OpenGFX - 8bpp Graphics Base Set for OpenTTD

Table of contents

• 1.0 About
• 2.0 Downloading
• 3.0 Installing
  • 3.1 Installation or update via Online Content service
  • 3.2 Manual Installation
• 4.0 Reporting bugs and Contributing
  • 4.1 Reporting bugs
  • 4.2 Obtaining the source
  • 4.3 Building OpenGFX
  • 4.4 Notes for package maintainers
  • 4.5 Note on the xcf and psd files
  • 4.6 Making an OpenGFX release
• 5.0 License
• 6.0 Credits

1.0 About

OpenGFX is an open source graphics base set designed to be used by OpenTTD.

OpenGFX provides a set of free and open source base graphics, and aims to ensure the best possible out-of-the-box experience with OpenTTD.

The project's home is https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX.

OpenGFX provides you with...

• all graphics you need to enjoy OpenTTD
• uniquely drawn rail vehicles for every climate
• completely snow-aware rivers
• different river and sea water
• snow-aware buoys

This version of OpenGFX requires OpenTTD 1.2.0 or newer. For older versions of OpenTTD or TTDPatch please use OpenGFX 0.4.1.

2.0 Downloading

OpenGFX is available from a few locations. This readme will only cover the official download locations.

We cannot support third party download locations and we cannot refund your money if you have paid money for OpenGFX.

• If you're new to OpenTTD, the easiest way is to use the installer (Windows) or your package manager (Linux) and install OpenTTD, OpenGFX and OpenSFX.
• If you're new to OpenTTD, cannot use an installer and don't have access to the original TTD files, you'll have to follow the manual installation procedure. This is really not as difficult as it may sound, so don't worry too much about it.
• If you already have OpenTTD up and running using the original TTD base graphics, installing OpenGFX using the Online Content Service is the easy way to obtain OpenGFX.

3.0 Installing

3.1 Installation or update via Online Content service

This method uses the Online content service (BaNaNaS) to download OpenGFX. In order to use this OpenGFX version, you need a working OpenTTD and again at least OpenTTD version 1.2.0 or a recent nightly.

1. Start OpenTTD and on the main menu click the Check Online Content button. A new window will pop up. If OpenTTD doesn't start, follow the manual installation procedure.
2. Find the OpenGFX entry from the list at the left. You can use the search box in the upper right corner of the window.
3. Click the little square in front of the OpenGFX entry in order to mark it for download.
4. Click the Download button in the bottom right corner. After download, close the open windows.
5. In the main menu of the game, click the Game Options button. The Game Options dialog will appear.
6. Select OpenGFX from the drop-down list below Base graphics set if that's not selected already (bottom left of window). Close the window using the × in the upper left corner.

3.2 Manual Installation

1. First, make sure that you downloaded and installed at least OpenTTD version 1.2.0 or later.
2. Next, download the latest OpenGFX package. There are a few sources:
   • official
   • archive
3. Unpack the zip file into the OpenTTD's baseset directory (see section 4.2 of the OpenTTD readme for a detailed treatise on all data dirs OpenTTD recognizes). There's no need to unpack the tar, so just leave it as it is. The baseset directories are:
   • Windows:
     • C:\My Documents\OpenTTD\baseset (95, 98, ME)
     • C:\Documents and Settings<username>\My Documents\OpenTTD\baseset (2000, XP)
     • C:\Users<username>\Documents\OpenTTD\baseset (Vista, 7, 8, 10)
   • Mac OSX: ~/Documents/OpenTTD/baseset
   • Linux: ~/.openttd/baseset The /baseset/ directory inside of the OpenTTD installation can also be used.
4. Run OpenTTD. Chances are that you'll miss a sound set. Get one (we recommend our sister project OpenSFX) and install it into the same directory as OpenGFX.
5. In the main menu of the game, click the Game Options button. The Game Options dialog will appear.
6. Select OpenGFX from the drop-down list below Base graphics set if that's not selected already (bottom left of window). Close the window using the × in the upper left corner.
   • If you did not install the original TTD base graphics during the installation of OpenTTD, you can skip this step.
   • If you installed the original TTD base graphics as well, this is where you can switch base graphic sets.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

Anyway, if you're having trouble getting OpenGFX to work, please file a detailed report on what you did, what error messages you got and where you got stuck in the OpenGFX release topic on the TT-Forums or (preferably) at our issue tracker.

