More city buildings

[Milko]

Hello

I've just added the staging inn, thanks.  I'd probably rather leave the 1x2 and 1x3 stations out of the official release until such time as the code is changed to allow them to work in the same way as platforms, in order to reduce menu clutter.  In the meantime, people can always download them from here.

Code changes mentioned, are those required in this post?
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=8883.msg82614#msg82614

Giuseppe

[The Hood]

Sorry for the late reply. No, they are separate requests. The one about stations is to give extensions 16 rotations like platforms. The other request is about modular buildings.

[The Hood]

After a bit of testing I've changed the stone attractions to be curiosities rather than monuments. This should help the above problem, but do continue the discussion if needs be...

[The Hood]

More brick houses.


http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/pak/brickhouses.zip

Intro and retire years are guessed like most of time.

I've just stumbled upon this again - not sure why I never included it (except possibly because I was wondering about having the 8-rotation variant with a straight version of the house). Sorry Archon - it's definitely worth putting in! Are you still interested in painting some more - I am going to be concentrating on increasing the variety of citybuildings and your excellent additions are always welcome.

EDIT:
Not very exciting, but here are some more light industrial buildings. Mostly reworkings of other graphics.

[jamespetts]

Very nice!

[greenling]

cool the new Building in the Photo.

[The Hood]

Thanks. I should perhaps add if anyone has any inspiration for other citybuildings please do post images here - I'm finding it quite hard to choose what to draw!

[jamespetts]

1930s office:



Modern industrial buildings:





Modern offices:







Skyscrapers:

[sdog]

that daily express building is truly remarkable.

the last image shows some lighter facade colours as does the buildings in the background of the daily express building.

In the game the buildings are predominantly dark however. Perhaps some high level buildings should have such lightly coloured stone and concrete facades?

[kierongreen]

No building would have been so light 1870-1970. Smog (see pictures of older buildings that haven't been restored to show the damage caused!)

[AP]

I'd suggest skyscrapers be used with extreme care. There are very few UK cities where they proliferate, as compared to american cities, they are subect to extreme amounts of planning restrictions in the UK. Some cities have blanket height restrictions of 3-4 storeys. Skyscrapers might be better treated as monuments (one-offs).

[jamespetts]

Actually, there's much to be said for using attractions as city buildings generally: they would be useful for public amenities such as police stations, prisons, fire stations, swimming baths, hospitals, lunatic asylums, workhouses, government offices, courts and the like.

[ӔO]

the only problem with treating such buildings as attractions would be that they don't overwrite existing buildings at the city core.
You might get a 100 story building in the outskirts of nowhere.

[The Hood]

I think there is plenty of scope for improving the way cities are generated in pak128.Britain/Simutrans. At present I don't understand how much is a pakset issue and how much is a exe/code issue - see also discussion here: http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=9684.0

Among the things which don't quite "fit" to me are:
- preference for dense buildings everywhere or nowhere (depending on renovate %) rather than a denser core and suburbs
- general lack of industrial buildings being placed with timeline on (is this because we don't have the right levels of industry?)
- attractions are always built around the edge of cities, even those which in real life would be central (e.g. cathedrals, skyscrapers if coded that way)

However I don't think we will solve all these straight away, and we won't be able to work out a better solution until we have more buildings to play with. Graphics take time to do, but once done can be reused and the dats can be adjusted and tweaked over time. Until we have more this isn't possible. Anyone else feel like helping me draw some?

[The Hood]

I wasn't going to share these quite yet but I liked what I saw when I tested it so I had to share it. I've done 2 semi-detatched versions of Kieron's 1930s house and another version of the detatched house (so it's not a lot of my own work). It works quite well and generates some more realistic looking suburbia...



EDIT: and some 1930s flats. Unfortunately, now I've added these, generating the massive suburbia doesn't happen as the game much prefers building flats (levels 6-10) rather than houses (levels 1-4)



EDIT2: And some parade shops from the 1930s to add some commercial buildings to that era:

[sdog]

You could reach the suburbia growth by making the block of flats only intermittently available. Say every third year. Thus for two years of growth mostly suburbia would grow, in the third year some would be replaced by blocks of flats.

This would of course not work during world generation. Here most likely dates could be avoided, for instance not having this available in full decade years and '5 years. Those are more likely choices for players.


those shops look rather good. a pitty the game will hardly ever build them in that way.

