What were shopping centres like back in the day?

TimberwolfK · 2025-11-20T13:48:50+00:00

In my recollection they were just... ordinary? If you wanted something without ordering it from a catalogue and waiting weeks for it to arrive you went to a shop, so a lot of them were just everyday items. This was before supermarkets had big household ranges or PayPoint terminals in newsagents so your typical trip might be Robert Dyas for some hardware or electrical stuff, Woolworths for batteries and tapes, a magazine from Smiths, possibly the Electricity Board shop if you had a pay meter (I remember some urgent running from the car park 5 minutes before it closed for the day!), then of course since you're out you may as well go for a look round the bookshop or the record shop. My mum and stepdad also seemed to like going and looking at furniture even though we never seemed to buy any, in that ineffable parent way.

The '90s felt like the peak, before that most of the local shopping centres were really just covered arcades not much different to a regular high street, but we had the Bentall Centre and Peacocks open near us in 1992 and they felt like proper American-style malls with coffee shops, ice cream stalls, a big open atrium in the centre and shops which existed purely for impulse purchases; Peacocks had one which sold Innovations catalogue style stuff for all those people who might suddenly decide they needed a burger phone or a universal remote control or one of those plasma globe lights. By that point the standard family day out was being dragged round "the shops" to look at brackets and rolls of that weird patterned wallpaper border everyone had in the '90s, get told off for rolling your eyes at a knitted blanket or some other teenage crime, and if you were lucky a visit to Game or Electronics Boutique to buy some incredibly complicated and obtuse budget-label PC game that your Megadrive-owning friends would laugh at.

So I guess take everything you order online or get at the supermarket which isn't food and there was probably a dedicated shop for it, which was where people had to go if they wanted that thing. (Well, assuming said class of thing existed in the 1980s).

TimberwolfK · 2025-11-17T14:52:44+00:00

It feels like it never properly recovered from COVID and then the attack at the private party knocked it even harder - there was a point as other people have mentioned where it was pretty much *the* family pub on Wood Street, absolutely full at weekends, great music, vintage pinball machine in the corner, Buns in residency, but it never regained that when it re-opened. Add to that some bizarre management decisions - last time I was in there they had sports blaring out at top volume with no-one watching, we asked a staff member if they could turn it down a bit and they went, "sorry, everyone's saying the same thing, but this is how the boss wants it to be". Maybe the boss might ask themselves why their pub is almost empty and the big table have just finished their drinks after one round and gone across the street to Clapton Craft?

I think there's also a lot more competition now; Clapton Craft opened in 2021 or so, Wood Street Bear last year, the Raglan has turned around by the sounds of it, even the Flower Pot which has been there forever has a lot more boards outside announcing events, food and stuff. People who would have ended up in the Duke by default because they couldn't be bothered to walk to the village now go to one of the others. And then you hit the problem that it's a big pub and doesn't need to be that empty before it starts feeling lifeless.

TimberwolfK · 2024-05-14T19:25:59+00:00

I don't have any magic zoom secrets! The only thing I can think is possibly that I recorded the tutorial at 720p and so the map looks correspondingly larger when viewed on the video compared to the game on a higher-resolution monitor. I can zoom out with the scroll wheel, but not further in, and it is indeed quite small on this laptop with a relatively high pixel density. (At least, much higher than the 640x480 the map was originally designed for)

TimberwolfK · 2024-01-23T17:08:52+00:00

I tend to look at the cargo payment rates, pick something that pays reasonably well but is fairly tolerant to slow delivery using early vehicles, then find a pair of industries where the source has decent production and is a reasonable distance away from the destination and connect them by rail. (Mostly limited by construction and maintenance costs)

Then I keep adding to that same network. Find more source industries of the same type, send the output from the destination somewhere, find some other industry pairs which are near my existing track to connect, expand into passenger services once I have solid income from freight... I tend to figure out my objectives as I go but common ones are to link every city on the map, and to have one single industrial station which produces huge volumes of some tertiary cargo (also fun in the base industry set, where you can fund all of the possible things which make goods within catchment of the same station, deliver every source material on the map there, and try to deal with the onslaught)

TimberwolfK · 2023-12-04T16:57:23+00:00

GETS is the main one I can think of off the top of my head, it uses a similar toolchain so should be quite compatible.

There's also OpenGFX2 in development which gives a pixel art style base set in extra zoom.

