd put out a maintenance update - highlights are a slightly smaller file size, further shading improvements, and the requested mail capacity increases.

Other than that a long-standing bug has been squashed, with articulated lorries no longer clipping into each other when queuing for a station.

[Electricfox]

Is there any chance you could introduce the Stagecoach earlier? Historically the first mention of stagecoaches in the UK comes around 1630, so maybe 1700 since the Sailing ship mod and Sals canal boat mod both introduce ships around then, so if your Stagecoach and horse drawn dray could have the same introduction date then that allows for some nice early gameplay pre-steam. I think you could do the same with the horse drawn tramway wagons, since there's record of wooden railed wagonways going back to, well, Ancient times but certainly back to the 16th/17th century.

[Timberwolf]

That one is a bit interesting, because the dates chosen were a combination of things I found during research and also that NRT didn't exist for most of the set's development.

While the term "stagecoach" had indeed been around for about as long as the idea of using more than one team of horses for a journey, it wasn't until the 1790s where improvements in suspension, wheel attachment and frames gave coaches running at the speeds which would be playable in OpenTTD even at "realistic" settings.

Similarly with no NRT, I'd set the horse trams to introduce at a time which seemed about right for steel tram rails - the wagons are also based on late Victorian iron framed wagons so that would really need a different set of sprites to be correct for early wooden industrial tramways. There is a negligible issue around the horses themselves; the "shire" breed wasn't recognised until the late 1700s although there's about 100 years before that with horse breeds the same in all but name and of course at TTD scale you can't really tell the difference between a horse, llama or exceptionally large dog let alone what breed it is. That said extending back to 1700 you would be getting close to the point where a dray is more likely to be drawn by oxen than horses.

It feels like the solution is to add some sort of very early ox-drawn wagon (probably unplayable in "realistic" mode but viable in "gameplay" mode), and then maybe look at rail sets for the various wooden/plateway/etc. wagons to give a more natural progression from draught animals to early locomotives. One for the growing backlog...

[Electricfox]

That one is a bit interesting, because the dates chosen were a combination of things I found during research and also that NRT didn't exist for most of the set's development.

While the term "stagecoach" had indeed been around for about as long as the idea of using more than one team of horses for a journey, it wasn't until the 1790s where improvements in suspension, wheel attachment and frames gave coaches running at the speeds which would be playable in OpenTTD even at "realistic" settings.

Similarly with no NRT, I'd set the horse trams to introduce at a time which seemed about right for steel tram rails - the wagons are also based on late Victorian iron framed wagons so that would really need a different set of sprites to be correct for early wooden industrial tramways. There is a negligible issue around the horses themselves; the "shire" breed wasn't recognised until the late 1700s although there's about 100 years before that with horse breeds the same in all but name and of course at TTD scale you can't really tell the difference between a horse, llama or exceptionally large dog let alone what breed it is. That said extending back to 1700 you would be getting close to the point where a dray is more likely to be drawn by oxen than horses.

It feels like the solution is to add some sort of very early ox-drawn wagon (probably unplayable in "realistic" mode but viable in "gameplay" mode), and then maybe look at rail sets for the various wooden/plateway/etc. wagons to give a more natural progression from draught animals to early locomotives. One for the growing backlog...

Good points, I'm glad that you're considering it though. One of the features of OTTD is the ability to start in whatever year you like, unlike other transport games such as Transport Fever, and so the early years of rail and transport can be explored. Things like the canal mania, which I don't think is really touched on outside of board games. I've had a lot of fun with early starts with the EarlyRail set, although the niggling problem is the industrial set up is more predisposed to a late 1700s universe, with a lot of heavier industries. That being said, whatever you decide to do I look forward to seeing it, especially with the potential for Trolleybuses coming in at some point as well, and then of course there's your rail set. Looking forward to that too!

[STD]

I take it you've decided to finish this set for now ? Further development is possible with the appearance of inspiration?
I previously suggested adding trolleybuses and electric buses in addition to the existing trams .

Regards, STD (Aleksey).

[Timberwolf]

I want to revisit it post Trains (if nothing else I'm learning a lot about file size reduction) but I only have so much free time, so for now it'll probably be maintenance releases and bug fixes.

[Timberwolf]

This is probably not the release announcement people were expecting or hoping for from me... but in my playtesting of Trains I noticed a couple of bad expiry dates which left you with only one type of passenger tram at some points. Since I also did a lot of work on my toolchain for the Tracks and Trains sets, I thought it would be good to use this as an opportunity to bring Road Vehicles up to the same standard of rendering with fewer off-by-one pixel errors.



No changes other than bugfixes and graphical improvements, but 2.2.1 is available in regular and HD forms on BaNaNaS.

[PEPSprinterPacer]

Very good NewGRF, like to spam cars and pretend there normal traffic!

[kamnet]

Very good NewGRF, like to spam cars and pretend there normal traffic!

Download the TownCars AI and it will spam for you.

[2TallTyler]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but how do I get my freight trams to have more than one car?

[Timberwolf]

Oops... looks like a bug, possibly related with the update that stopped trucks from clipping into each other.

[Timberwolf]

Indeed, the logic for adding the space after each articulated lorry was conflicting with the tram wagon sprites. There's an updated version (2.2.2) on BaNaNaS - as the problem was only with displaying the sprites (not with lengths or capacities) it's savegame-compatible, you can update without problems and the extra wagons will be showing once more.

[PEPSprinterPacer]

I think I found a Easter Egg!

[+] Spoiler

The Foden S21 has a Bin Lorry Body for Goods!

[Fairyfloss]

Been playing with this for a bit, any chance for an update to make the non-electric trams (like the horse-drawn ones) run on non-electrified ram tracks? It feels kinda weird to have to build overhead wires for basic trams in the early years...

[PEPSprinterPacer]

Imagine chooseable bus liveries, like Arriva and First for the Solo sr and
A Standard eclipse urban with a few liveries and so on...