The International Simutrans Forum

I've finally found some more time for drawing stuff, and here's the latest results...

It's going to be part of PakBritain, but if there is demand I can make a separate release of them.  I'll release the pak once I've drawn a few more (probably about 2/3 of the way there to a release right now) but here are some screenshots - unfortunately I can't upload them all due to filesize and number of pictures required!

Industries done so far:
Coal Mine -> Coal Power Station
Oil Rig (sea) or Oil Well (land) -> Oil Refinery
Oil Refinery (fuel oil) -> Oil Power Station
Oil Refinery (petrol) -> Petrol station
Oil Refinery (chemicals) -> Pharmaceutical Factory -> Chemist
Sheep farm or Cattle farm (livestock) -> Slaughterhouse -> Butchery
Cattle farm (milk) -> dairy
Sheep farm (wool) -> Textile mill -> clothes shop
Forest/Sawmill (combined in this pak) -> furniture factory -> furniture shop
Forest/Sawmill -> Paper mill -> printworks -> newsagent (newspaper) and bookshop (books)
Forest/Sawmill -> Builder's Yard
Quarry -> Cement mill -> Builder's Yard
Clay Pit -> Brickworks -> Builder's Yard
Clay Pit -> Pottery -> China Shop

The first one looks really good!

I'm LOVING IT!!!!! Especially because it's English :P It's nice to have an English Pak (I'm English not British, i always argue the point lol :D)

Thanks mate! I'm so looking forward to it.

Thanks for the feedback so far.  If you want to see a screenshot of any of the ones I haven't posted just let me know and I'll whack them up.  Latest addition - grain farm, complete with 4 seasons of field.

Why is the roof of the warehouse different in both sides. I mean, the side next to the outer wall has vertical lines, and the other has horizontal lines...problems with Blender and textures? In fact it happens the same with the main building roof.

Looks good! Plain fields look a bit dark?

I get round the texture issue by using two textures - one rotated by 90 degrees.

Oh - hadn't spotted that about the roof textures!  Shows how awake I was when I drew that!  Which one do you think is better - the roofs in the spring shot or the other shots?  I'll also think the winter field is a bit dark, so I'll redo that when I'm not in work!

Definetly, spring's roofs but I think you've used the same texture for the ground and the roof in that view

Here's the updated farm - roof texture adjusted and winter field a little less dark.  Any better?

I like it, good work.

It's still missing this... err, you know, dirt and all that.

Completed bakery chain:
Grain farm -> Grain mill -> Bakery

Simuthans of PakBritain have been partying this weekend because they now have a pub  :D  In it you can have beer from the brewery or cider from the local orchard.

Um... Can you make a sign 'Pub' at the pub? That will be easier to find your gorgeous pub. ;)

BTW, I love this pak set as well as pak 96 comic :)

Great to see new buildings being painted - sorry if this appears to be overcritical:
Orchard house looks a bit too tall.
I'm not sure about trees in orchard - with these and other buildings pixel editing will be needed to remove stray light pixels, but in addition the trees don't seem to quite fit in. I'm not sure how to improve this - trees are one area I'm not that good at...
The tower bit of the brewery seems to have quite a large window area - more typical of modern steel frame brick facade buildings than traditional brick buildings.
The brewery in general looks quite small - this isn't necessarily a problem (as compared to some industries it should be), but having fewer windows and possibly slightly taller buildings (industrial floor heights larger than residential ones) would make it seem more in scale.

All in my humble opinion...

@Qayyum: if you look carefully there is a sign at the pub - maybe I need to make it bigger / a more obvious colour.

@kierongreen: I think I agree about the size comments, although I think it is more that I have slipped into making some of my buildings (e.g. farms) too big rather than industry too small!  I think you're right about window area on the factory.

About trees, I'm not sure what to do.  The pixel editing does need to happen, I've already done some but it's amazing how many stray light pixels get through each time!  As for not fitting in though I really don't know how I could draw them differently, without reverting to drawing 1000s of individual leaves in blender (not going to happen!!!). What in particular do you think doesn't fit?  Shape? Colour? Anyone else got any suggestions?

Attached: another shot of the orchard trees and also forest trees for comparison.  Both may need refining.

You can use a Blender plugin for creating trees called Gen3 (http://www.geocities.com/bgen3/). It's easy to use and It creates beautiful trees like these (from the old Blender resource thread (http://archive.forum.simutrans.com/topic/05054.0/index.html))

The orchard trees just seem a little to synthetic for want of a better word. The forest trees are definitely artificial looking. Some starting points would be to add some more random bumpmap textures (something like cloud) to them. If you send the tree blender files to me I could try looking at them?

