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RVg city buses

Started by McAlpine, December 03, 2012, 12:40:38 AM

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McAlpine

The RVg-KS 4510 and RVg-KS 9020 series of buses are my preferred choice for city buses. However, they have two drawbacks:

- The 4510 series expires some years before the 9020 series becomes available. There are other buses available during this gap, mainly by S.Kroytor, but IMO most of them are more suited for overland operation than for city lines. As they don't seem to be based on real vehicles (unlike e.g. the Mercedes Citaro) the introduction and expiration dates seem to be chosen arbitrarily. Is there a balancing reason for this gap?

- They aren't colored in the player colors palette. I made a player colors version of the 9020 series for my private use; with the standard blue player colors palette it looks close to the original graphics. As far as I understand, Raven did a lot of work for pak128, but is no longer active, so I don't know what the policy is concerning his work. May I share my players colors version here?

Fabio

Every object released in Pak 128 starting with v2.0 is under Artistic license, so they can be edited freely.

If you improved those busses, we'd be glad to review your work and possibly add it to the pakset.

McAlpine

Here they are. The 9020-92 probably still needs some work on the rearmost wheel though. Also, when playing with a "reddish brown" color scheme, the 9020-58 now looks very similar to the RX-1064.

Zeno

Those re-painted buses look out good :)
About the time-line, that gap between 4510s and 9020s is already covered by Kroytor's PAZ-672 and 772, which are slow enough to be considered as urban buses. Moreover, I just added an Aclo Regent double-decker for that same period, which gives you a little more options to choose in that time window.

greenling

Mc Alpine RailCo
The Photo from the Buses are nice.
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Working on a big Problem!

McAlpine

I redid the 9020-92; now the rear wheel looks better. I also colored the RX-1064 in player colors, with a distinctive look that sets it apart from the 9020 series. Probably I'll do something similar with the B-107.

If anyone plays with a day/night-cycle (I usually don't) - all vehicles have working head- and tail-lights. No glowing windows however - passengers sit in the dark.

@zeno:
true, though the PAZ busses have rather high running costs. They can make up for this via their speedbonus, but if I understand this correctly, in newer versions speedbonus is computed from actual max (or average?) speed so buses operating within a city don't get it.

Zeno

Speedbonus is taken from real trip (average) speed, and all road vehicles have adjusted costs for their speed (at least I tried so).
Those PAZ buses should be as profitable as Raven's ones.

BUT! (there's always a *but*, you know) the buses have been balanced twice since last release, so I highly recommend you to wait for the next release, or download the latest nightly version.

McAlpine

OK, I just compared the prices in the latest svn version, and compared to the 1045-series the PAZ busses indeed don't look that bad; compared to the 9020 series however the PAZ busses are slower, smaller and more expensive. Though at this point they are also very close to being outdated, so replacing them is the better choice anyway.

Talking about balancing: Your Renfe 301, 316 and 318 locomotives seem extraordinarily cheap to me compared to other locomotives of the same speed and power (in the latest svn) ;) . Your AEC double-decker is also quite cheap, though it's also quite slow for its era.

Zeno

They all are supposed to be automatically balanced, based on speed, power, capacity. They are balanced at their start year, so the bonus speed for the start year is the one that counts. That explains why different vehicles with same stats have different prices (if they start in different years... 4 or 5 years can make a quite notable difference).

McAlpine

Quote from: Zeno on December 03, 2012, 11:08:03 PM
They are balanced at their start year, so the bonus speed for the start year is the one that counts. That explains why different vehicles with same stats have different prices (if they start in different years... 4 or 5 years can make a quite notable difference).
This explanation makes sense for the running costs of the busses I've seen so far, alhough it means that the RX 1064 is only of use for 1 year before it becomes obsolete because of the Pegaso-Seida 5020 Intercity.

But the Renfe locomotives are very low even compared with later vehicles of similar stats: The Renfe 318 from 1958 has 1477kW and 105km/h and costs 0.44¢/km; the TEM-2 of 1960 has 883kW, 100km/h and 1.13¢/km.

