Here are some gasworks, available from 1860 to 1959 (two versions, one from 1860 to 1900, one from 1900 to 1959, the latter with double the production of the former). These should help to boost the uses of coal in the early/mid game. These are designed to consume enough to justify their own railway connexion, which is realistic.
(http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/gasworks.jpg)
(http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/gasworks.png)
.dat file (http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/gasworks.dat)
Excellent. Sorry to be picky here again, but looks like the lattice on the gasometers could do with thinning out a bit where it is adjacent to transparent - either hand-edit this or do another render without anti-aliasing and use this as a template to crop the anti-aliased render with.
Just as a general note would you mind doing all new stuff with snow versions too - I'm trying to fill all the holes on this at the moment.
Thank you for the feedback - how do I turn off the antialiasing in Blender?
In the render settings tab, disable OSA (in blender 2.49) or disable anti-aliasing (in the 2.5 beta)
Hmm, disabling anti-aliasing makes the lines broken, so that technique can't be used. The alternative requires quite an extreme amount of pixel editing, as there are three gas cylinders in each of four views...
On the ships I got broken lines then repainted them. When I did the gasometer I pixel edited them. Either way it would look miles better than the thick black lines. The only other possibility is trying to use the existing gasometer image as some kind of template?
Use Zeno's trick - take non-AA render as a binary mask for the AA-ed one.
I have updated the gasworks and gas power station graphics - I'm not sure that I've quite got it as desired, but it's something of an improvement of the original versions. The links in the original post link to the updated graphics. The gas power station is correct apart from some stray pixels that, try as I might, I can't track down (but they are only visible in one rotation).
I have noticed, in respect of the gasworks, that the textures on the original gasometer did not copy over when I imported them from the gasometer .blend to the gasworks blend. A dull grey colour seems plausible enough in any event, but they did look better with the textures applied when I tried them in Blender. I don't have time left this week-end to refine this further now; the plan is at present to add a market, one or two supermarkets and a cannery and food processing plant to round off the food chain, check the balance, then release the next version of the Experimental version - I shall have to see whether I have time to enhance and add snow textures to the gasworks and gas fired power station.
James - dat file link appears to be broken...
Hmm - odd. Try this.
Modified file with snow image - the link to the .png file above has been updated. I have also found that using Blender 2.5's "full sample" setting for antialiasing, it is possible to achieve an effect similar to that used by the masking function put together by Zeno (I think?) a while ago: note that the gas holder graphics were not modified by hand in this example.
(http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/gasworks-snow.jpg)
Couple of comments on the snow graphic - several areas (e.g. gasometers) seem to be missing snow... :) There also appears to be a black edge along the wall on the far sides. Maybe this is releated to the full sample setting?
I've also just noticed that there are a few areas in both images with large areas of black - should these be textured?
I wasn't sure how to get snow on the top of the gasometers without also getting snow on the sides - what's the best way of doing that? The black edge may be related to full sampling - I'm not sure what's causing it.
The black was not intended to be textured: many of the components were based on this (http://www.countrysidemodels.co.uk/gallery_general/gswks/gasworks3.htm) model gasworks that I found, and the structures appear plain black there. Do you think that they should be a lighter charcoal shade, perhaps?
Definitely a charcoal shade, and if possible I'd also do a light texture of some sort - probably a similar but subtly different charcoal. Pure black just looks out of place except for windows. For the snow on top of the gasometer, I think I extruded a thin layer on top and coloured it a different material. Alternatively, assign the top side a different material to the rest, and make the only difference with this new material that it also has snow textures. Same for snow on top of brick walls and the top of the gasometer railings.
Did you get round to fixing the details in this?
Haven't had time lately, I'm afraid :-( Overwork, and the recently discovered problems of connecting Windows and Linux clients in Experimental have been taking all of my time...