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Pak256.California-Ex

Started by nrg, June 04, 2020, 05:35:28 AM

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nrg

I've been working on an America/California themed pakset off-and-on since last year (mainly in the last couple months).  I have been focusing on California, with the idea that it might be expanded on in the future to create an American set (which is a bit too ambitious for me right now), but have a distinctly west-coast feeling.  Right now it's in a bizarre almost-but not really-playable state:

There's one train available so far, the newer BART "Fleet of the Future".  I've commandeered the maglev waytype to use for BART's broad gauge tracks instead, since maglevs barely exist in North America and I really wanted BART to have it's own waytype.  There's a basic platform, tracks, and third rail, but no bridges or aerial structures yet.
There's only one bus: a 1980's Gillig Phantom.
The only goods vehicle is a Kiwibot.  It has nothing to carry yet, but clogs up traffic as it slowly rolls down the sidewalk...
The only ship is a tule reed boat.
To make things extra-strange, all citycars are Ford Model-T's (there was a cc0 model available).
There are a handful of early-mid 20th century houses and shops, a modern urban retail building, and a 1950s/60s apartment building, based on some real buildings in the East Bay and Santa Barbara, but a lot more are needed.
So far the only factory is an early cattle ranch/rancho, based on an 1840s adobe.

Some of the graphics are basically placeholders (like the current sidewalk and cityroad).  I've been struggling with producing convincing-looking trees using the blender sapling tree generator.  I have a couple of pine/redwoods but can't seem to make anything resembling an oak tree.

Milko

Hello

Awesome, exceptional graphics!

Giuseppe

wlindley

#2
Excellent! As a longtime Phoenix resident, I imagine this could encompass everything from San Diego and Phoenix to San Francisco and Flagstaff.
I do encourage you to consider using the "LEGO-building-block" method as used in the pak128 Britain Stone Attractions images.  By which I mean, consider Los Angeles Union Station (Google image)

as a group of 1x1 buildings which the user can build as station add-ons.  Each building would have doors and full walls from all rotations.  I have drawn, in green, example 1x1 buildings for composition (as Main Waiting Room, Entry with Clock Tower, Carriage Court, Mail Annex, Garden Court, and so on.)
If Extended one day supports Catering upgrades as station add-ons, the Fred Harvey Restaurant (just to left of clock tower) would have a small passenger capacity but a high Catering bonus.
A delightful side-effect of this method is that, by adding a twin-bell-tower 1x1 building, you can build San Diego's Santa Fe Station with the same set, or with one or two other 1x1s you can build Phoenix Union Station.

The same principle works with factories and other large buildings: the 1x1 building-blocks can be combined in your Dat file instead of tile-cutting.  You can even designate buildings as factory 'fields' and have the game build each factory as unique set of buildings.

jamespetts

Splendid! It would be excellent to see the US audience catered for. There appears to be another project to create a 256 sized US themed pakset; I wonder whether you might want to consider collaborating?

As to city buildings, remember that it is now possible to have multi-tiled city buildings. If you are designing a pakset from the ground up, you might want to take advantage of that in your basic scaling/design/balancing decisions, as it is much easier to make use of these buildings if this has been designed in in advance.
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wlindley

The Arizona Memory Project has a good, freely viewable, collection of AT&SF Albuquerque Division Structures including many station and structure blueprints which were typical of the Santa Fe in California.

RealAmerican1776

Hello. I am working on a Pak256.America-Ex. Do you mind if I use some of the stuff here for that pak? It would come in handy. Thank you. I can also help with locomotives and buildings. I have a town hall here that might fit in California. Here it is and tell me if it will work. If it does I will find some way of giving it to you. The Pak file is going to be too big for the attachments.

nrg

Thanks everyone and sorry for the delay in responding - I've been busy with work the last week.

