Improved Town Layouts

Photo credit: Kale on Discord

A house replacement set using default graphics with new rules and features.

Features

Better downtowns and suburbs

• High-density residential and commercial buildings only grow within the coverage area of a passenger station
• Downtown buildings cluster together
  • Pre-skyscraper brick buildings cluster separately from skyscrapers, so some cities have a separate "Old" and "New Town"
  • Note: A gap in passenger station coverage will block the cluster from expanding in that direction, since buildings may only grow within 2 tiles of another in its cluster
• Downtowns stay proportional to the town
  • Each office building requires houses for its workers, so the towers won't overrun the suburbs

Historic Preservation

• All buildings have longer lifespans to reduce the churn of constant rebuilding
• Historic downtown buildings are kept in some towns, but demolished in others
• Landmark buildings last forever

Landmark buildings

• Landmarks lend character to your city and often generate increased passenger traffic
• Some landmarks only grow in Cities (Hotel, Spa)
• Some landmarks only grow when the town has enough population (Stadium, University, Courthouse)
• All landmarks are kept from appearing too often, either some distance apart or only one per town

Start as early as 1700

• Introduction dates range from 1700 to 2000, allowing a slow progression over time
• Old houses accept Wood (until 1850) and Coal (until 1945) for fuel
• Early buildings have reduced population to allow older, slower vehicles to keep up with demand
  • 1700-1850: 1/4 population
  • 1850-1950: 1/2 population

Supports Waste & Recycling

Requires Improved Town Industries

• When used with Improved Town Industries, houses generate Waste

Compatibilities

• Compatible with all industry sets and GameScripts (please report any problems)
• Uses only base game sprites, thus compatible with any base graphics set including Original TTD, OpenGFX, aBase, zBase, and NightGFX
• Requires OpenTTD version 1.10.0, JGR version 0.34, or better.

Parameters

Use additional sprites. Default off.

• Use Bank sprites
  • Adds the Bank sprites as a University (temperate bank sprite) and a Courthouse (sub-arctic bank sprite)
  • Not recommended if playing with an industry set which includes banks
• Use FIRS Hotel sprites
  • Adds the sub-arctic Hotel sprite as a Spa
  • Not recommended if playing with FIRS, which also uses this sprite
• Use sub-tropical sprites
  • Adds the sub-tropical church sprite as an additional Church type
  • Adds one of the flats sprites as a random sprite of the Warehouse

Code Reference

All code is commented and is organized into several .nml files which are combined by a simple Python script into a merged .nml file for compiling into the .grf. All of these files are in /src/.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help.

Translations

Currently available in:

• English
• French (arikover)
• German (WoelfiVW)

Please feel free to translate into your language and submit a Pull Request.

Limitations / Not in Scope

• This is a house replacement set. It does not improve the behavior of other NewGRF houses, how towns build roads, or town growth
• This set is intended for the Temperate climate. It does not include snow-aware sprites, because they do not exist for most buildings.