More city buildings

[VS]

I should take a good look at this pakset again...

[The Hood]

Now that really is looking very nice indeed. A real improvement!

[Arkadiusz]

The power of modular (reminds me of the time when I also used to play with modular pieces for some other game)... great work, can't wait to see it ingame.

[wlindley]

Except for snow images, then, I believe this should be the final form (including a few minor corrections after the above).

The new ParishChurch should replace the old one.

This zip file includes the dat, png, the Gimp source with layers, and a .pak compiled for Experimental.

[The Hood]

I really like this stuff.  A few comments however:
- rotations seem to be missing/poorly defined for various of these.  As a general rule, 4 rotations should be given as players rotate the map fairly frequently and I don't think it looks great if the building appears to realign to face a different way (minor discrepancies are less of a problem)
- I'm not sure about the abbeys - abbeys tend to be churches with cloisters attached rather than the large towers as they appear at present
- I think there are possibilities for adapting the cathedral design to create at least one more, e.g. with a central tower and a cross plan.  This would probably need a new facade tile though which was a little grander than the parish church!

Looking forward to the snow images.

[AP]

Could these modular components be available individually in-game? To enable custom shapes e.g. a historic walled town to be created (by public player obviously). Or is the intention that it is only available in pre-designed units (cathedral, church, university etc).

[The Hood]

AP, at present the idea is just to have preconstructed attractions (although obviously nothing to stop anyone compiling the images individually and making up themselves) - mainly because the AI would build them randomly if not preconstructed into arranged sets.  One thought I had for an extension request around this was instead of defining a specific image for a certain point in the attraction, defining a "set" of images of which one would be chosen at random by the AI on construction.  E.g. for a cathedral, define a basic plan as follows:

XXXTX
PNNAC
XXXTX

Where:
X = random choice of some external "grounds"
T = random choice of trancept tile
P = random choice of portico/facade tile
N = nave tile
O = random choice of central tower tile
C = random choice of chancel tile

This would then require less work defining specific objects but allow more variation city to city.  Not sure if it is even slightly feasible though (probably not given my track record of getting ideas implemented by coders)

[AP]

mainly because the AI would build them randomly if not preconstructed into arranged sets

Ah, yes, I could see how that might be problematic!

[Sybill]

To make this work, the coordinates need to accept a matrix rather then a single value for a position in the image file.

Now it's like

Code Select Expand

BackImage[0][0][1][1][0]=image.1.7

but it would be necessary something like

Code Select Expand

BackImage[0][0][1][1][0]=image.[1.7,2.7,3.7]

where the ai chooses one of the values.

I'm not a programmer, so I don't know if this is possible. But it would be very nice to have something like that.

(I hope you can understand my post, it's difficult for me to write this in english.)

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

(I hope you can understand my post, it's difficult for me to write this in english.)

You made a couple of very very minor mistakes, but I thought you were a native speaker. So have no worries on that front. Besides, we're an international forum. :-)

[wlindley]

Snow images up next, I did want to correct the entry tile per TheHood's suggestion.  (That also simplified it to 3x4 instead of 3x5.)

And now I have one empty tile left in the .png, I want to fill that with a Ruined Castle... then snow, "this time for sure"  (Bullwinkle voice)

[The Hood]

That looks better. As I was suggesting, if you also had a different portico you could stick the tower in the middle of the church where the trancepts and chancel/nave meet.  A bit like hereford catherdal:

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/7551530

That would allow two different cathedral designs for variety.

[wlindley]

This perhaps, for the snowy medieval buildings?

[The Hood]

Excellent!  These will make a fantastic contribution to the next release.

Just a couple of things:
1) most importantly, can you post the latest non-snow version and dat too?
2) snow on trees?
3) the first four images on the second-bottom row need 4 rotations as they are not central to the tile - could you do these please so we can have full 4-rotation support?

[Milko]

Hello Wlindley

F A B O L O U S ! ! !

Great addition!

