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In progress road and tram type set born out of a desire for 'cheaper' looking lower tension trolleywire. As I wanted to have a few different types of wire, as well as trolleybus wire distinct from tram wire, I needed to make a few types of road and tramways.

Goals for this set are to provide visually distinct graphics as mentioned above, and to show the capabilities of NRT in its current state, as no other general purpose roadtype NewGRFs exist as of this writing.

Currently this set provides 5 types of road surface with various costs and maximum speeds, 3 of which may have overhead electrification. There are 3 types of light railway tracks, all with and without overhead power. More types and power supplies are possible, but I'd like to keep the variety somewhat basic so that users may load other NewGRFs for more niche and esoteric types.

Road graphics are generally based on Andrew 350's ARRS, with some modifications. Catenary graphics are drawn by me, to evoke trolleywires hung from hanger cables that span the street. They may not be to everyone's taste, but they are what I wanted. (cheaper types use creosote-wood posts, normal types use galvanized steel poles. Higher speed light rail uses a catenary system). Road markings are North American in style, with some variation based on town zone to show this feature of NRT. More graphic features are planed for future features of NRT.

Please test the set out and report your ideas on costs and speeds - I'm not interested in adding a ton of parameters to adjust every value, so I'd like to arrive at a reasonable consensus before a 1.0.0 release.

Best,

Let's try it people, get a taste of what NRT can do!

Newer Version 0.1.0:

Graphic changes:
-New trackbed graphics for Basic and Modern Light Rail
-New Bridge specific catenary sprites
-Curbs for Stone Paved Road
-Adjusted colors of rail overlays for all tram types
-Asphalt Road markings based on town zone to better differentiate from Highway

Code Changes
-New Intro date for rough tramway
-reduced speeds on all roads other than Highway

I managed to get a crash with this and NRT, if you do as well while testing please report in the NRT thread.
Still To Do:
-More graphic variation based on town zone
-Random Graphic variations
-Improve Bridge sprites
-Balance costs and speeds after more testing
-(maybe) add more tramway power types

To Do but not yet possible:
-Alternate graphics based on presence of tramway on road and vis versa
-Forbid Road on Modern Light Rail, forbid tram on Highway
-Specify fences/trees/lamps per roadtype
-Flag some roads as non-town grow-able

EDIT:

Sources etc for 0.1.0:

This looks really promising!
I'm glad you were able to implement speed limits, it works like a charm already (but tested it only on small scale yet*)
* no crashes so far, but didn't test with latest build of NRT, and also not yet with trolley buses

May I have a suggestion?
Maybe you could consider giving Parameters to set the speed limit? I guess this could be very practical for players as such things as speed limits differ great between country or use case. But if this is too much work I can totally understand that. Either way, it's great work so far and speaking for me I'm happy to get what is there

PS: I really like your graphics for the wooden poles, as well as the tramway / catenary!

May I suggest in a further development having additional sprites for road type transitions? It would be like like half sprite of asphalt becoming into mud or gravel on the other half.
I hope this is possible, could be a nice aesthetical improvement to avoid abrupt road type transitions.

einsteinyh wrote:May I suggest in a further development having additional sprites for road type transitions? It would be like like half sprite of asphalt becoming into mud or gravel on the other half.
I hope this is possible, could be a nice aesthetical improvement to avoid abrupt road type transitions.

Currently I don't know if this is possible. However every asphalt to dirt transition I have ever driven over myself has actually been fairly abrupt - the crew building the road doesn't gradually feather it into the dirt. What would be a bit more realistic perhaps would be mud tracked onto the pavement.

The prime goal of this set, beyond providing different wire sprites, is to show what NRT is capable of, rather than to be the best possible road set. If NRT supports more interesting transitions, I will try to make an effort to use them to show that it is possible.

supermop wrote:

einsteinyh wrote:May I suggest in a further development having additional sprites for road type transitions? It would be like like half sprite of asphalt becoming into mud or gravel on the other half.
I hope this is possible, could be a nice aesthetical improvement to avoid abrupt road type transitions.

