Updated on 2025-02-18, by John Franklin
The OpenTTD China Set project started on 19 July 2023, originally from discussions between wuwu (kaitokiwa), Babel, and NACHN about making a playable China map. Aside from the fact that the map could be too big leading to lag and late stage player abandonment, there was one fatal problem:
"We are missing a full China Railway pack" - Babel, 19 Jul 2023, 16:42 BST
The main Chinese elements in the game at that time were the following: the extrazoom but cartoony Chinese train set developed by Leou and Dirace, which has barely been updated, and is optimised for gameplay, only including a small number of trains, configures of which don't correspond to reality; Guangdong buses, Chinese-style company headquarters, Chinese town names, and scenario maps of China, which are also by them; and the pixelated Chinese Train Set by some Korean developer, with slightly distorted data but severely missing engine-pulled trains and freight trains. We were so unhappy with so little content that we had to use xUSSR or Japan Set every time we started a server with a Chinese map. We were desperate for Chinese elements!
An unwritten rule of open source communities is that if you are not happy with the existing content, then you are welcome to participate in the development and add new content. However, at that time we had little confidence in this - most of us had no programming experience, and even our exposure to OpenTTD was not very "senior". If no one had done it for so many years, it could be very likely that we, being penniless, would not be able to do it either, and China Set would only end up as daydreaming.
The future has come; time is not wastable!
----Zibo No. 4 High School
But never predict the future with just the past. On 31 July of the same year, John Franklin created a new folder for China Set: Trains, uploaded the source code to GitHub, and posted the prototype train set, which contained only one passenger coach, to BaNaNaS (the game's built-in online downloader). Even though "development path" was undecided in early times, and the source code was basically copied and pasted from other train NewGRFs, from then on, it was an unbelievable success - by that summer, we had original colour versions of the 25G/K/T passenger coaches ready, as well as DF4, DF11G, HXD3C/D, CRH5A, CR400BF, and CR200J, doing updates every three days; however, the developers, being students, came to a standstill once terms started in the autumn.
If you were lucky enough to play with an early China Set: Trains, then you would notice the tiny models. The graphics of China Set: Trains at the time were rendered in Autodesk 3D Studio Max at a near-realistic scale, causing them to be out of scale with OpenTTD's gameplay. If the coaches were as wide as the rest of train NewGRFs in the game, they would be 2.5 tiles long - whereas the default coaches are only 0.5 tiles long. For gameplay purposes, the length of coaches were limited to 0.75 tiles, making the trains extremely small. Even so, the model needed to be deliberately shortened, with two fewer windows!
Another problem was that NACHN, the sole developer working on the 3DS Max models, was too pressed for time due to postgraduate studying to do much modelling, so that's where the whole China Set: Trains got stuck. The models were rendered into images that required Photoshop to fix, and no matter what we did, the scale of trains was never quite right. Around December 2023, we started to think about ways to get China Set: Trains back on track, and to improve the way the images were made. Timberwolf's UK Trains and GETS Germany Extrazoom Train Set are using a different approach - MagicaVoxel voxel modelling with GoRender auto-rendering - and the results are very well received. How about this?
Soon after, John Franklin took the Class 43 diesel locomotive (Inter-City 125) and the Pullman passenger coach in Timberwolf's UK Trains and made a very rough voxel model of the DF11G diesel locomotive and the 25T passenger coach by gluing a layer of voxel on the outside. We tried to put it into the game, and it was unexpectedly good! The tiny train problem was greatly improved, and the clarity was acceptable. Importantly, MagicaVoxel is an open source, and free software, and much easier to use than 3DS Max, and thus the number of modelling developers has increased dramatically since then. After replacing all sprites with voxel-rendering outcomes, and adjusting the graphic templates for this, China Set: Trains was released as version 0.1.0 on the last day of 2023.
Since then, development has been running fairly smoothly, and early problems (such as the rudimentary, potentially copyright-contentious bus model - the GPLv2 license used by China Set is not compatible with the CC-BY-SA v3.0 license used by Timberwolf) have gradually been resolved. Today, China Set is OpenTTD's most comprehensive collection of Chinese game elements, and is the first choice of gamers when it comes to using Chinese game elements.
But we will never be complacent. We are always developing, always learning, always discussing, even if we don't have a lot of time and our development progress may be slow. Of course, new players and developers are very welcome!
The current China Set has the following NewGRFs released:
China Set: Trains - the most "ancient" China Set NewGRF, currently in a good state of completion, but severely lacking in pre-1949 models. Search for China Set: Trains in the online downloader.
Note: Not Chinese Trains or Chinese Train Set!
China Set: MTR Add-on - adds MTR models from Hong Kong. Search for China Set: MTR Add-on in the online downloader.
China Set: Metros - Adds metro and suburban railways from all over mainland China. Search for China Set Metros in the online downloader.
Due to an oversight by the developer, there is no colon here.
China Set: Stations - adds stations in the style of the China Railway, but development is now stalled. Search for China Set: Stations in the online downloader.
China Set: Stations - Wuhu - A smarter and more automated set of stations modelled on the Wuhu train station of the past and present, thanks to the high technical skills of Ahyangyi from Wuhu. Search for China Set: Stations - Wuhu in the online downloader.
We have many more projects waiting to be developed and extended, so - welcome!