Sodor Railways Expansion - The Thomas The Tank Engine set for OpenTTD

The Sodor Railways Expansion (OpenTTE) is a train graphis set (newGRF) for OpenTTD, including vehicles from the Thomas The Tank Engine universe

This set is intended to be used as an add-on expansion for BRTrains in order to allow for more complete gameplay, although it can also be played as a standalone set with some limitations. Use alongside other sets outside of the BRTrains group of newGRFs is not supported and you may fine graphical glitches or discrepancies in scale

This newGRF is available under the GPLv2 license, and all contributions are assumed to be offered under the same license.

Installation

Grab the latest release from the in-game content downloader.

Alternatively get it from the page and copy it into your OpenTTD/newGRF folder.

Compiling from source

Prerequisites

Python 3.14+ is required to build the project, earlier versions of Python 3 may work but have not been tested

You will also require the following packages, available from PIP

• PyYaml
• Pillow (PIL)
• NML

Currently (due to the use of the "badge" feature which is part of NML trunk but not yet released), a local copy of NML is required. Download this from the OpenTTD Github and place it in the ../nml folder, one directory level above the folder this application is in. Eg if this project is development/OpenTTE2, place NML at development/nml. This step will not be necessary once NML has a released version higher than 0.8.1

To build, run the build script with:

python build.py

This will compose images (eg purchase sprites) and generate NML, then collate and compile the NML. Finally it will attempt to copy the newGRF to your OpenTTD/newgrf folder if located in the expected location on Windows (with or without OneDrive) or MacOS. Untested on Linux. If the copy fails, simply copy the build/opentte.grf file to that folder manually

Contributing

Pull requests are always welcome, please keep them small and split large changesets into smaller PRs. Discussion on Discord is always useful before changing anything important

This newGRF is "2x as 1x" zoon and "32bpp as 8bpp" colour. By this, we mean that the sprites take technical advantage of OpenTTD's extra zooom and 32bpp colour functionality, while generally adhering to the spirit of 1x zoom and 8bpp. Sprites therefore

1. Are initially drawn as 1x zoom sprites, then scaled up to 2x zoom to judiciously add detail
2. Are rendered in 32bpp colour, but use the original 8bpp palette in addition to some additional colour gradients in the same style

This allows for eg the drawing of faces on TTE characters in a way that is not possible at 1x zoom, and the use of additional colour schemes for real world liveries in gradients that do not exist in the OpenTTD colour palette

These attitudes are intended to be used sparingly, to enhance the set by stepping outside the hard limitations of 1x zoom and 8bpp, but while staying mostly true to the spririt of OpenTTD's original art style. They should not be used to draw units at 2x zoom in general, or to use widely more colourspace. Rather they should be used where 1x zoom prevents a sensible level of detail, or to add colour gradients that would otherwise be impossible (aubergine, orange, teal, cyan, brown, lime green, indigo) with the existing 256 colour palette

Discussion

For suggestions, requests, bug reports, or general discussion, please use either

• Our TT-Forums thread https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=54189&start=40
• Or the BRTrains Discord https://discord.gg/5yPtsUzzxG

Credits

• Audigex: Development and artwork
• Fabian/TheThomasFan: Artwork

Honourable memtions to DanMacK, SalvaCottontail, Bazek for their work on the predecessor version 1 project, which shares no code or art with this project but was nevertheless an important part of its developmental history

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv2 license See LICENSE for license details