Currently I don't know if this is possible. However every asphalt to dirt transition I have ever driven over myself has actually been fairly abrupt - the crew building the road doesn't gradually feather it into the dirt. What would be a bit more realistic perhaps would be mud tracked onto the pavement.

The prime goal of this set, beyond providing different wire sprites, is to show what NRT is capable of, rather than to be the best possible road set. If NRT supports more interesting transitions, I will try to make an effort to use them to show that it is possible.

This would probably look nicer as a New Object road overlay.

And are you planning to add support for winter sprites in this set? In the winter these roads will also look very beautiful .
And I think that spool.grf and countryroads.grf is in the future to combine in one set. That is, if you want . Both of these set do not conflict. I tested in the game (see screenshot). Sorry that we could not yet use in the game all three sets (including docklands.grf). I checked, there is a conflict (see screenshot with the error) If you use any two of these sets - for example, docklands.grf and spool.grf, you have available quite a lot of different types of roads. Looks impressive for OpenTTD .

I wanted to ask - so conceived in the spool.grf that not all roads intersect? (see the screenshot)
When the highway does not intersect with others is probably right. You can draw an analogy with nutracks, where there is high-speed paths that may not intersect with a road. But in this case the stone road can't be crossed with asphalt? What is the reason? I think you should test this set on various the intersection of different types of roads between them. I think this is important, before support for different types of roads will be implemented into the game officially .

STD wrote:Sorry that we could not yet use in the game all three sets (including docklands.grf). I checked, there is a conflict (see screenshot with the error)
If you use any two of these sets - for example, docklands.grf and spool.grf, you have available quite a lot of different types of roads. Looks impressive for OpenTTD .

I reproduced this with Docklands.grf and CountryRoads.grf

I can only suspect that there is a compatibility problem with these two sets. Maybe some road type intersect with their IDs?

I use the IDs 0 (SAND), 1 (OFFR) and 5 (ROAD), 6 (HAUL)

I disabled the use of IDs 5 and 6 within CountryRoads, and I could happy use it together with Docklands.
However(!) I still couldn't use both together with RoadHog!

I couldn't check the code of Docklands though...

STD wrote:Sorry that we could not yet use in the game all three sets (including docklands.grf). I checked, there is a conflict (see screenshot with the error)

Probably number of roadtypes defined is more than 16. I didn't reproduce it, but that was the opinion from frosch. If anyone wanted to write a better error message https://github.com/andythenorth/NotRoad ... tram-types

andythenorth wrote:

STD wrote:Sorry that we could not yet use in the game all three sets (including docklands.grf). I checked, there is a conflict (see screenshot with the error)

Probably number of roadtypes defined is more than 16. I didn't reproduce it, but that was the opinion from frosch. If anyone wanted to write a better error message https://github.com/andythenorth/NotRoad ... tram-types

This might be the very cause I think

With some testing* I figured out I could still use any road type up to the magical number of 16, including the GRF that reports the error.
However, tram types of said GRF wouldn't be added, so the process of adding might report the error and halt, not trying to add anything after the error occurred. Don't know if it'd be better nothing would be added in case any error occurs, though.

Out of interest, does this GRF need a particular patch to work, or is it a simple plug and play GRF? Just wondering as I remember all the issues as to why this wasn't done before, and I haven't been following the development of NewRoadTypes closely.

Pilot wrote:Out of interest, does this GRF need a particular patch to work, or is it a simple plug and play GRF? Just wondering as I remember all the issues as to why this wasn't done before, and I haven't been following the development of NewRoadTypes closely.

You'll need a special build of OTTD patched with NotRoadTypes. You can grab the binaries here.