The orchard trees definitely lack any touch of "fractalness", they're fight now just textured and deformed balls. More or less the same goes for these conifers.

I don't know much about 3d modelling, but the keywords you want to search are "procedural", "algorithmic" and so on. Trying to create a number of different trees by hand sounds like good fun if you're paid by hour, but that isn't the case :P

That looks incredible.  I can't wait until you have it completed.  Great work - really!

OK, here's another go at conifers, using the tree generator script (which is awesome, thanks!)

I'm not quite sure I've got it right still though, so any more suggestions on what to do next would be appreciated.  I'll have a go at the orchard later.

Now that's what I wanted to see in 128 :D

Certainly looking much better than my attempts :) The trees look good - what about giving a little variance between the trees, slightly different sizes and colours, just to differentiate them a bit?

There is already some difference in heights (but you can't really see it!).  I will have an experiment with colours as well.  I was also wondering about what people thought of the scale?  If each tree is currently too small then I could do 4 trees per tile instead of 9.

@VS: You're welcome to have any of these graphics for mainstream pak128 if you want, but you'll probably need to balance the dat files differently.

OK, here's my latest attempts - which one do you think is better?

I prefer the first version. It's looking very good.

Pedantic colour points:
It might be good for the hue to be slightly more towards blue on the lighter trees - the darker ones are ok though (this is for the conifer trees, for deciduous going slightly towards yellow would be better, not by much though) and for the saturation to come down a bit (again, not by much).

Yes, IMO the first one's better, too. On the second one, trees form "vertical lines" by color (only dark ones in a row, then just light ones, then again only dark ones, etc. - on the first picture it looks much more natural. Although I like the height of trees in #2...

Yes.

OK, here's a third attempt at the forest, with slightly different colours on the trees, and the central sawmill bit resized smaller to look more in scale.  Is this one better?

I like! Perfect.

Heh. Now if only fields could have winter version... wait, they do! :)

Orchard looks good. What it should product? I have some idea where it could be used. Soon I would like to present new industry chains somewhere in forum. For those who understand czech are available diagrams in czech written part of forum in topic "Nové průmysly pro pak128" - but translation to english is in process.

The orchard in this pak supplied cider to the pub and fruit to the greengrocer (not drawn yet).  I've managed to redraw the trees, hopefully this time they look a little less like deformed spheres.  Any further improvements?

Yes, this is certainly better, too.

I can't really say anything as my monitor shows mostly darkness and I can't make out anything on these trees beyond shapes.

Looks good.

... The orchard in this pak supplied cider to the pub and fruit to the greengrocer ...

Fruit? What fruit? In spite of it could be irrelevant, I think much better could be if any exact type of fruit could be produced. In my idea of new industry chain I call drinks industry orchard will supply distillery and juice factory - and they will supply drinks shop - many other supply materials needed (for both supply factories) but it will be clear from diagrams (after translation) I painted.

I think that my idea could be based for your chain - but it is much more spread.

And by the way: I think new shape of farms is much better then original square. And seasoning (changing by season) could be done much better: to some farms who are not producting animal products (milk, wool and so on) could produce only between summer and autumn - not only in winter and spring.

So here is that my idea:

Green marked factories are representing already being ones (names are taken from traslation file)
Yellow marked one is factory from else new industry chain by my office
White marked factories are unique ones of current chains.

...and here are transported goods like they are hidden behind those numbers - names could be changed:

1: gas (carbon dioxide - to filling into juice)
2: juice
3,7: gl****
4,5: fruit
6: grain
8: lemonade
9: ??? (I am not sure with exact name for that product)

Drinks seller could sell also bottled milk (currently dairy is supplied by milk and gl**** what could be good - but I think that chain is not finished) and beer.

Some interesting ideas there, but I don't think I'll include them in this pak.  The overall idea of the British Industry Set is to have simple industry chains which don't result in 20 different industries being generated all over the place and clogging the map up every time there is a new market built in a city.  The other difference is to have lots of small markets which are supplpied by a small number of factories.  This should present a different challenge to the existing pak128 industry chains, with the idea being to encourage trunk freight routes between cities and smaller distribution networks in the cities to the individual markets.