Quote from: wlindley on June 04, 2020, 05:44:25 PM
Excellent! As a longtime Phoenix resident, I imagine this could encompass everything from San Diego and Phoenix to San Francisco and Flagstaff.
I do encourage you to consider using the "LEGO-building-block" method as used in the pak128 Britain Stone Attractions images.  By which I mean, consider Los Angeles Union Station (Google image)

as a group of 1x1 buildings which the user can build as station add-ons.  Each building would have doors and full walls from all rotations.  I have drawn, in green, example 1x1 buildings for composition (as Main Waiting Room, Entry with Clock Tower, Carriage Court, Mail Annex, Garden Court, and so on.)
If Extended one day supports Catering upgrades as station add-ons, the Fred Harvey Restaurant (just to left of clock tower) would have a small passenger capacity but a high Catering bonus.
A delightful side-effect of this method is that, by adding a twin-bell-tower 1x1 building, you can build San Diego's Santa Fe Station with the same set, or with one or two other 1x1s you can build Phoenix Union Station.

The same principle works with factories and other large buildings: the 1x1 building-blocks can be combined in your Dat file instead of tile-cutting.  You can even designate buildings as factory 'fields' and have the game build each factory as unique set of buildings.

Thanks, that's more or less what I was thinking wrt the station buildings - a number of 1x1 buildings designed to be connected to form a larger station.  I was thinking of starting with San Jose Diridon, because it's fairly generic and the main station hall fits exactly within one tile at the scale I'm using, but I've also been looking for other stations.

It seems like there should be a way to take comfort into account, so that stations with a waiting room or cafe would be preferred, or passengers would be more willing to wait if there were more amenities.

Quote from: jamespetts on June 06, 2020, 11:56:30 PM
Splendid! It would be excellent to see the US audience catered for. There appears to be another project to create a 256 sized US themed pakset; I wonder whether you might want to consider collaborating?
Yes.  I would like to keep the regional flavor though.  Ideally there would be a way to have multiple sub-paksets designed to work together and be easily mixed and matched, but that's just an idea right now.
Quote

As to city buildings, remember that it is now possible to have multi-tiled city buildings. If you are designing a pakset from the ground up, you might want to take advantage of that in your basic scaling/design/balancing decisions, as it is much easier to make use of these buildings if this has been designed in in advance.

I will be using some multi-tile buildings, mainly for the more contemporary era where much of the development (especially around transit stations) is made up of large apartment/townhouse and office/industrial complexes, and for things like strip malls.  One thing I'm curious about is how upgrading works however.  If there's a 1x2 building for example, can it only ever be upgraded to another 1x2 building or does it get broken up into smaller bits?

Quote from: TheRoadmaster1996 on June 15, 2020, 08:27:24 PM
Hello. I am working on a Pak256.America-Ex. Do you mind if I use some of the stuff here for that pak?
Yes, absolutely!  I'm going to upload everything somewhere (probably github?) once I figure out the licensing.  I'm leaning towards CC-BY-NC-SA (which is also what Pak256 uses) but had to use some files from Pak128-Britain-Ex to get a working pakset. 

I'm using a scale of 75ft per tile, which makes everything similar to, but slightly larger than what pak256 uses.  I did some experiments and vehicles seemed a little too small at 25m per tile.  At 75ft one tile can fit two houses or three 25ft-wide San Francisco rowhouses perfectly on one tile with everything drawn to scale.

Quote
I have a town hall here that might fit in California. Here it is and tell me if it will work. If it does I will find some way of giving it to you. The Pak file is going to be too big for the attachments.

Thanks.  It's a bit too East-Coast-looking for what I'm going for.  I have a town hall model half-completed already (and another that I'm not really happy with).

RealAmerican1776

Thank you. I am going to Coloma California for camping on the Fourth of July and there is this beautiful bridge built around the turn of the century (I want to say it was built in 1909 but I'm not sure.) I want to get some pictures to try and model it. I think it will look great for my pakset and differently your California being in the state so it might be interesting.

Vladki

Hello guys. If I may recommend joining forces with other 256 paks (especially the japanese). That will save you a lot of effort on painting infrastructure and other basic stuff that is not so much country specific. And it seems to me that the scale and style of rendering is very similar, so it should match. For country specific stuff I recommend the approach used by pak192.comic, where climates roughly correspond to countries.
https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,15225.msg150160.html#msg150160

So e.g. mediterran would be California, temperate US East coast, tropical Japan, etc...


RealAmerican1776

To be honest with you Vladki, I don't think that would work here in America. California has deserts and alpine climate as well, not just mediterranean. Same with the East Coast, temperate trees that work in Rhode Island won't work in say Georgia that has a more sub tropical climate. I think the climate settings are fine. I would however change tropical to Deep South if it's going to be an America themed pakset.