This may not be the right thread to post this, but as you are working on providing graphics for the NRT-development I do dare to do it here

I am wondering about how the NRT roadtypes will work and what may be possible.
In this case I am thinking about how tramtracks work and how this can be used for other things.
Do tramtracks work as an overlay for a roadtype? If so, is it possible to create overlays that are not tramways, but work in the same way?
So you have a road and then overlay it with something else, like various sorts of pavements, a bicyclelane, trees, lights, parkingspots, etc for eyecandy purposes.
Do you think this is at all possible with the current development of NRT?

Quast65 wrote:This may not be the right thread to post this, but as you are working on providing graphics for the NRT-development I do dare to do it here

I am wondering about how the NRT roadtypes will work and what may be possible.
In this case I am thinking about how tramtracks work and how this can be used for other things.
Do tramtracks work as an overlay for a roadtype? If so, is it possible to create overlays that are not tramways, but work in the same way?
So you have a road and then overlay it with something else, like various sorts of pavements, a bicyclelane, trees, lights, parkingspots, etc for eyecandy purposes.
Do you think this is at all possible with the current development of NRT?

I think by being first out of the gate with a roadtype Newgrf you may confuse me for being someone who actually understands NRT development, but I will try to answer as best as I can.

Generally, what you describe is 'possible' but there may be better ways to go about it...

Tramways / Light Railways are separate from roadtypes in NRT (in trunk tramway is simply a 2nd roadtype). With NRT, you may define up to 15 types of road, and separately up to 15 types of light railway. In the 'tramway' condition of road+light railway, the tile independently stores up to one type of road and up to one type of track. Currently, the type of road doesn't really have an effect on the type of track, nor vis-versa. Graphically, a track type provides an overlay sprite, which draws the tramway graphic over the road surface. Currently, this overlay sprite is always drawn, even when road is not present. (For example, in Modern Light Rail in Unspooled has track with sleepers and ballast as the underlay, and rails only as the overlay. When built on a road, the sleepers are covered by the road, but the rails get drawn over it). I hope for a switch to draw different overlays based on road on tile in the future, but currently this is not possible.

That said, a 'tramway' type could be anything - but will count against the 15 type total. You can set it to be something strange, and disallow compatibility with various types of tram vehicles if you like. Similar with road types - they also have an overlay sprite (which I use for stripes), but do not necessarily have to be set to be compatible with ROAD. You could make a roadtype that looks like a park, and set it so that no vehicles are powered on it, or you could draw it to look like a goat path, and set it so that only vehicles of type GOAT are powered on it. For the purposes you describe, I would suggest making your graphics part of a road type - a tram type would work, but parking spots where there are no roads may look strange. This is what I plan for next versions of Unspooled.

In Unspooled, I use a switch based on town zone to modify the overlay sprites drawn on asphalt road. Currently this just changes the style of intersections and centerlines, but it could also be used to draw bikelanes in zone 4 or parking spaces in zone 3, etc. You could also use a similar switch to modify the underlay graphics - abusing overlays may look weird on bridges. Generally you don't really want to put 'tall' things like cars, trees, guardrails in the road surface underlay or overlay though, because you will want these things to occlude objects behind them. For those types of objects, the ideal method would be to define new street furniture sprites, but currently NRT does not support this - trees, sidewalks, and lamps are provided by baseset, and replacing them will change them for all road types. This is part of NRT that may change as development progresses, so please encourage our NRT developers!

Currently you can easily set the following graphics for a tile based on road/tram type, or other switches like town zone or pseudo random bit, in this order:
-Road Underlay (could include 'faked' sidewalks, empty parking spots, fancy pavement, etc)
-Tram Underlay (could have trackbed, sleepers, etc)
-Road Overlay
-Tram Overlay (such as the rails, allows tramways to appear 'set in' to pavement)
-Far side of catenary pylons (keep in mind how a pole in a corner may need to appear behind some RVs, and in front of others)
-Near side of catenary (would include the wires)

Please not that catenary is only mentioned once - a tile can only draw one type of catenary, even if both a roadtype and tramtype on the tile provide sprites. The roadtype's catenary will win. (try combination of electrified road and tramway in unspooled - the game will draw the trolleybus wires).

