About

The main goal of this NewGRF is to provide a desert landscape, regardless of your map's climate.
It utilizes desert tiles from OpenGFX and OpenGFX2 as objects; both versions also come in variants with and without gridlines, resulting in four possible combinations of tiles.
The ground tiles are complemented by objects such as rocks, greenery, people, cars, and oases.

For games using the Sub-tropical climate, there is an option to replace the base set's desert terrain tiles with other variants. This allows, for example, an OpenGFX2 gridless desert alongside an otherwise OpenGFX-styled landscape (see Features below).
Additionally, you can enable the game to generate a desired number of oases and rocks, adding some sparkle to your deserts.

Features

• Offers replacement of your current baseset's deserts (with or without gridlines).

• Adds desert terrain tiles as objects from OpenGFX and OpenGFX2 (with or without gridlines).
  All ground tiles are slope-aware and coast-aware - you can just drag them across the terrain, and they will automatically adjust.

• When playing in the Sub-arctic climate, snowline-responsive options for sand and rock tiles become available.
  Versions with permanent snow are included in all climates.

• All greenery + people with cars feature 32 variations per slope, minimizing visible repetition when placed in large numbers.
• Oases can only be placed on flat terrain, but offer 512 layout variations to ensure visual diversity.
• Supports automatic spawning of objects such as oases and rocks in various colors during map generation (see Random object spawning for details).

Parameters

The following parameters allow customization of the NewGRF's features:

Desert graphics replacement

Select the desert style to replace your base set's desert tiles:

• None (no replacement)
• OpenGFX2 (gridlines)
• OpenGFX2 (no gridlines)
• OpenGFX (gridlines)
• OpenGFX (no gridlines)

Add desert tiles as objects

Choose which combinations of base set and gridlines will be available as placeable objects:

• OpenGFX desert tiles (gridlines)
• OpenGFX desert tiles (no gridlines)
• OpenGFX2 desert tiles (gridlines)
• OpenGFX2 desert tiles (no gridlines)

Random object spawning

Controls random object placement during map generation.
The number represents the amount of objects placed on a 256×256 tile map (for reference, there would be 15 transmitters on such a map).

The objects have a 4×4 tile footprint and behave like regular landscape elements: they can be demolished, or you can remove them just by building over them.

• Oases: Spawn in unique layouts based on probabilities taken from random bits of each tile.

• Rocks: Spawns yellow, gray, or brown rocks in deserts in one of 2^16 (65,536) layouts.

Installation

1. Preferably, open the Check online content in-game dialog and search for "Deserts as Objects".
2. Alternatively, download the .tar package from the GitHub repository.
3. Place the file in your OpenTTD directory, (perhaps ...\Users\USERNAME\Documents\OpenTTD\newgrf).
4. Enable the NewGRF in the OpenTTD settings.
5. Configure parameters as needed.

Credits and License

Thanks and credit go to the respective authors of

• OpenGFX
• OpenGFX2
• OpenGFX+ Landscape
• OpenGFX2 Objects

(All licensed under GPLv2)

With minor additions and coding by chujo

The combined work, including modifications and additions, is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 (GPL v2).

More info

@chujo on OpenTTD's Discord (discord.gg/openttd) or on TT-Forums