New Projects

Hey everyone, I know it has been a while since an update on here. The problem is that the work recently on the code hasn’t really produced anything worth looking at.

Nevertheless, there are two new Theme Hospital related projects that are being updated at the moment. One of them is CorsixHospital, developed by Corsix. A screen shot of this is below:

You can also watch a video of it:

The other project is Java Hospital, which does not use the original graphics and is top down. And written in Java. I don’t have any screenshots of this right now.

Both projects have new sub-forums at the OpenTH forums, so the community can be kept together. Feel free to post and give your opinions!

What should the dialog for the room select look like? (Updated)

Hey everyone. I’ve spent all of today programming you’ll be pleased to know. There isn’t a massive amount to show for it, but I’ve gone about fixing some of the things that changed. The only other new features is that now there are error dialog boxes, which strangely wasn’t on anybodies request list.

However, one thing I was wondering is what should we do with the dialog box for selecting rooms. Currently it has the tabs down the left, like the original TH one, and then a list box just saying the names, which is rather boring. To remind you, here is what the original one was like:

The room selector from Theme Hospital

I really like the little picture previews. It says cost, what other information could we give? (For instance, minimum size, doctors required, number existing, any technology upgrades?)

Suggestions welcome and mockups doubly welcome!

Update: And just because I know you guys are dying to see it, here is the new message dialog class used for errors. The interesting thing I suppose is that this new GUI is completely custom written so it isn’t rubbish.

You guys love error messages! Right?

and here is the current selector:

The room build dialog in OpenTH right now

What has been happening

So the code has had the following changes applied to it by Paul. Most of these are internal things which you won’t care about.

1. We don’t use GUIChan anymore, the poorly written user-interface library that was used. OpenLayer, Allgegro and SDL are gone too. Freetype (for fonts), libpng (for png loading) and Lua (for scripting) are all the dependencies we have now.
2. UI and event system rewritten
3. Fonts rendered more efficiently. Textures handled in a more programmer-friendly way.
4. Unicode is supported nearly everywhere, so it will work in non-Latin languages too in future.
5. Coding is more consistent now

So these are big, important changes. The bad side is it doesn’t work right now. However, just when I was going to repair these changes we noticed some code had been deleted by TSVN. This is annoying to say the least (especially for Paul). However, it will be rewritten and the repairs will come into effect and we will have a better core.

Then I’m not entirely sure what is next. Whatever we feel like I suppose. Drag and Drop can be improved, staff rooms & research can be better implemented and we want to change the way outside objects are rendered to name three things. I will also try and tidy up Lua sometime and make a guide but I don’t want to do it quite yet. Machine/Person interaction is high on the list too.

We’re back!

Hello everyone!

You will have noticed the project has been dead for a while. This is because we’ve all had exams. But now they are over! At least for Paul and I. Hopefully we will get to do some more programming soon on the project.

Other developers also have various commitments but hopefully will come back into the game this summer

- Jack

Adding new in-game graphics

At the current state the game uses the in-game graphics from the original game, and that is all well for those who own a copy of it – and still know where it is. For the rest of us, however, it will be quite hard to play the game without them. Therefore we’ve started a graphics replacement project similar to what OpenTTD has. The project is still in its very early stages – there are no finished objects – but here are some examples of what we’re currently working on.

Work by Bami:

Bench

Radiator

Work by Kamo:

Plant

Litter Bin

Work by vommie:

Desk

Follow the development in the art section of the forum.