[The Hood]

Yes it is rather a shame that the game doesn't build things in the most aesthetic way, e.g. large suburban roads of similar buildings, and high streets with shop after shop, office districts with larger buildings etc. Maybe one day a developer will be happy to code it - it would vastly improve the look of the game. I'm working on the principal that if there is a large bank of graphics ready to do this with, it's more likely to be coded.

Anyway, here's some 1930s offices. I think my 1930s architecture bonanza day should stop here...

[greenling]

The Hood
Your Photos from the new Buildings looks very good out.

[kierongreen]

Ooooh very nice, as I said, I want to ensure that estates get built even when there are higher level buildings available

[Dwachs]

Would it help to implement multi-tile city buildings? I think this would be possible.

The 'easiest' way would be to create such buildings while upgrading low-level ones. Then the city rules part does not need to be touched.

[kierongreen]

I was thinking maybe create city building groups that naturally cluster. Like current preference for res/com/ind but more detailed. Also maybe a parameter to toggle whether core or suburbs is preferred for a building.

[alexbaettig]

I like the idea that the urban sprawl in the 30s is more or less decreased by these.
Something else: These 30s offices with the clock on top could also serve as an alternative post office... Maybe with a red stripe over the first windows... Think about it... In big cities usually you don't get these small post offices.

[kierongreen]

The building with a clocktower looks like it is a normal 1 tile city building, just with 8 rotations - so it is not necessarily that big in game.

[alexbaettig]

no no, I don't mean that big but one tile as an station extension is definitely nice. I mean the current post offices do look so small and do not quite fit for a big station in a big city.

[Carl]

Great buildings, The Hood!

[The Hood]

Would it help to implement multi-tile city buildings? I think this would be possible.

The 'easiest' way would be to create such buildings while upgrading low-level ones. Then the city rules part does not need to be touched.

I like this idea a lot.

I was thinking maybe create city building groups that naturally cluster. Like current preference for res/com/ind but more detailed. Also maybe a parameter to toggle whether core or suburbs is preferred for a building.

And this one too...

[jamespetts]

I like both The Hood's contributions and Dwachs' and Kieron's suggestions - and also Sdog's suggestion for a temporary solution has much to recommend it.

[The Hood]

And another offering - not very inspiring I'm sure but how many office buildings are supposed to be inspiring?

[sdog]

I like the idea of having one of those as post-office station extension. The one with the clock would look particularily nice, however the corner versions, i like the best would be lost that way. Station extensions don't have corner versions, is that correct?

[ӔO]

might be interesting to just randomly stroll around with maps street view.
http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ll=52.405359,-1.51112&spn=0.043723,0.086174&t=h&z=14&layer=c&cbll=52.405359,-1.51112&panoid=sEM23JvJSZJtgVhZ1eLjkA&cbp=12,41.95,,0,-30.3

http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ll=52.977589,-0.024719&spn=0.693762,1.378784&t=h&z=10&layer=c&cbll=52.977096,-0.024405&panoid=5M0y_My3nM59ENINh-UM9Q&cbp=12,357.64,,0,0.54


I really like those new buildings.

[jamespetts]

And another offering - not very inspiring I'm sure but how many office buildings are supposed to be inspiring?

I wonder whether that last building would look slightly better slightly darker?

[wlindley]

that Deco building, with balconies across the front, and a color like the white flats, would make an excellent residential structure.  Quite like Hercule Poirot's residence on the David Suchet series.

[ӔO]

I wonder whether that last building would look slightly better slightly darker?

I'd say that the roof can be one tone darker.
It looks like a stucco building: http://www.relkogroup.co.uk/businesses/restoration-and-masonry/case-studies/cs-stucco

there are quite a few interesting buildings with no interesting traits on that website.

[The Hood]

It is supposed to be stucco. I've redone it with a darker roof but I don't have time to do a screenshot now. I was already thinking of deco flats as a variation on it too.

All of the stuff I've done so far is now in SVN - there will be more, but I wanted to upload what I've done so that kieron and whoever else could make a start on any coding work if they want to, using the additional graphics.

[kierongreen]

thanks i'm working on more than one coding project in simutrans at the moment so don't expect immediate progress...