Underground Trains

Topic: Underground Trains (Read 93833 times) previous topic - next topic

Underground Trains

July 14, 2009, 04:01:13 pm

Hiya,

First post here

Been playing Simutrans for a while now with pak128.Britain and was wondering if theres any underground trains or how would i go about drawing the graphics for them.

Cheers,
Chris

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #1 – July 14, 2009, 04:25:09 pm

you should of asked me at school

if you look at http://addons.simutrans.com/?pak=128&cat=vehicles&todo=search there will be some underground trains, and many other add ons.

Note by The Hood: the British Rail and London Transport sets by Kieron are previous versions of the rail vehicles in the latest pak128.Britain - so no need to use these with pak128.Britain...

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #2 – July 14, 2009, 04:37:56 pm

Welcome to the forum and thanks for the interest in pak128.Britain!

You may have noticed there are a limited number of underground trains in the set at present:
- Metropolitan E cl**** steam loco
- Metropolitan Vickers electric loco
- Metropolitan 1907 EMU stock
- Metropolitan bogie rolling stock
- Metropolitan dreadnought rolling stock
- DLR vehicles

These were initially drawn for pak128 by Kieron Green to complement Timothy's underground addon for pak128 (which contains some of the more recent tube stock). Kieron's stuff has always been in pak128.Britain because he started the project and so therefore the stuff is graphically consistent with the rest of the pak128.Britain project - but Timothy's pak128 add-on is older and is in the graphics style of standard pak128 and doesn't quite look right in pak128.Britain (which is why it isn't in the releases).

There are two possible solutions to this:
1) Timothy has given permission for me (and presumably anyone who wants?) to modify his graphics to fit the pak128.Britain style - this may or may not work well as most pak128.Britain graphics are done in blender 3d modelling and rendered with the same settings for consistency, whereas Timothy's are pixel-painted. They might need a lot of work to fit the pak128.Britain style but if you (or anyone else, ultimately I was going to get round to it at some point in the distant future...) wanted to have a go then ask Timothy for the sources and try and follow the guidelines in the thread on pak128.Britain graphics

2) Create new graphics from scratch - especially if this could be done in Blender then it would be easy to get consistency with existing vehicles. If you want to go down this route, I can provide existing blender files as starting points (with all the lighting and angles set up). Again, most welcome to do this - just ask if you aren't sure on anything.

You may have noticed in this reply (and other threads) that graphical consistency is important to the project - that's the number one thing for getting new graphics into the set. As I say, I recommend the blender method - it is the best way to ensure consistency, and I manage to draw the graphics you see in the pak despite being rubbish at art using blender. Just ask if you want more pointers...

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #3 – July 14, 2009, 04:39:40 pm

Note: This post crossed with The Hood's above, so there may be some duplication...

There are indeed some older addons for Pak128.Britain with underground trains, although they are not, like the rest of Pak128.Britain, open-source, nor are they balanced to fit the rest of the Pak128.Britain vehicles. Also, because they are not open source, it is not possible to adapt them to work optimally with Simutrans-Experimental.

There is a plan eventually to make Underground trains for Pak128.Britain. I think that there is some suggestion that the original author of the addons to which Stubbsy referred would provide the sources for his graphics and allow The Hood to update them as necessary, although I am not sure whether that is confirmed. Indeed, there are a few very old Underground trains already in the pakset, as well as a complete set of DLR trains.

If you want to have a go at drawing some new ones (Underground trains, or anything else that you think would add to the pakset, would be extremely welcome - we could do in particular with some early EMUs of all types), have a look at this thread. The easiest way to start is to ask The Hood to send you the .blend files (that is, files for the 3-d application called Blender: it is free to download) of vehicles similar to those that you want to produce, make small modifications to them, and then re-render them. Once you have some experience of doing that, you can make more and more significant modifications and eventually produce your own .blends from scratch (if you have experience of using Blender already, please forgive me if I appear condescending).

Welcome to the forums, incidentally, and thank you very much for your interest in Pak128.Britain :-)

Edit: The Hood, I wouldn't mind having a go at re-doing Timothy's stock - changing the contrast in The Gimp, for example, might well be a viable way of doing it. I'm not sure whether it would work, but it's worth a try. Can you PM me with the best way of contacting him to request the sources? Presumably, he's happy for them to be released under an open source licence?

