Multi-Tile City Buildings: do they work?

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

I've been playing around with some custom graphics for buildings, and I would like to know if multi-tile city buildings are possible. I know there were some discussions around it already, but I still don't know how well is this feature implemented. Does city generation and other mechanics work with multi-tile buildings, or I should stick to 1x1?

[Leartin]

I don't play extended, but the multi-tile city-buildings patch was taken from Extended and incorporated in Standard and works there, so it should work in Extended as well.
And if it does not work properly, then creating graphics anyway promotes fixing

[Matthew]

I've been playing around with some custom graphics for buildings, and I would like to know if multi-tile city buildings are possible. I know there were some discussions around it already, but I still don't know how well is this feature implemented. Does city generation and other mechanics work with multi-tile buildings, or I should stick to 1x1?

I also experimented with making citybuildings for it (see this post).

That was five years ago now and I haven't tested on recent versions of Extended. I can't remember for certain whether the city generation algorithm placed multitile buildings at game start because my buildings were intended for after the timeline started. But they did appear as towns developed.

However, I do remember two issues that put me off proceeding with my project.

Firstly, I couldn't find a way to control the rotation of citybuildings relative to the roads. With single-tile buildings, if you draw the front door on the right rotation (IIRC the 'south' side) then the game will always place that side next to the road. But Extended's implementation of multi-tile didn't seem able to do this. So if you draw buildings that definitely have a front door and a back door, you might find that the back door is facing the road while the front door is facing another building. It looks terrible when you have a cluster of terraced houses and only half of them have their front doors facing the road. But you might be drawing something else (e.g. a supermarket or warehouse) that doesn't need such a clearly defined front-and-back design.

Secondly, the creator proposed implementing this into Standard, but their project leader (Prissi) said that "in the end it was a complete rewrite". The fact that Prissi had concerns about the code quality also discouraged me from investing further in multi-tile. There has been a discussion about porting this Standard implementation to Extended. I can't see evidence that has been done (based on the cherry-picked commits list) and one of the reasons I've been studying C++ is the hope that one day I might be able to fix this, but I'm a long way from that yet (maybe in the 2030s!). In any case, you might have a different risk appetite from me....

I don't play extended, but the multi-tile city-buildings patch was taken from Extended and incorporated in Standard and works there, so it should work in Extended as well.
And if it does not work properly, then creating graphics anyway promotes fixing

Yes, I guess from the artists' point of view, all that matters is that they use the same .dat parameters.

What's the state of play in Standard now? Can the artist control which side faces the road (like you can with single-tile buildings) or is it like the Extended implementation in that respect? And are multitile buildings generated in new cities or do they only appear when citybuildings are renovated?

[jamespetts]

This has not yet been tested in Extended, but, from what I understand, the version of the code in Extended is an earlier version than the code that is currently in Standard and does not work fully. There have been people who have expressed an interest in merging the latest code from Standard to get this working, but this has not happened to date.

[makie]

Pak128.german use 2x2 and 2x1 Buildings intensiv.
In standard it works, after a lot of testing and fixing.
I had make a test version for extended, but it crash after some minute, so i give up.

https://simutrans-forum.de/mybb/showthread.php?tid=9685

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

I asked about this after watching this video. I can see some multi-tile buildings there, but maybe they are more like attractions and monuments instead of random city buildings.

Not being much of a coder myself, I will stick to the normal 1x1 buildings then. My problem was more a matter of visual scale than anything: I can fit both single houses and skyscrappers in a single Simutrans tile, but I would have to change their scales. I will see if I can work around it, but then again, maybe this is just some excessive quirk from my part, it is just a visual issue after all.

[prissi]

The multitile code in extended has by now almost nothing in common with the version in standard. I rewrote the patch totally as it was not network safe and had lots of issues. I think the extended code is network safe by now, but most of issues seems to be still there.

Merging might not be too difficult, as it essentially affects three routines in simcity.cc which one may even replace 1:1 (minding the needed helper functions and different settings).