Playing with 32bpp graphics

From OpenTTD

In order to play with 32bpp graphics, you must have OpenTTD 0.6 or newer, or nightly build r11119 or newer installed. To play, complete the following two steps.

1. Put the 32bpp graphics tar file(s) in your OpenTTD data directory. This is the same directory where you put your NewGRFs.
2. In your openttd.cfg (freely editable with text editor of your choice), add blitter = 32bpp-simple under the [misc] section. Save the file. This is a foolproof way to get 32bit graphics working - if you want more choice, familiarize yourself with the section below.

Note that the tar files listed on this wiki are only accepted by the game if you're using the Windows version of the original game graphics. Players using the old DOS version (this is the case if the grf files are named "trg1.grf, trgc.grf, trgh.grf, trgi.grf and trgt.grf") have to extract the tar files to the data directory first. Then all folders in the data/sprites directory should be renamed after the corresponding grf files (e.g. trg1r to trg1, trghr to trgh and so on).

[edit] Advanced blitter options

Even though you have 32bpp sprites set up in your data directory, OpenTTD does not display them by default. The game has to be told to use a 32bpp compatible blitter, also known as a sprite drawing engine. For this we usually use the blitter = line in openttd.cfg.

There are several blitters to choose from. They differ slightly in how they draw the sprites. Below is a list of available blitters and their properties.

32bpp-simple

Slower, but reliable. The simple blitter does no optimization at all on the sprite data, it just converts it from palettized 8bpp to 32bpp RGB.

32bpp-optimized

Faster. The optimized blitter will run-length encode the sprites' transparent regions to make drawing faster since almost every sprite is surrounded by at least some transparent areas. The optimized blitter also has animation disabled.

32bpp-anim

This is the same as the optimized blitter, except animation is enabled.

Sometimes for whatever reason the blitter setting in openttd.cfg cannot be used. As a fallback the blitter can be given to the OpenTTD binary as a parameter with -b 32bpp-simple, -b 32bpp-anim or -b 32bpp-optimized. The -h parameter lists all available blitters.

[edit] Joining New Graphics Development

Do you enjoy playing with 32bpp graphics? Would you like to contribute, in order to get full 32bpp graphics out sooner? We are in need of artists, administrators (to do manual tasks such as keep the documentation organised) and coders (to help us code features to enable new graphics options)...

To draw 32bpp graphics for OpenTTD you need to know how to model in 3D (unless you are helping with some of the 2D tasks). For modeling software we suggest the open source 3D software blender available from Blender site.

For further information on 32bpp development you can browse the OpenTTD Graphics forum on tt-forums. Alternatively you can contact Ben Robbins, one of the leading members of the OpenTTD graphics community.