You can find more information here: https://wiki.openttd.org/Frosch/NotRoadTypes

Thank you for your elaborate and very insightfull answer!
I apologise for being offtopic here, but as you are one of the few (or possibly only at the moment) actually implementing the fantastic and impressive features the devs of the NRT have developed, I thought I would ask you some things first (as you may know of the restrictions and possibilities of NRT from encountering those by bringing them into practical use), before bringing it up in the NRT-development thread. You may also be interested in thinking about and testing some of the things I propose, proving those usefull or (hopefully not ) being not possible/workable at all.

First of all, I believe that the very best thing would be a third type, lets say FURNITURETYPE. Specifically only for providing roadside graphics (pavements, parkingspots, bicyclelanes, trees, lights, etc etc) in the same way as tramways work.
Why tramways? Well, because of the way those interact with ROADTYPE.
I would imagine them consisting of the following parts:
- an underlaysprite (for example concrete or tarmac), that will be covered in combination with a road, but visible when no road is present. Eliminating this concern:

but parking spots where there are no roads may look strange.

- Far side and near side graphics (like how the tramway catenary is built up), these will then have the actual eyecandy. This because the tramwaycatenary has separate graphics for bridges and tunnelentrances. So lets say we have a FURNITURETYPE that provides parkingspots, those parkingspots will not be drawn on bridges or tunnelentrances (or something that better fits bridges or tunnelentrances can be drawn instead).
- Possibly also overlaysprites like how the track_overlay for trams work, that can be used to change the surface of the road by adding dirt/grime/usage or different stripes/lines in the middle. Leaving those transparent blue, will then just show the normal roadsurface. (these could also be used for bridge_surfaces)

In a nutshell, the workings are the same as TRAMTYPE, with the following exceptions:
- FURNITURETYPE is not (well probably mostly not ) suitable for electrified vehicles, except offcourse when you also choose to draw catenary, meaning you need to set a flag if it can or cannot be used by trams/trolleybusses. If I understand correctly this flag can already be set for TRAMTYPE.
- FURNITURETYPE must override, or even better simply disable, trees, sidewalks, and lamps provided by baseset, making it independant of townzones (to be honest, I really dislike townzones forcing certain street furniture on me ). If I understand correctly this flag is not yet possible (but I saw it is on the to-do list).

Now, I can imagine that a third type is not possible or not too interesting for the devs of NRT to implement/develop, especially because it is more focussed on eyecandy rather than functionality.
In that case I would use some of the 15 types of tramways to implement the above (rather than a roadtype as you mentioned).
Firstly, because they are independant from a roadsurface. So you can have a certain roadsurface and dress that up with eyecandy on the sides, getting a lot of variety without using ROADTYPE slots.
Secondly, tramways provide extra sprites for bridges and tunnelentrances, meaning you can also provide custom graphics onto those bridges and tunnelentrances (I may be wrong about this, it may also be possible to have these graphics in ROADTYPE, as they are listed as "optional" in the wiki-page you mentioned, does that mean only optional for TRAMTYPE or also for ROADTYPE? If also for ROADTYPE, then this argument is invalid)
Thirdly, the possibility of having separate far-side and near-side graphics is a must, because of what should stay visible or obstructed from sight when a rv passes through. (Again, this depends on what is meant by "optional", if this also can be applied for ROADTYPE, then this argument is also invalid)
Furthermore, by placing this in the TRAMTYPE section would mean that you can still allow trams to also use these tiles (ofcourse you need to also provide some sort of catenary).
But the most important reason, is that I can easily think of 15 different types of road (graphicswise, but also speedwise or allowing certain vehicles-wise), and to be honest I cant come up with 15 types of tramways... Meaning that TRAMTYPE has the most room for eyecandy stuff like this...

But, indeed, for any of this to work the flag of enabling/disabling baseset trees/sidewalks/lamps is a musthave!!

