Boats, barges and ships

[jamespetts]

Splendid! Apologies for not being able to make more progress on this: resources spread rather thin with all the various Simutrans things...

[The Hood]

Can I check what we agreed with length scales for boats. As I understand it:
<15m - linear scale as per railways.
>15m - proportional to square root of length, scaled such that 15m is identical to railway scale, 60m = 1/2 scale, 240m = 1/4 scale etc.?

[jamespetts]

Yes, indeed - that's my understanding. Have you found my 15m ruler .dae file in my repository? I use one for length and one for width, and rescale them accordingly (so, for example, a 50m long boat would be 50/15 = 3.33, so scale the ruler length along the x axis by 3.33, then import a fresh one, rotate it 90 degrees and repeat the process for the width).

[The Hood]

Not yet. I assumed we'd just be scaling by length, not separately for width - surely doing otherwise messes up the aspect ratio considerably?

[jamespetts]

I think that I have erred in my explanation: apologies. For a 50m ship, one would take the square root of 15 (3.87) and the square root of 50 (7.07), and divide the latter by the former to get 1.83, and multiply the length ruler on the y axis by 1.83. One would then duplicate the length ruler and re-scale it as a width ruler. Suppose, for example, that this 50m long ship was 4m wide: one would take the re-scaled ruler, rotate it by 90 degrees, and scale it by 0.08 (4 / 50) on the x axis.

One would then use freeform scaling to get the ship's bow and stern just touching the red vertical bars on the length ruler, and use x axis constrained scaling to get the ship's sides touching the vertical bars on the width ruler.

[kierongreen]

Width should always use the same scale as length to avoid aspect problems, therefore the width, length and height scales are all the same and proportional to the square root of the length.

[The Hood]

I'm with kierongreen here - surely it's easiest to determine the scale factor according to the square root method and then simply scale the whole ship with a 1:1 aspect ratio so that the length fits the correct length scale. Otherwise, for very long ships which are still relatively narrow, you will end up scaling the width linearly but the length with the square root, leading to it looking far wider than it should for its length...

[jamespetts]

Hmm - maybe I am getting confused: I thought that the revised version of what I wrote above did that? The idea is that the width will be in linear (exact) proportion to the length for each individual ship, but that the length (and therefore overall size) of one ship will be in a logarithmic scale with other ships that are over 15m long. That is why I described, in the revised text, scaling the width ruler to a proportion of the length ruler based on the ship's width relative to its length without further calculations involving the square root.

[The Hood]

OK I get you now - but surely you don't need a width scaler as well as you can just scale in proportion down to the correct length?

[jamespetts]

That should be the case in theory, but I found that a number of ships were not the correct width for their length.

[The Hood]

OK, so the width scaling was to ENSURE correct aspect ratio. It's as good a time as any to check all of the widths if we're rescaling everything anyway. Glad we cleared that one up

[The Hood]

I'm now turning my attention to adding dat files for the new images and rescaling existing images which need to be rescaled. From the spreadsheet in your github repository, james, I can't see any data on the canal boats and you haven't entered speed/capacity/power data for some of the new steamers you drew. Do you just want me to do a best guess or do you have some data you were intending to use?

[jamespetts]

Where there are items missing in the spreadsheet, such as speed, power or capacity, it is because I was unable to find data - I suggest that you extrapolate as best you can from the ships for which we do have data.

As for the canal boats, I did have some data in mind, but I am currently preparing for a tea party and don't have time to go through it right now. Might I suggest that you start with the ships and I can provide the data for canal boats later?

[The Hood]

That's great - I can guess some data for the boats and there are also a lot of other ships that need rescaling. Just post the canal data when you can.

[The Hood]

Update: River and coastal boats now all adjusted and added to SVN.

[jamespetts]

Excellent. I have spotted one or two errors, however. The original "Clyde steamer" retires in 1899, when the PS Waverly II is introduced, whereas in fact it ought to retire in 1886 when the PS Madge Wildfire is introduced. The MV Lochfyne does not appear to retire even though it is superseded by the MV Balmoral. The TSS King Edward's .dat file is missing - the .dat file with that name actually has the content of the TSS Queen Mary's .dat file, and there is no .dat file named for the TSS Queen Mary. The Tyne and Mersey ferries should probably have generic names to match the others ("Small diesel river ferry" and "Diesel river ferry" should suffice). The mail addons seem to have blank graphics, whereas I thought that a mail icon graphic ought be used. The mail addon for the PS Premier seems to have a different introduction date to the PS Premier itself.