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #4 – July 14, 2009, 04:50:27 pm

Yeah i wouldnt mind having ago at updating them as i use blender anyway for my openbve projects

so should be ok its just getting them into the game.Also im pretty good at pixel painting as i do paperbuses; this being an example http://mm2rmbuses.googlepages.com/Enviro200.png (which has a few errors

) but as i say its getting them into the game.

Cheers,
Chris

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #5 – July 14, 2009, 05:13:25 pm

well chris if you want to paint them and send them to me, i can make the .dat to how you want it and explain it to you etc and i will do that and pak it for you until you get the hang of it

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #6 – July 14, 2009, 07:20:55 pm

Quote from: jamespetts – on July 14, 2009, 04:39:40 pm

Edit: The Hood, I wouldn't mind having a go at re-doing Timothy's stock - changing the contrast in The Gimp, for example, might well be a viable way of doing it. I'm not sure whether it would work, but it's worth a try. Can you PM me with the best way of contacting him to request the sources? Presumably, he's happy for them to be released under an open source licence?

I'd be happy to send you the source files, just email me at tb[at]entropy[dot]me[dot]uk and I'll send them to you. They are (as with all of my creations) subject to a BSD style licence which I'll include a copy of. I have no problems with anyone modifying/using them for use with the Simutrans project. One day I'll get around to posting all the source images online somewhere.

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #7 – July 14, 2009, 07:54:36 pm

Curiously, at least with 1.0.2, the "Metropolitan 1907 Motorised Tube Stock (middle)" is precociously available in 1898, but can never be built; in the depot window, there is always a red line under it, even after building the presumably-matching front unit.

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #8 – July 14, 2009, 09:24:07 pm

Wlindley,

thank you for the bug report. I have found the problem, and sent a fixed version to The Hood. Much appreciated :-)

Chris,

thank you very much for your interest in creating vehicles for Pak128.Britain :-) Would you like me to send you some of the .blend files that I have? (The Hood has the whole set, whereas I have a few). Getting them into the game isn't too hard - I can ****ist if you would like; either send me a PM or post a message in the public forum (the advantage of the latter being that anyone else with the same issue will be able to see the solution). The thread to which I pointed you is a good starting point. (Incidentally, that's a good quality picture of the 'bus - if you drew that, I am impressed :-) ).

It is better to use .blends and then render them than pixel paint for Pak128.Britain for two reasons: (1) it looks more consistent with what we already have; and (2) it enables you or others to re-use the blends in making similar but slightly different vehicles that look highly consistent with the originals. That is the technique that I used to make the cl**** 81 electric and 8p steam locomotives in the release set. Adapting Timothy's Underground set will, of course, require raster graphics skills. There is no harm in us both trying.

Timothy,

thank you very much for the offer :-) I will e-mail you shortly as you suggested. Is the BSD licence compatible with the Artistic Licence under which the rest of the set is released, do you know? If not, would you consider dual-licensing them? Thank you very much for volunteering your work for adaptation and inclusion :-)

Re: Underground Trains

Reply #9 – July 15, 2009, 07:42:19 am

@Chris,

Looks like if you're doing blends for openbve then you should have no problems with the simutrans graphics level of detail. I recommend you download the example blends from the thread jamespetts linked too (e.g. the cl**** 67) and use the lighting and render settings in there with your models. You may need to tweak the scales a little - 1 simutrans tile = 30m in pak128.Britian, but there is some distortion on lengths on some models to make them fit. In the cl**** 67 blend file (and others I use) 1 blender grid square = 1/16 of a simutrans tile (i.e. = 1 internal length unit as specified in the length= parameter in the dat files) so vehicles should be a whole number of grid squares long, and 2 wide.

If you want the existing blends for anything, just PM me - I have most of them. For converting the render outputs into something the game understands, you can have plenty of help on this forum, but in particular I recommend looking at the existing stuff on sourceforge SVN and using the png and dat files there as templates.