You as a current user/implementor of what NRT has to offer may think differently about all of the above, I am curious about what you think...
And again, I am sorry for being offtopic, but I think discussing this with an actual contentprovider for NRT before posting in the NRT-development-thread is a good way to go... It will hopefully help me with formulating better arguments for asking certain (new) features to be developed.

Quast65 wrote:- Far side and near side graphics (like how the tramway catenary is built up), these will then have the actual eyecandy. This because the tramwaycatenary has separate graphics for bridges and tunnelentrances. So lets say we have a FURNITURETYPE that provides parkingspots, those parkingspots will not be drawn on bridges or tunnelentrances (or something that better fits bridges or tunnelentrances can be drawn instead).

You can put whatever type of sprites you want in the catenary sprites - both for road and tram types, and regardless of whether you want to provide power to electric vehicles or not, for bridges or tunnels as well. (Unspooled has custom bridge wires for both road and tram types, but not for tunnels because I have not yet drawn them). Be aware though, when a tile contains both tramway and road that both provide catenary sprites, only the road's catenary will be drawn.

Quast65 wrote:In a nutshell, the workings are the same as TRAMTYPE, with the following exceptions:- FURNITURETYPE is not (well probably mostly not ) suitable for electrified vehicles, except offcourse when you also choose to draw catenary, meaning you need to set a flag if it can or cannot be used by trams/trolleybusses. If I understand correctly this flag can already be set for TRAMTYPE.

Actually, Tramtype and roadtype are somewhat arbitrary for allowing trams or buses. You can very easily set a tramtype that does not allow any existing trams (in fact you actually have to explicitly provide power for various types of tram to allow them to drive on your tramway). Trolleybusses also will not be able to drive on a tramway at all, unless the tile also contains a compatible powered road - as a road vehicle, trolley busses are totally agnostic to what type of tram is or isn't on a tile (also an electric tram cannot run on non-electric rail that overlaps electric road - the tram only cares whether the tramtype is compatible). As you are describing it, it sounds like you are aiming for essentially a tramtype that sets no trams as powered. If you wanted a third type of 'type' to go on tiles, that is indeed a huge ask, and would involve revoking some of the map bits that go to defining road types. A developer will have to confirm, but I believe it might involve going from something like 2*15(road+tram) to 4*7(road+tram+decoration+?).

Quast65 wrote:- FURNITURETYPE must override, or even better simply disable, trees, sidewalks, and lamps provided by baseset, making it independant of townzones (to be honest, I really dislike townzones forcing certain street furniture on me ). If I understand correctly this flag is not yet possible (but I saw it is on the to-do list).

I think the best bet here is to wait for NRT to have more control over tree/street furniture sprites. There has been some work done on drawing trees dependent on road type rather than town zone, and of course switches could allow different road types to draw different furniture per town zone. You can already remove the base set furniture by replacing the sprites with empty graphics, but if per roadtype sprites become possible then you could set also set a roadtype to have the same furniture in every zone (but this may get boring). I assume, however, that street furniture will be like catenary - a tile can only have one style of side walk, so will have to choose between either the tram provided or road provided style. For consistency, the road's style should prevail.

Adding features to NRT will happen, but the most important thing to drive that is encouragement of the NRT developers - that is why I started making roadtype Newgrfs. I'd encourage you discuss with them on IRC or in the Development forum thread too. I am personally a little skeptical of using up map array bits for totally static decorative pieces, but I do not mind having essentially decorative road and tram types. Control over street furniture is very much something I'd like to see come to NRT, along with more nuance in town owned/built roads.

Best,

Thanks again for discussing this with me, it has given a lot of food for thought and insight. Enough for me to switch over to the NRT-threads.

In trying out your set, I noticed I'm not getting catenary poles in the SW and SE views of dead-end tiles (full tiles show them correctly). Is this just how catenary sprites drawing works in general, is it an NRT-specific known issue, or is it a hiccup on my end?