Zeno

About the locomotives, thanks for discovering a bug in my calculation program! ;-)
Now renfe 318 should be 1.77¢/km

McAlpine

And I see you also rebalanced the Pegaso busses ;)

Here's a player colored version of the RVg B-107 (which is for some reason called "B-149" and the equivalent of "Red Dwarf" in some translation files - the nickname now only applies if you choose red as your secondary player color).

mEGa

Hi,
I just discover your art work at this time. Very nice indeed !  pak128 will get some improvement with it, really.
Current projects in progress : improvements of few designed french paks

VS

All right... first of all: The idea of returning player colour to vehicles is a good one. Everyone likes player colour (even if it is hard to use well!). You started, and that's very good! :) As you may guess, this is not enough... yet! ;)

The original is a render. With player colour, what you do is pixelart, more or less, since you are limited by 2x8 available colours. Result is a mix of render and pixelart. If you want it not to look like an unholy union of two very different things (and you do), you must either bend the old to match new, or vice versa.

Assuming the render is more or less usable, the task its to make player colour part that matches the remaining parts of render. You have to start with understanding, what rendering a 3d model does. There is detail all over the place, not aligned to pixels. When you see a door, the edge is a mix of door and wall. If you look at the attached picture, the yellow bus has door precisely defined, while the red one's are rather uncertain. Same with wheels and... well, everything.

Assuming I take from your repaint the view with doors, let's see what is there: A huge space of one colour, interrupted only by what you thought is the door. Also, new wheels of pure darkness, on the big area of bright colour. I see three problems here:
1) too big homogenous area
2) mismatched shape of door in original render and your redraw
3) strong (and thus jarring) contrast between wheels and the new bus body

First, door. The original can guide you easily! It has darker pixels in some places. So, let's take what you drew in player colour, and make it darker there. Simple as that :) You can check the other views as well and think about this technique. Where the render is darker/brighter, the player colour version might follow for better result.

Second, the wheels. Study the first bus. There isn't just a black circle. There is a ring of pixels around, where the surrounding colour is made a bit darker. The overall shape then seems more circular. And... just look, the render has this too, although there is some chaos mixed in by "misalignment" of model and pixels. What I did in my repaint was the same thing. Darker surroundings.

Third, uniformity of blue area. Well this is always a tough one! So many possibilities. In the end, I decided to add another stripe of secondary colour, and it seems to have worked well.

Finally, I decided that I wasn't satisfied with the top stripe. It appears bright, compared to original colouring. It's easy to see why - once again, there is a strong boundary between "dark" (windows) and "bright" (stripe and lower parts). So, I made this stripe a bit darker. Maybe it helped, maybe not. I am not sure.

Hope this helps somewhat? As you can see, it is always just a matter of: look, think, make it work. The three techniques I detailed are easy to even mindlessly repeat... :)

My projects... Tools for messing with Simutrans graphics. Graphic archive - templates and some other stuff for painters. Development logs for most recent information on what is going on. And of course pak128!

DirrrtyDirk

  
***** PAK128 Dev Team - semi-retired*****

greenling

The Buses in Playercolor like i.
Opening hours 20:00 - 23:00
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I am The Assistant from Pakfilearcheologist!
Working on a big Problem!

Sarlock

Quote from: DirrrtyDirk on December 05, 2012, 03:46:34 PM
Everyone likes player colour

Are you sure? ;)

Some of us sandbox players prefer realistic non-player colours :)

That said, it's important for multiplayer.  You're doing a great job, McAlpine!
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

DirrrtyDirk

I like to call them a "necessary evil", but I sure never have liked them, nor will I ever truly.  ;)

But since they are necessary, and yes I completely agree with that (at least for multiplayer), I can live with them, and the better they are done the easier they are to endure.  ;D
  
***** PAK128 Dev Team - semi-retired*****

Fabio

Experimental livery system is much more sophisticated. I wonder why something like that was not considered for standard.
Each player could be linked to a livery instead of a color.

greenling

Fabio
Have you look on the code that make this posible?
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(In Night from friday on saturday and saturday on sunday it possibly that i be keep longer in Forum.)
I am The Assistant from Pakfilearcheologist!
Working on a big Problem!

McAlpine

@VS: Thanks for your constructive criticism and tips. Imitating antialiasing with a limited palette isn't trivial (I tried to somehow automate it with the "palette map" tool of GIMP, but didn't get the hang of it, so it's handpixeling), but it looks much better indeed.