Giuseppe

[jamespetts]

Delightful, and very seasonal!

[wlindley]

zip file with updated snow on trees, and a few other small corrections, plus non-snow version, and dat file with regular and snowy versions.

The two "wall with entry" images cover the four views / edges, although not entirely symmetrically.  Yes this means the complex buildings will vary slightly by viewing angle, perhaps I'll change that later, once we get an updated .pak format.  As it is, the compiled pak of these buildings alone is 8.2 MB ... from two 360K png files!

[The Hood]

@wlindley,

Thanks.  I'm planning on having a good play with those images and may try a few buildings of my own with those components and then decide on what would be consistent to put in the official release.  Regarding the size, this would be relatively unaffected by the number of images defined in the png and largely affected by the total number of image references in the dat file (so each rotation and snow images add a lot of size, especially for larger buildings, as does the fact you've created many different objects, each of which has its own size).  Given the size of most people's hard drives though, and the fact that pak128.Britain long ago ceased to be a pakset for the filesize-constrained, I'm not too worried about that.

[sdog]

with pak-sets increasing and online game requiring up-to date versions of pak-sets, it might be worth to think of a rsync based updater. The changes between pak-set versions are small compared to the overall size.

[The Hood]

I've tried out those images and created a few of my own using the same tiles - I really love the concept of modular buildings and I'll be posting an extension request surrounding this shortly.  I think there is a lot of potential for this concept and it's a great way of creating lots of new buildings in a consistent style.

Concerning the original set of attractions made, I love the cathedral and the churches along with the cemetry and the single tile towers etc.  I've a few reservations though:
1) Abbeys don't really look like that; see my attempt below for something a little more realistic with a courtyard.
2) I'm not utterly convinced about the large square buildings with all the windows on; I can't quite figure out why but it just doesn't seem to go with the rest of the pak and it looks too blocky when combined with other tiles.  Something like that would be OK for castles, but in that case would need fewer windows and some other more castle features.  I might try a version like that myself.  However they just don't work in the university/colleges for my liking. 
3) A few more tiles for colleges would be good, plenty of inspiration from googling Oxford and Cambridge colleges (from my Cambridge days Christ's, Trinity, Corpus ought to provide some ideas for old-style tiles).  Anyway, we've got plenty of new stuff for now, and this can wait if you're not feeling up for more of this.
4) Discussing this with kierongreen we realised that 5x5 buildings are impractically large - many players use 2 tile station radii so it would be impossible to completely cover any building 5 deep.  For now we'll probably stick to buildings no larger than 4xn

Here are my creations using these tiles:

Castles (2nd one shows why dedicated castle tiles would be better than the current buildings with lots of windows)



Cathedrals



Colleges




Abbey

[Fabio]

Hello,

if you're interested in a Britain version of my Residential Blocks (see http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=8167.msg82103;topicseen#msg82103) you could provide me with appropriate textures (for walls, roofs, floors) and colors for the windows, so that I can create some...

[The Hood]

FAbio,

Thanks for the offer - I'd certainly be interested to see what they looked like - perhaps you could do a test version if it's not too much effort.  I'm keen to maintain graphical consistency so I'd only say a definite yes if it fit the pakset well.

Texture files can be located here:
https://github.com/JamesHood/pak128.Britain-blend-files/tree/master/textures

Ground: use concrete-paving-small
Walls: try concrete, flemish-bond-improved, limestone (also possibly try some other concrete looking textures, in blender I normally do this simply by adding noise to a surgace)
Roof: grey-roof-slate, or possibly some dark concrete effects.
Windows: all pak128.Britain windows are #000000

You may need to lighten / darken some of these textures to work; I use them in blender and have altered some settings to produce good results, but I do this by eye mainly to create the best results.

[Milko]

Hello

Fabio, thanks, thanks, and thanks again. 

PakBritain has a shortage of city buildings.