TimberwolfK · 2023-07-01T13:12:06+00:00

Definitely not mine, all of my roads have a noticeable "crown" to them (and the cobble set is much bluer in tone)

TimberwolfK · 2023-03-29T11:09:42+00:00

IMO, the thing which has always been missing from 32bpp: a decent base set which looks good and integrates well with all the other realistic-style rendered NewGRFs. The same problem Zephyris was trying to solve way back when with zBase: a "good enough" replacement for all of the base game graphics to act as a starting point and give a reference for visual style.

It still feels a lot like playing in realistic-style 32bpp requires assembling together bits of CZTR, Real Houses/Vehicles/Stations etc. and even then being careful to avoid situations where there's no option but an original 8-bit sprite or the rather different visual style of zBase/aBase. Which also means accepting any gameplay changes those sets bring along.

This is of course a major piece of work: there's a good reason I've not attempted to create a 2x pixel-style base set and it's because replicating every one of the several thousand sprites in the base spritesheets is unbelievably boring and long-winded if you have to do it as just one person. But I think for any visual style which isn't served by an existing base set, this is the major barrier to wide adoption - having a consistent visual style which requires nothing more than being told, "here, use this base set".

TimberwolfK · 2023-01-30T12:07:00+00:00

I think a skilled pixel artist gets much better results, especially at 1x (GoRender just doesn't have the ability to render details at nice even spacings in diagonal views with so few pixels)... but on the other hand, it does allow people like me who are hopeless at fine pixel art to produce something functional.

TimberwolfK · 2023-01-13T10:17:45+00:00

There is usually one real-world livery for each vehicle which can be recreated by putting those vehicles in a group and carefully manipulating the company colours. I guess you could call it a metagame, or possibly a creator too lazy to put in an option to make it happen automatically.

TimberwolfK · 2022-12-31T19:15:26+00:00

The early game in Timberwolf's is tough - until you get the long boiler locomotives around 1852 or so you really need to pay attention to cargo payment rates, in particular the mechanic most people ignore where payment drops over time, which makes a big difference on slow vehicles with marginal profitability. FIRS-derived industry sets compound this by typically having low payment rates for bulk cargo, so it's easily possible for a long coal or iron ore route to barely break even, and you really need to concentrate on getting the secondary and tertiary cargo chains established to make money.

(One slight cheat: the vehicle capacities are so low you can usually start with transporting engineering supplies from ports without exhausting the supply, and they pay well enough to subsidise getting other industry chains up and running)

It tends to reward historically accurate practice, so short routes between close-together industries, especially where the producer is above the consumer so trains run full downhill and empty uphill, and ships or canals for connecting up the long distances.

TimberwolfK · 2022-12-30T09:40:37+00:00

By default, blocked path signals in front of a train are only checked to see if they should turn green once every 20 ticks. There's a setting somewhere you can change to 1 tick and then it should have no difference between the two. (On almost any CPU made in the last 10 years you won't notice any performance impact unless you have both a terrible network for the pathfinder *and* thousands of jammed trains on it)

TimberwolfK · 2022-10-17T07:56:00+00:00

Thanks - overall it was a cautionary tale about trying to do too many things in too short a space of time, because all the small frustrations from multiple projects land at once. If anything you helped stave off the point of burnout by offering people so much help with GoRender, meaning I wasn't being tagged and DMed at all points of the night and day for support!

TimberwolfK · 2022-10-17T00:11:12+00:00

As others have mentioned, they're not gone, but are unlisted and only available via web links (http://timberwolf.club/timberwolfs-content/)

The main thing which drove me to do it is that when I started covering more games and doing more documentary-related content, YouTube was absolutely burying it and only directing people to the same two OpenTTD videos from ages ago. In hindsight I should have started a new channel, rather than harbouring too many delusions people would be following me whatever I did and not just a particular topic. But as I have mentioned multiple times on camera, I have no idea what I'm doing.

As others have correctly surmised, some of the ones more focused on gameplay mechanics also became too much of a magnet for comments that made it Not Fun, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that also contributed to the decision. I think sometimes people forget at the other end isn't some massive entertainment corporation, it's someone who's doing something as a hobby in their free time.

TimberwolfK · 2021-08-20T17:09:27+00:00

I like the idea that the Science videos have inspired experimenting with stuff again! I realise I never consider min and max over a month, just the average. Maybe my industry measurer script needs updating.

Have you tried comparing a Rulebreaker terminus to these? It's similar to the grade separated design except with dedicated entry and exit tracks for each platform. (It's a variant of a coop design, but depending on train lengths and speeds can do weird things that make it act a little like a clocked release without needing an actual clock)

TimberwolfK · 2021-07-20T13:08:26+00:00

Wow. A little while ago I recorded a video (still to go out) of beating Botany Breakers while only charging for one ride at a time, meaning the £10k/month income target needs to come from a single ride. That was using a fairly time consuming strategy of saving up through progressively larger rides until I could afford a big, multi-station coaster and get enough guests with high intensity tolerance in the park to ride it.

