New house & station themes?

[Gumboots]

Blackhawk made a pack of those already. It's pretty good. TBH the hospital isn't so good, but the other buildings are a big improvement. Really it would be a good idea to clean up the hospital and archive the pack.

viewtopic.php?p=36913#p36913

[sbaros]

Here, I have superimposed the KPEV 2'2' T 31 tender over the P8 body to create the impression of a water tank

I just found out the same superimposing technique can work miracles for buildings as well.
Let's see a very rushed and improvised example: In the linked picture, I have superimposed over a distillery a Persian house dressed in the distillery texture. I used the default PersianHouse102_body.3dp. The main thing is to trick the program to load it along with the rest of the 3dp files. Looking at the distillery description files, we see its well-known animations stored as "Distillery_Anim1.3dp" up to "Distillery_Anim5.3dp".
So, let's try copying PersianHouse102_body.3dp into UserExtraContent of a spare Tycoon installation and rename it to the next available filename, i.e. "Distillery_Anim6.3dp". Of course a Persian House hardly constitutes an animation, but the program obviously doesn't mind, as the file format is the same. YESSS, It worked !
Naturally, any bitmap texture will rarely happen to fit reasonably into the visible parts of an inserted 3D topology, as it happened here. (and yet still clumsy in places) What's the use of a domed Distillery? Well, probably the same as the default one's. Variety and fun ! Isn't this what it is all about? The enriched distillery, when given its own BTY file, will seed randomly with the default one across the map.
Another convenient and more useful case with helpful texture matching was when I similarly inserted the "Rubber Farm" 3D model -anyway useless for European scenarios- into the Oil Well topology renamed to "Oilwell_Anim2.3dp". The Tycoon's default Oil Well is unacceptably hard to notice, especially in wooded areas. With this trick I added some seemingly abandoned wooden shanties around it and made it much easier to locate from a distance.

This opens a way, which will be fully exploited once we learn how to allocate specific portions of a bitmap texture to each of the 3dp's involved. Thus our creativity will truly unfold.
I'll be looking forward to other members' experience on the subject.

[sbaros]

Sub-bases for supporting buildings in case they become "levitated" on mountainous terrain

PersianHouseFoundations.zip

(56.03 KiB) Downloaded 89 times

I guess this has been done before, but I haven't been able to locate any relevant downloadable stuff. Here is a first contribution from my part. I'd like to be notified about fellow users' similar efforts. Admittedly, it needs to be extended and improved, but it's better than nothing.
I hope we eventually get rid of all "levitating" buildings. I'm sure our founder would approve this.

KyotoHouseFoundation.zip

(18.34 KiB) Downloaded 96 times

TudorHouseFoundations.zip

(25.2 KiB) Downloaded 93 times

Addition 21-08

[Gumboots]

That trick with the ****_Anim*.3dp is one I hadn't noticed before. It makes perfect sense, since all those files do is call a given mesh that relies on the parent DDS image for skinning. It's the other ****_anim.3dp file (ie: lower case a, no numbers) that defines how the mesh will move if animated. If that is missing, the mesh will be static.

I haven't looked into how the texture coordinates are defined for Anim files, but I would expect exactly the same format as for any other asset's .3dp. It would just be a matter of finding out where the texture starts in the file (should not be that hard).

However, if you want a static mesh and it has to share the parent DDS anyway, personally I'd be inclined to just model the whole thing as part of the body file in Blender. But I can see this alternative being handy too, particualrly for quick testing. The only catch is you may run into trouble with the new additions being outside the default building footprint at times, so there may occasionally be overlaps if two buidlings seed close together.

Levitating builidings are a bit of a nuisance, but don't happen all that often, and the houses are small enough to be less noticeable than larger buidlings like stations.

[sbaros]

On the contrary, small houses are in risk of becoming 100% levitated because they may have the whole ground "pulled under" their entire footprint. Larger buildings stand far more chances of remaining at least partially supported. See screenshot inside the Readme file in "PersianHouseFoundations.zip" and here
Nonetheless, stations and factories should not be left without them. The most successful ones were achieved for the clap-board style stations and the brewery, so here they are. They will rarely be visible (these screenshots took some extreme tricks), but its good to have them just in case. I look forward to more contributors in this field.
NOTE: If you clone the brewery files for the brewery-based hospital, you will get a sub-base for it too!

[sbaros]

My first T-shaped foundations, understandably for a T-shaped building, and the logical follow-up, a Γ-shaped one for a Γ-shaped building.

[Gumboots]

Cool. I'll grab all of these later and give them a run. I haven't actually opened the game for a while (been busy with other things).

[sbaros]

The base for the distillery took me only 2 steps to finalize and will cover the upgraded version too.

Distillery_Anim6.zip

(420 Bytes) Downloaded 84 times

The provided "Cinema" files can be duplicated with "churchofcoru" replacing "Cinema" in the filenames by members utilizing churchofcoru.BTY because it's virtually the same 3D model. So, they'll get sub-bases for both edifices.