@The hood and Fabio

If possible it would be nice if some of these buildings were already applicable to the years 1930 to 1950. In the period 1930 to 1950 the shortage of buildings of medium / high density is remarkable.

Giuseppe

[Lord Vetinari]

My two cents on the cathedral (I understand that this would require an additional piece, but this way the facade is typical northern gothic / norman style, which I understand it's what you are aiming for; plus, a cathedral usually has a paved square on the front):



And the abbey (which in reality is a church with a courtyard delimited by the nave and the transept; also, the church is usually the tallest building. For a grander effect, we can use a cathedral instead of the church):



Of course those are just photo edits done in a couple of minutes.

[VS]

Is it normal for English cathedrals to have such small entrances?

[Lord Vetinari]

No, they should have a grand portal. In my sketch I used the tiles available in the set.


EDIT: forget about what I wrote. We can use the castle entrance:

[The Hood]

I really like the portal.    I think that's definitely a new tile for the set.  For now I'll keep the abbey as it is though - the symmetry helps reduce pak size

[wlindley]

Ahh, I see what you mean.  That looks like a good Revision 2 for a later after-Christmas update.

[The Hood]

Or even before Christmas?

New Cathedral Entrance:



New Castle Tile





Now all I have to do is code all of the attractions I have shown (currently they are made manually in the attraction editor by 1x1 tiles)... Hopefully a release tomorrow, but no promises!

[greenling]

Very nice! great work!

[Erem]

The pakset is coming along nicely with all the new buildings. Well done to everyone involved and thanks for making my towns look much more interesting and varied.

I've only had a quick play around with version 1.10 of the pakset so far, generating maps in different periods to see how the new buildings look, but I've noticed that larger cities can have multiple cathedrals and multiple castles, as in this example:
_{Exeter's 3 cathedrals and 2 castles}


Is there any way to limit the number to one of each per city?

Also, it seems more than a little odd when the citizens of a 20th-century city decide to build a castle! I don't know how you would get around that though, other than having castles as attractions rather than monuments. The downside then is that they could be some considerable distance from the nearest settlement, but perhaps that is more believable than the modern-day construction of castles?

The old towers and city walls pose a similar problem. I think, ideally, they should be placed in the town at the time the map is generated only, and only if the population of the town is above a certain level. That way, larger and presumably older towns would have these relics from the past whereas the smaller and newer ones wouldn't (and, more importantly, wouldn't build them later on). I don't know whether something like that is possible with the game's mechanics but, if it is, that could be a solution to the castle problem too.

[The Hood]

 I wad already aware of each of these problems. Unfortunately they are fundamental limitations within the executable. I have a few ideas for how to improve this but this would all depend on someine coding it up.

As for the timeline issues these are easy to change but as there aren't many modern attractions and cities still only build from the start date in map generation I decided to extend the life of these buildings.

[Milko]

Hello

Forgive me if I resurrected an old post but I would like to understand:

The ctrl+click "Select orientation to build station" dialog is somewhat broken on these, but the game itself draws them fine.

But the combination Ctrl+click how it works? I can not reproduce the operation ...

Giuseppe

[wlindley]

As for the timeline issues these are easy to change but as there aren't many modern attractions and cities still only build from the start date in map generation I decided to extend the life of these buildings.

The newest Standard begins with the earliest start date and advances the date during the generation process, so it is probably safe now to set things like City Walls to have retire dates... yes?

But the combination Ctrl+click how it works? I can not reproduce the operation ...

Ctrl+click on a construction button, brings up an orientation dialog (attached); this dialog needs to be re-coded to display stations or buildings composed of tile graphics that overlap.  (The main window viewport display logic draws tiles "front" to "back" as you view them; this dialog draws in a different order. If you make the building graphic .png files with TileCutter it won't matter, but if you draw discrete and overlapping building elements, they get drawn incorrectly here.)  The dialog's tile-drawing code needs to be the same as the main viewport's.

[prissi]

This stems from the different orientations of station tiles and city buildings.