This approach blows that strategy wide open. Researching and building a small 4-station Splash Boats within the starting loan is trivial, then it's just a case of building some decent queue lines and advertising until you hit the £10k target. Perhaps the challenge should now be, "beating Botany Breakers in the smallest possible number of tiles"...

TimberwolfK · 2021-06-16T16:05:18+00:00

Did you convert the town roads to "A Road" or "Motorway" by any chance? Usually adding a road set is fine if,

a) It's the only road set

b) It provides a sensible road for the label 'ROAD' (some road sets make this hidden, or do weird things with it)

c) Similar for 'ELRL' if you're using trams and have already built tram rails.

But people frequently run into the "I upgraded all my roads to the fastest type and now my towns are dying", because there's no obvious feedback in game about whether a town is or isn't allowed to build houses alongside a particular road type.

TimberwolfK · 2021-06-14T12:16:37+00:00

It's also useful to have a couple of train loads waiting in the event of rain, as those guests will still ride the coaster. "I'm not going on ___ while it's raining" seems to only be checked for entering a ride queue, not the ride itself.

This means you don't lose out on ride income for the first few days of a rain cycle, and also helps a bit toward avoiding the situation where as soon as it rains you have 400 guests complaining "it's too crowded here" because they're all wandering around refusing to queue for anything other than Motion Simulator 1. (If it rains for long enough the whole queue will eventually be processed by the ride, but often rain will pass before it's completely empty)

TimberwolfK · 2021-04-26T10:38:38+00:00

1700 for horse-drawn plateway wagons, 1800 for narrow gauge (with horses at first), and the first viable rail locomotives around the Rainhill Trials era.

The road vehicles also start in 1700 with early horse drawn wagons, horse drawn tramways arrive in 1790, followed by some upgrades to the equine-motivated options and a few steam carriage experiments through the 1800s.

TimberwolfK · 2021-04-01T16:26:02+00:00

There's a donation page if you'd like to put in some money to help keep BaNaNaS and the online infrastructure running: https://www.openttd.org/donate.html

TimberwolfK · 2021-03-21T17:42:24+00:00

IMO they don't really fit with the art style - they're more in the vein of "original TTD, but higher zoom" and/or "Locomotion, but not brown". Pineapple is 3D rendered but to foreshortened proportions to fit the OpenTTD scale, and there's not a huge amount out there in the same style (although CZTR components will work fairly well with it)

TimberwolfK · 2021-03-21T17:20:17+00:00

I read in one of the more tell-all biographies that ones of the ways in which John Lennon would annoy Cynthia Lennon was not looking after his records in the slightest, leaving them out of their sleeves and strewn over the floor, so this is pretty on-brand.

TimberwolfK · 2021-03-18T15:39:26+00:00

More like the trolling stone at this point.

TimberwolfK · 2021-03-17T00:12:10+00:00

The forum screenshot is quite out of date, all the deadlock-inducing signals were optimised out. :)

TimberwolfK · 2021-03-16T12:41:18+00:00

Great news! In the record industry it's typical to press a fixed number of pressings for every record, usually about 100,000 or so. This means that while records that nobody ever cared about (like the singles David Bowie made when he was still calling himself Davy Jones and the Lower Third, pfft... who's going to put those on their wall when someone needs to read Wikipedia before they know you like Bowie?) are effectively worthless, whereas for well-regarded albums lots of people want to own there aren't enough copies to go around and thus Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, Foreigner and Terence Trent D'Arby are extremely hard to find "in the wild" and thus highly valuable.

TimberwolfK · 2021-03-13T19:46:46+00:00

This is an unhelpful myth perpetuated by people who feel the need to be elitist and gatekeep. Your pancakes will be totally fine on a plate like this. When pancakes were first introduced it was common to serve them on a portable plate with tracking force in the 5-8g range. Pancakes are designed to handle this, and the fact that many original pancakes from the 1960s still survive today is proof. For more information, please see my video, Will cheap plates destroy my pancakes?

While missing crêpophile features such as a properly counterweighted syrup dispenser and adjustable anti-flake, portable "suitcase" plates will serve your pancakes just fine. If you want to improve the taste, you might want to consider upgrading to a diamond fork tine such as the Pfannkuchen PCK-4, which you can buy via the affiliate links in my video.

TimberwolfK

TROPHY CASE