4.0 Reporting bugs and contributing

4.1 Reporting bugs

If you spot any graphical bugs or glitches in the available graphics, please let us know preferrably via our issue tracker or via the OpenGFX release topic on the TT-Forums. Please make sure that you're using the latest available version before reporting a bug. You can check the issue tracker to see if the bug you've found is already reported (or fixed!).

If you have made yourself improvements to either graphics or the source code itself, please also share that with us either via the pull request page or the development discussion thread.

4.2 Obtaining the source

The OpenGFX source is available in a git repository or as gzip'ed tarball. You can do an anonymous checkout from https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX, e.g. using git clone https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX or obtain the tarball from the release page.

4.3 Building OpenGFX

Prerequisites to building OpenGFX:

• gcc (the pre-processor is needed)
• NML 0.5+
• grfid from the grfcodec package
• some gnu utils: make, cat, sed, awk and you might additionally want a text editor of your choice and a graphics programme suitable to handle palettes.

Optionally, required to re-generated all graphics files from their layered source files after executing maintainer-clean:

• GIMP 2.4 or later

Windows

We advise you get a MinGW development environment, NML and git from the sources mentioned above. For more detailed instructions see our guide on the wiki and the very extensive and detailed installation instructions on the MinGW wiki.

Linux

Your system should already have most tools, you'll probably only need NML and git available from the source mentioned above. For installation instructions concerning git refer to the manual of your distribution.

Mac

Install the developers tools and get NML from the source mentioned above. git is easiest installed via MacPorts: sudo port install git

On OSX GIMP is not found in the path, if you installed the app package as supplied from the GIMP's project page. You can add that to your search path if you link the binary which requires the X-environment to be running: sudo ln /Applications/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gimp /usr/local/bin/gimp

The use of git is strongly encouraged as only that allows to keep track of changes.

Once all tools are installed, get a checkout of the repository and you can build OpenGFX using make. The following targets are available:

• all: builds all grfs and the obg file
• install: build and then copy OpenGFX in your OpenTTD data directory. Use Makefile.local to specify a different path.
• clean: cleans all generated files
• mrproper: also cleans generated directories
• maintainer-clean: clean also the graphics files can be re-generated via GIMP
• bundle_src: create a source tarball
• bundle_zip: create a zip archive of OpenGFX
• bundle_bz2: create a bzip2 archive of OpenGFX
• bundle_tar: create a tar archive of OpenGFX
• check: checks the md5 sums of the built grf and obg files against those of the official release versions

Given the usual case that you modify something within OpenGFX and want to test that, a simple make install should suffice and you can immediately test the changes ingame, if you selected the nightly version of OpenGFX. Given default paths, a make install will overwrite a previous nightly version of OpenGFX. Mind to re-start OpenTTD as it needs to re-read the grf files.

4.4 Notes for package maintainers

• Checking for build success: The source releases contain an additional file opengfx-<version>.md5 which indicates the md5 sums of the generated files as released in the binary release. You can check your build by running make check. Mind that you'll overwrite the file with the original md5 sums, if you call make bundle_src or make md5.
• The source release also contains a Makefile.local and a slightly appended Makefile.def, both supplying additional variable definitions which otherwise would be determined by accessing repository properties.
• The variable which supplies the install path changed for the sake of consistency and better readability to INSTALL_DIR. The old INSTALLDIR still works but is deprecated.

4.5 Note on the .xcf and .psd files

The repository contains a few .xcf2png files which indicate which png files can be generated from the source .xcf or .psd files. This will only be used, if GIMP is found. Calling maintainer-clean will delete the png files which can be re-generated from a .xcf or .psd file.

4.6 Making an OpenGFX release

1. Check that all relevant PRs are approved and merged.
2. Update the changelog. This is done manually, and commits are grouped by type. Example: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX/blob/master/changelog.txt
3. Decide what the version number will be.
4. Publish a new release using the release tool in the Github project: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX/releases/new
5. GitHub Actions will build the release and publish to OpenTTD CDN.
6. Ask TrueBrain to update the OpenGFX for NSIS Windows installer.
7. Upload the release manually to BaNaNaS. The openttdcoop BaNaNaS account is usually used for this.

5.0 License

OpenGFX Graphics Base Set for OpenTTD Copyright (C) 2007-2016 by the OpenGFX team (see credits section below)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the

Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

6.0 Credits

OpenGFX is created by the following people (in reverse alphabetical order):

• The monospaced characters are generated from the font Liberation Mono: https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/ created by Pravin Satpute and Caius Chance, released under GPL v2.

Contact: [email protected] or on irc.oftc.net/#openttd

A detailed list of who worked on what is available in the file docs/authoroverview.csv in the source repository.