Mariculous

Abusing climates for this purpose is rather a workaround than a solution imho.
The way to go would be the new regions feature.

jamespetts

I agree with Freahk - climates are currently strictly an altitude based system. If you want different types of buildings in different parts of the map, regions are the way to go. If the two north American paksets were to join forces, this branch of development might create content for a  region in the west, and the other branch for a region in the east.
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RealAmerican1776

Interesting idea. Maybe instead of America as a whole, I might think about doing New England instead. Someone could do a Southern pakset,  A Mid Atlantic pakset (New York New Jersey, etc.), Texas would have to be its own, a Midwest pakset, someone is already working on California, so maybe Pacific Northwest, and then you got the high desert region like Nevada and finally a Rocky Mountain pakset. Or just one big America. California can just be a standalone make it so much easier doing the whole country in one. Because California or New England doesn't represent the whole country, every region and every state from Maine, Nebraska, Texas, and California makes this country what it is, a land of diversity, of opportunity, of hope for those who seek the American Dream and the dreams millions of people who come to our shores have and share with those who are already here for we are that great big City on the Hill, a beacon of hope and liberty and freedom. America isn't just a country, another place on the map. America is so much more... it is an idea. Those things I talked about are those ideas and we as a people have fought and some of us have died to protect those ideas and the soldiers, sailors, and marines carry those ideas with them wherever they go, so I think if we were to do any pakset based the country, it needs to be the whole nation, not just one region or one state.

wlindley

If there is a single base pakset, with one make process from a common library of images, textures, blender models, and so on, then it will be easy to mix-and-match subsets.  Conversely, if there are several diverse directions for color choices, make procedures, and other modeling calculations, there will be much wasted effort.  If all these bits are documented as the procedure unfurls we might actually get a minimal playable set which will attract even more help?

RealAmerican1776

So correct me if I'm wrong but you want to make sub paksets in one main pakset? I don't know but that seems like a lot of work. Like I said it might be easier to just have one big America themed set. And I'm still not great at coding. I'm learning teaching myself how to code. I even got a coding book for dummies.

KneeOn

I think the suggestion is the California pakset is developed as a Cali pakset, while the USA one which has a more east coast feel gets developed at the same time by the respective developers and then released as one pakset.

Some common textures can be shared (brick, metal etc) and common blender files (basic houses which only need their respective coast flavourings added).

You'll get more content for less work and by keeping the work separate but shared, people can opt if they wanted for east/west/both.

It's more of a sharing of certain work and releasing work as one rather than developing (potentially) 50 individual state paksets where things like icons, cursors, menus, climates, tracks, signals, whatever else could be shared are shared. You'll all get more work done that way and the Region's feature should mean you can have Californian buildings on Californian textures and east coast buildings on East coast textures all in one set.

Phystam

Really excellent! If you, America/California paksets developers, share how to render the 3D models, your project will go better!

wlindley

Exactly.


The tropical southeastern Orlando, Florida station for example (above) is in much the same Spanish design as Southern California.  Sacramento in many ways looks very Midwestern.  And rolling stock should be mostly the same across the continent in any time period.

jamespetts

I agree with W. Lindley - what one would do is not so much have sub-paksets, but rather a single US (or North American) pakset with different regions. Ideally, one would have a great many common items and a number of region specific items. This would greatly reduce the amount of overall work whilst still allowing both of the North American pakset creators to create distinctive east coast/west coast items and have them all appear together. One might start with just the two regions, and add other regions as and when developer resources allow.
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RealAmerican1776

You might want to look at the Coast Guard Station in Vallejo. They have some houses that look like they date back to Spanish colonial times. Coming from my experience of being there, they are really nice looking buildings.

RealAmerican1776

Hello, I have something here that might interest you. It's a Valley Oak tree native to California.

jamespetts

That does look good.

May I recommend, however, that trees be rendered with the transparent workflow? It makes a huge difference to their appearance.
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RealAmerican1776

What do you mean and how would I do this?

jamespetts

Quote from: TheRoadmaster1996 on August 15, 2020, 12:16:18 AM
What do you mean and how would I do this?

See here for a step-by-step guide to making vehicles for Pak128.Britain-Ex using the transparent workflow.
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