[The Hood]

Thanks - lots of mistakes no doubt as I was trying to watch the rugby at the same time! The only intentional one was the MV Lochfyne - being considerably different in capacity to the Balmoral I thought it best to leave them both without retirement.

[jamespetts]

Should it not at least be retired when the later ferries by Kieron are introduced?

[The Hood]

Well again, those are much smaller. It doesn't do any harm to have them available.

EDIT: I've also just noticed all of the renders are back-to-front - I noticed you added a comment to the render script to change everything by 90 degrees - is it possible you rotated by 90 degrees the wrong way?

[jamespetts]

Yes, I suppose that this is possible. I work around it by using image definitions like this:

Code Select Expand


EmptyImage[E]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.4
EmptyImage[SE]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.5
EmptyImage[S]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.6
EmptyImage[SW]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.7
EmptyImage[W]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.0
EmptyImage[NW]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.1
EmptyImage[N]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.2
EmptyImage[NE]=./images/lbscr-2-4-0-t-1855.1.3


[The Hood]

I've reverted the script to the old behaviour on my copy - it also seems all my boat blends are 90 degrees out from yours (?!) but that works with the original script if ships are arranged side on (helps with positioning) facing right in view 0 before executing the script. No need to change image definitions then.

[jamespetts]

With all the .blends that I use, including the railway .blends which are based on the .blends made by you and Kieron, the Y axis is the length axis and the X axis the short axis.

[The Hood]

Hmm. No idea why the difference. I've just changed the definitions for all the boats I've just done and uploaded corrected dats to SVN. Now turning my attention to re-scaling the other boats. I'm keeping an eye out for orientation differences...

[The Hood]

Now scaled all existing boats in the pakset to the square root lengthscale.

[kierongreen]

Great

[The Hood]

New canal graphics added to SVN and included in the new release...

[jamespetts]

A lot of hovercraft here, but these are mostly livery variants, plus the Mk3 SR N4 - a stretched version of the Mk1 which should be available as an upgrade in experimental:



Top to bottom:
- SR N6 in Hoverlloyd livery
- SR N6 in BR Seaspeed livery
- SR N4 Mk1 in Hoverlloyd livery
- SR N4 Mk1 in early Hoverspeed livery
- SR N4 Mk1 in later Hoverspeed livery
- SR N4 Mk1 in later BR Seaspeed livery
- SR N4 Mk3 in later BR Seaspeed livery
- SR N4 Mk3 in early Hoverspeed livery
- SR N4 Mk3 in later Hoverspeed livery
NB the original SR N6 image above is Hovertravel livery

I am currently in the process of adding the multiple liveries to Experimental; may I ask: what are the introduction dates for the later versions of the Seaspeed and Hoverspeed liveries? I cannot immediately find those on searching.

[The Hood]

No idea. I just saw them and worked out the order of the liveries, so drew them.

[jamespetts]

Hmm. Do 1977 and 1996 seem reasonable guesses until anyone can find out more accurately?

[The Hood]

Sounds good to me...

[ӔO]

probably 1981, November or there abouts.

Seaspeed merged with Hoverlloyd in 1981 to form Hoverspeed.

[jamespetts]

Ahh, that's the separate Hoverspeed livery; that I gathered, but what I need to know is when the later Hoverspeed livery was introduced, and the second type of Seaspeed livery.

[ӔO]

I would guess they would have been repainted when they were temporarily withdrawn for their major conversions.

[jamespetts]

That may well be so, but there must have been a point in time before which they would simply have been repainted in the older livery if/when they had major overhauls, and after which they would be painted in the new livery: somebody at some point had to sit down and design the new livery, and then other people had to decide officially to adopt it.

[ӔO]

I dug around and as far as I can work out...

For Hoverspeed:
Very early livery had a white roof
By Aug, 1988 used livery with the grey roof http://www.jameshovercraft.co.uk/hover/srn4/srn4_hoverspeed.php
probably around 1993~1994, changed liveries to match seacats entering service http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Hoverspeed.html

Also evidence to suggest multiple liveries coexisted. The Princess Margaret in her final shape: http://www.bartiesworld.co.uk/hovercraft/srn4.htm

For seaspeed:
early livery used, at least, until 1976, as featured in 'diamonds are forever'
Probably changed livery in 1977, in honour of QE2 silver jubilee.