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Waypoints, Roads and Tramways - Rising above the traffic.

Your new game is progressing well but traffic is horrible, and then sometime after 1980 a new tram available announcement appears on your screen, a monorail (1970 if you have installed Erato's Japanese Suspended Monorail Set), for a suspended monorail system that flies above the traffic.

11 Jul 2008 - Zephyris introduced his Urban Suspended Monorail (Tramway Replacement) (v1.0).

25 Jul 2018 - At Kamnet's suggestion wallyweb releases on Simuscape and tt-forums a version with new road stops and a dedicated bridge.

1 March 2021 - wallyweb confirms that work is progressing on a NRT version.

Then until now - Much work in the shop getting NRT to work, designing object overlays for tunnel portals and stations, learning JGR's new road stops.

Now we announce the release of Suspended Monorail NRT Alpha.

The project remains true to the inspiration of Zephyris' original work while introducing NRT coding.
The track has been elevated so that the trains run above the road rather than on the road.
More recently JGR's amazing Road Stop work has allowed for the removal of object hacks for stations and tunnel portals, the later now using waypoints as a much simpler, more elegant way to mask tunnel portals.

And now we present an illustrated instruction on how to take full advantage of Suspended Monorail's game play features.

- Of history - Japan and Germany and too many YouTubes to mention.

- Of minimum requirements and installation
This set requires JGRPP version 49.1 or later
The player should install the player's choice of an NRT road type. There are several available.
Install the .tar package in your OpenTTD content_download newgrf folder.
Do not unpack the .tar file. OpenTTD will do this.

The package contains:
- The grf file
- A sprite sheet
- An nfo file (This is thoroughly commented and is the source code).
- The GPLv2 license.

This topic is the readme. A text copy will be added to the .tar file when this project moves to the release forum.

NOTE THAT THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE.
It is currently quite stable, but bugs happen. Once bugs are documented and resolved, the project will advance to BETA stage.

Post your comments and reports below.

Enjoy.

- Of roads, tracks and bridges

Roads to the left.
Monorail to the right.
Monorail over roads in the middle.
Monorails are overlays of roads so they must follow the rules of the road. A monorail will not pass a road vehicle.
Bridges are the answer. Monorails on a bridge will pass a road vehicle on a road below the bridge.
Also you can place many nice things under the bridge such as canals and parks and road bay station stops.

Note: The roads in the images are from a work in progress.
Use your favourite NRT road type ...
But whatever you do, never, never, never use the default roads. The crash will not be between cars and trucks.

- Of road stops and tram stops
Here we add the stops: passenger and freight: Road and monorail. Follow the menus.
Note that Bay stops are not available to monorails which are just hanging trams.

- Of waypoints and tunnels.

JGR's road stop magic includes waypoints, a feature long sought after for the game. Remember to install jgrpp at least 49.1
Those pesky monorails just don't want to reach down to a tunnel, so we helped them along by providing monorail portals as waypoints.
Build them on a flat tile just before the tunnel entrance.
Select the sign from the waypoint menu and it will find the right sprite for the job.

- Of buildings

Passengers need destinations: Hotels and offices.
Freight need warehouses.
The sprites are in the road stop menu.

This completes the offering. Now we are ready for your comments, bug reports and praises, and remember, if your EV is stuck on the charger at home, our monorails have solar panels to get you where you need to go.

Enjoy,

It is a pity that junctions and stops cannot be built on bridges. As a result, your monorails can travel without affecting the road traffic... except the very places where it matters the most.

odisseus wrote: ↑05 Dec 2022 03:52 It is a pity that junctions and stops cannot be built on bridges. As a result, your monorails can travel without affecting the road traffic... except the very places where it matters the most.

Indeed, and if they should ever become available I would add them to Suspended Monorail.
The game source coding for these would be seriously challenging, a nightmare or a passion depending upon the developer's motivation. The bridgeheads are already quite complicated as it is, and stops would have to take higher bridges into consideration, all among other complications that we might not be aware of.

What do you think about making the support pillars shorter so that the monorail cars move at the ground level? This would make it clear that the monorail interferes with the underlying road traffic unless it is built on a bridge. Additionally, the default stop graphics could be used without looking weird, and the tunnel portals wouldn't be needed at all.

odisseus wrote: ↑05 Dec 2022 13:17 What do you think about making the support pillars shorter so that the monorail cars move at the ground level? This would make it clear that the monorail interferes with the underlying road traffic unless it is built on a bridge. Additionally, the default stop graphics could be used without looking weird, and the tunnel portals wouldn't be needed at all.

That was Zephyris' version. It's linked to in my first post. The current version is more realistic in appearance. Check out the YouTube videos also linked to in the history post above.

Nice work, I've got some ideas I'm going to raise with JGR based on a feature I made that does precisely the opposite of what this needs. I'll need his help on the newgrf stuff though.

Also, some zoomed in screenshots would be nice

Aegir wrote: ↑06 Dec 2022 09:24 Nice work,

I've got some ideas I'm going to raise with JGR based on a feature I made that does precisely the opposite of what this needs. I'll need his help on the newgrf stuff though.

You'll be interested in the fully commented nfo and companion sprite sheet included in the tar ball.

Also, some zoomed in screenshots would be nice

Eventually I'll be posting some in-game screenshots below and player postings are always welcome. There's one over in JGR's topic.
Meanwhile I'm revisiting an older project rusting away on a shelf in my mind that is nearly done save several bug fixes and new inclusions. Stay tuned.

Hi folks,

This has done the rounds on discord for a little bit, but with JGR's help we now have vehicle colission with regular road traffic disabled for suspended monorail. Vehicle offsets and bounding boxes need to be trimmed up a bit. Flickering is best reduced if the vehicles sit a good 2px higher from my initial testing and the road vehicles they're driving over are smaller, such as say Mop's RV's or Road Hog.

Have fun.

Kinda sad that all the objects got removed, but apparently Wallyweb did this back in December and I didn't even notice it until I tried this new version last week.

kamnet wrote: ↑13 Mar 2023 02:57 Kinda sad that all the objects got removed, but apparently Wallyweb did this back in December and I didn't even notice it until I tried this new version last week.

are the objects still in anybody's saved files?

Aegir wrote: ↑12 Mar 2023 06:44 Hi folks,

This has done the rounds on discord for a little bit, but with JGR's help we now have vehicle colission with regular road traffic disabled for suspended monorail. Vehicle offsets and bounding boxes need to be trimmed up a bit. Flickering is best reduced if the vehicles sit a good 2px higher from my initial testing and the road vehicles they're driving over are smaller, such as say Mop's RV's or Road Hog.

Have fun.

how do i make a mod so it disables collision for a tramtype?

Revenge_of_KioTheDev wrote: ↑04 Jun 2023 14:33 how do i make a mod so it disables collision for a tramtype?

You have to use JGRPP and it's nmlc version which can be found here and then you use these properties to change the collision.

It's been four months since anybody's heard from Wally, repeated emails have gone unanswered.
It appears that, for now, development has come to a halt.

kamnet wrote: ↑05 Jun 2023 01:33 It's been four months since anybody's heard from Wally, repeated emails have gone unanswered.
It appears that, for now, development has come to a halt.

that's too bad