@VaclavMacurek
I have only seen your garfic (no text ;)). I think thats interessting.
We need in pak96.comic a difficult industry Chain. Can you post your grafic in the pak96.comic-forum, that we can talk about?

All what is needed to see texts on diagrams was download it and look on it through external image viewer. And of course, it may be re-posted into forum of pak96.comic.

Some routes are only showing true connections between some factories. Chain could be divorced (divided) into three (or two) parts - distillery chain, juice production chain and shop - but structure would be same.

So it is similar to I could let aluminium chain and planes chain (from topic New chains ideas) be only one chain - but chosen solution (divorcing of both chains) is much better there because you may combine it with some other chains to get many more ones.

@VaclavMacurek
Myslím, že sojo měl namysli, jestli bys nebyl ochotný něco z tvých návrhů nakreslit pro pak96.comic ;) Je totiž potřeba přidat další průmyslové řetězce.

translation:
I think, sojo asked you, if you were able/free to draw something from your ideas for pak96.comic.. New industry chains are needed.

Panda: Sojo asked me for re-posting od those pictures to forum of pak96.comic to somebody could prepare new chains for this graphic version of Simutrans, not for painting of it - but I could try to do it.

Creation of new chains for pak96.comic by myself is possible but all what I can do is painting pictures. Somebody else must finish my work by writing dat files and so on.

At first I could improve surface of aluminium works (look in topic Nové průmysly //http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=218.msg1686#msg1686 (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=218.msg1686#msg1686)//, there is one picture of that). Current surface is ****igned for pak128. For pak96.comic is needed simplier surface.

I will writing dats and so on. ;) But we should discuss into a pak96.comic forum.

Yes. Thanks. And by they way: I could accept simplification of this chain by erasing of two raws (and their factories) from chain:

1. grain for distillery - so it will need only fruit and gl****
2. CO2 (carbon dioxide) for bottling unit - only gl**** and juice will be needed

I think these changes could be sufficient and acceptable - also for pak128.

Finally had some time to continue work on this (yay!) - here's the latest results:

Arable (Vegetable) farm, produces vegetables
Greengrocers, accepts vegetables and fruit
Iron Ore Mine, produces iron ore

I very much like! Excellent! I shall greatly look forward to more of these...

Looks good.

Preliminary view of a blast furnace / steel mill.  Any comments before I do any more on it (each render takes ages because of all the textures etc. and I don't really want to do too many abortive renders!)



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Looking very good, although, if you are going to change anything, the ground would look a bit better if it were darker.

Incidentally, I am planning to work on the code to implement The Hood's idea to have a retirement date for industries - I mention this now in case it makes a difference to what/how many industries need to be produced (the .dat files can easily be changed, but the graphics take a long time, I imagine). If industries have a retirement date as well as an introduction date, then newer industries will have to replace older ones (i.e., larger, more modern looking factories will replace smaller, older looking ones, but the more modern ones will be substantially fewer in number, although have a higher output; industrial decline would then be able to be simulated, too). Any comments on how this suggestion would best be implemented would be welcome.

It would be great if you could code the retirement dates for industries. 

My current plan is to get just one graphic for each industry for now, then go and work on some other things (e.g. buses, trucks, rail goods vehicles - I've been doing industries for over a year on and off now and it's starting to get a bit tedious!), but after I've got enough stuff for the next release I will return and do some time-varied industries if the code is there.

Can't work out exactly what the bit at the far right is. But it looks great :)

It's supposed to be molten slag, I've done a new version of it which hopefully looks slightly more molten and glowing, but I can't post it right now as I'm not on the right computer.

Very nice. Could you sacrifice it and rename it "Aluminium factory"? I prepared one model

(http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=218.0;attach=353;image)

but I hate it because it is very awful. I am not good in painting of buildings.

Also bauxite mine is needed (it can look like iron mine because it is extracted from eart only by surface mining and it is coloured from metallic silver to dark red - based on ratio aluminum oxides/iron oxides).

When I release the pak I will also release sources (open source license) - you would then of course be welcome to use the graphics and dats yourself for whatever purpose.  I don't have any plans to draw a bauxite mine or specifically code an aluminium factory though, I have other PakBritain projects that need attention next!

Latest additions:

Hardware factory (steel + wood => hardware)
Hardware shop (accepts hardware)



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Very nice!

I like the hardware factory. You've used a good combination of simple textures, reasonable color schemes and models with a good level of detail. Great work!!

