A few more questions for my scenario design ideas

[Not In Service]

Thanks for the help with my earlier newbie questions, had a few more from thinking about my various ideas for scenarios I may create which I think fill in the blanks so I'm good to go. If any already answered you can just link to the thread, thanks.

1. Can you mix 32bpp and 8bpp in the same save/ scenario design as new grfs are of course in one of the two resolution options, or is it a case of choose one route to take either or, related to this some describe themselves as having/supporting hi res or/and 4x zoom which may also be relevant to the answer, plus if you can would the clash in quality be too jarring

2. I notice in some threads people saying they don't play 32bpp grfs so does that make them something to avoid or at least not use for scenarios very often (I'm thinking maybe perhaps it's best to choose to design a scenario in 8 or 32 only even if you can mix them up, partly of course depending on the answers to and people's thoughts on question 1)

3. Any thoughts/tips on picking the player start year for scenarios and maybe offering players a few variants so people can start early with earlier vehicles or later as they prefer (this would basically be the same scenario setup and new grfs as you'd bake in the early vehicles etc (you'd have to) but with time advanced for the start year options, quite like the idea of choices on when to start)

4. Having browsed the new grfs I've a short-to-long-list of ones of interest I may use once researched but it's given rise to its own question (I know the manual has the maximums of different things), how to manage not having selected too many 'things' for the game (or players!) to handle from the new grfs you go for as you don't want to have too many objects, vehicles etc especially if you go over game limits or things drop off menu lists i.e. don't appear with the options for that thing as you have too many. Is there a way to plan this before you pick your final list of new grfs for building a scenario, i.e. to know how many of a specific thing (object, vehicle etc) it will add and any clashes (same names/labels/ using a change to the same base element etc) and how you'd check? Also confirming if vehicles work with alternative cargoes (FIRS 4) and if lots of extra stuff especially higher res gets iffy on the largest maps system resource/ game stability wise.

5. There are two vehicle types I'm looking for (may have found some canal boats in the maybes list, not sure if what I'm looking for yet), freight canal boats (narrowboats) like you get in the UK historically and (for the 'vehicles' cargo in FIRS4 Steeltown) vehicle transporters, I'm thinking the ones you get as two tier road trucks that transport cars, vans that transport a single car and the zigzag platformed rail carriages you often see on long trains for this purpose. Does anyone know of some good new grfs for these (if there aren't any/many it would be a great idea for grfs somebody with the skills could make, the vehicle transporters are quite a staple of rail and road freight and there are also passenger canal services and the narrowboats I'm talking about are quite charming vehicles. Early horse drawn ones would be good but I imagine quite a challenge to design maybe impossible as they'd cross multiple tiles although somebody might be clever enough, for the vehicle transport an eye candy version could be good too just to have them on the roads/rail in any game where it's that vehicle type but really carrying a different goods type thus optionally just used to have them on your routes as scenery but still useful as you often see them on roads/rail lines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrowboat

[kamnet]

1. "Can you mix 32bpp and 8bpp in the same save/ scenario design as new grfs are of course in one of the two resolution options"...

You can. 32bpp or 8bpp is only in respect to the number of colors available in the palettes (2.4 million vs 256).

..." related to this some describe themselves as having/supporting hi res or/and 4x zoom which may also be relevant to the answer, plus if you can would the clash in quality be too jarring."

bpp, full zoom, and 3D/"HD" modeling are often confused for one-another. You can do full zoom with 8bpp colors, you can do 3D modeling for any type of rendering. The usual issue is that 32bpp full-zoom 3D models often look starkly different to hand-drawn 8bpp graphics. Whether or not you can live with it is up to the individual.

2. "I notice in some threads people saying they don't play 32bpp grfs so does that make them something to avoid or at least not use for scenarios"...

Scenarios need to have all the NewGRFs you intend to use (unless you're expecting the player to make modifications, not a good idea). If you want to use 32bpp or full-zoom sprites in your scenario, that's all up to you. If people don't like it, they just won't play it.

Now, just to be clear, when people say they don't play with 32bpp sprites, what they MEAN is that they don't like uising the abase or zbase full-zoom base graphics sets. There's plenty of 32bpp and full-zoom assets like Temporal8's Real32, GETS and CZTR Sets that people do enjoy. Those look very different from abase and zbase.

3. "Any thoughts/tips on picking the player start year for scenarios and maybe offering players a few variants so people can start early with earlier vehicles or later as they prefer"...

1860 is a good year where most "early" NewGRF sets start to provide decent vehicles and assets. A few will go back to 1800 or 1700 but these can be a real slog to use.

4. ..." how to manage not having selected too many 'things' for the game (or players!) to handle from the new grfs"...

If you select too many, the game warns you that you have hit the limit. Other than that, it's all just a balance of what type of game you want to share. I can often max out NewGRF limits in my games because I enjoy that variety, but when creating scenarios I usually curate more carefully and only use assets available from in-game download.

5. "There are two vehicle types I'm looking for freight canal boats (narrowboats)"...

Sal's Canalboats, but they're slow and low capacity.

.... "and vehicle transporters, I'm thinking the ones you get as two tier road trucks that transport cars, vans that transport a single car"...

Try Road Hog or Mop's Expanded Road Vehicle Set.

[Not In Service]

Again thanks, a couple more things remaining to clarify now I'm not 100% sure on after checking various threads and replies including to my questions

Re zbase being a base set (and I gather abase but I understand that's still abandoned) does that mean if you want to go for a mostly 32bpp design scenario you can select zbase without it negatively impacting any grfs you select and vice versa because it's only a base client-side set outside of any in-game grf selections, and is this the best way to go if designing a 32bpp scenario to cover any gaps not in grfs or will the various grfs mean you don't need zbase at all? For clarification on what I mean I'm asking out of wondering does zbase give you all/most things as 32bpp thus using it for such a game would mean the game having a 32bpp option to fall back on were it not in the grfs chosen rather than using the 8bpp default base graphics where I'm guessing some of these gaps might be filled by 8bpp defaults. Am I correct that based on the reply to an earlier question the base set graphics are slightly different to most other grfs in that you could design a scenario with one but somebody play it with a different base and that not be a problem as the prior reply suggested these are something of a free choice element thus will just depend on player choice, so basically a kind of configuration thing rather than the other more specific grf choices for vehicles etc.

The other question is something I've seen conflicting information on- house (building) choices in terms of sets chosen for the buildings towns place when growing, some sources seem to say you should only use one set, others say you can use multiples, the latter being what I was hoping as one set of interest has no early houses so I'd need at least two to cover the whole period- there are threads saying yes you can use different sets and have the buildings from all of them (so does this mean some won't work together and maybe you need to pick sets that allow other sets to be used as well specifically?)

[jfs]

I would suggest not putting any mind to how your scenario will look with any other basesets.