I agree. Excellent work! :) IMHO.

Thanks for the positive comments :-)

Latest additions: Car factory and fishmongers shop.

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I've realized that final consumers (fishmonger,greengrocery, etc..) have always the same graphics. The only difference is the sheet color. It's a good strategy because that keeps the graphic consistency, you can distinguish them quickly among the rest of city buildings, but be carefull or this might turn into graphic monotony....imho, I would try to introduce small variations in shapes, sizes or textures. Add some windows, draw several buildings with flat rooftops, put some showcases in the facades, etc..

Presumably, the car factory and fishmonger aren't part of the same chain? ;-)

@vilvoh - the ultimate plan is to have several different styles of shop which vary depending on age, with a consistent colour scheme for each chain.  So fishmongers would always be blue, greengrocers green, butchers red etc., but with different architectural styles.  Do you think that would help?  But after I have completed these two chains I will do something else for a while. It is starting to get monotonous just painting factories and shops all the time!

@jamespetts - would you eat fish from a car factory ;-)

Seems you already had thought about it, hadn't you? IMHO, it's a good way to define the different chains. That would help players to find quickly the different elements of the industrial chain.


What about some tourist attractions? ... a monastery, an abbey or a cathedral...several football or rugby stadiums...  :)

Kieron has drawn a number of attractions (including football, rugby and cricket grounds) which are in the existing pak.  I have a handful of other attractions which I don't think ever got released properly but they will be in the next release I make.  I have plans for a number of others but my next plan is to create a set of trees which are graphically consistent with the rest of pakBritain, as well as a number of other smaller things we need for a stand-alone release.  But as ever, suggestions welcome!

No more than I'd buy a car made at a fish factory...

Incidentally, excellent idea about the different shops!

Holy $(#^, that is nice! cant wait for a download! (I am the worlds WORST at finding stuff on the web)

Litlepetslinki - you can't be too bad if you've found Simutrans... ;-)

Next up, a fishing ground at sea.  I will do a car showroom, and then release, so if you're lucky it will be this week  ;)

Edit: Preliminary car dealership added

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You are making excellent progress! I do love the fishery, indicated by seagulls ;-)

I should buy gl****es... and not the drinking kind. I thought these were jumping fish :(

Probably subconsciously indicated by the ones in Pak128?

VS, you have been working a lot on standard 128 for a while - in any case I only realised the other day that the standard Pak128 ones were jumping fish and not seagulls!

That said, the "seagulls" are not really more than a couple of pixels, so hardly very artistic eh?

I'm hoping to get a release together this evening, but I will need to do some testing on the dat files for the industries first.  Watch this space!

OK, can't release the sources tonight  - for some reason when testing the last addition to the pak the game freezes when distributing industries in the game creation phase.  Has anyone come across this behaviour before?

Freezes during map creation can mean many many things. Try setting various parameters in simuconf to more benevolent values - eg. minimal industry distance can lead to lockups, or nearly so; intercity roads can be also demanding if you set too high...

It seems to be due to the car factory or car dealership - it only seems to freeze if these are in the pak and only then sometimes (succesful maps don't have the car factory or dealership, hence why I think it's them...).

Can you spot a problem with the dats?

Try stripping trailing whitespace. Dealership has empty retire year.

The bad news: I don't think that was the problem - I've done a few tests and it still freezes with or without the car dealership.

The good news: I think it may be related to the ratio of cities : industries on the map.  I have got the whole thing to work with a high city : industry ratio (i.e. number of cities at least half the number of industries).  Not sure why this should cause a problem in industry generation (it is that - I checked using debug tool), but maybe because this set has a lot of "City" based industries.

Because of that, I've decided to release the set on Open Source licence:
http://simutrans.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/simutrans/pakBritain.128/

-If you want the pak ready-made, look in the pak/ subdirectory - you will need to replace current industry set with BritIndustry.pak and current good.all.pak with BritGoods.pak (although BritGoods.pak should allow you to use existing goods and industries still).
-If you want to play with the sources, they are in the industry/ and goods/ subdirectories (fairly obviously).

Happy playing!

Obviously it's still a beta (the productivities etc are completely unbalanced), but I think it's best for other people to try it and see what they think.  Please get back with comments.  Also please let me know if you get the same problem I did about getting stuck on map generation.

Ahh, thank you for releasing those :-) It is good that people will now have access to your wonderful work on industries. I shall very much look forward to the release of the rest of the PakBritain sources.