Project status · status text updated 2026-10-04 · site built 2026-10-03 21:37 UTC

TTD Deluxe

A transport game in the spirit of OpenTTD, set between the years 800 and 1500. You start with pack donkeys on dirt trails, move up to carts and river barges, and end with horse-drawn wagon trains on wooden rails with lantern signals.

In the engine now

Real screenshots from Unity, newest build first. These show where the game actually is.

**A cottage, modelled in Blender.** Timber frame, limewashed daub, a thatched roof with a ridge roll, a fieldstone footing and shuttered windows, with the forested valley behind. 2026-10-04

**The village street.** Three cottage types and a barn along the trail, strip fields behind wattle fences. 2026-10-04

**The valley from 620 m.** 86,844 trees, the river and ford, the village and its fields, the upland hamlet top left. 2026-10-04

**The donkey string.** Pack donkeys with sacks and a bedroll on a wooden pack saddle, modelled in Blender. 2026-10-04

**Strip fields.** Ripe wheat next to ploughed fallow strips. 2026-10-04

**The trail through the forest.** Firs with drooping boughs among the broadleaf trees. 2026-10-04

**Meadow up close.** Grass tufts and wild flowers. 2026-10-04

**First build: the valley from 620 m.** River, ford, the village street on the right and the upland hamlet top left. About 87,000 trees. 2026-10-03

**First build: the trail at the forest edge.** Broadleaf trees have leaf detail. The dark conifers are still plain cones. 2026-10-03

Status

Last updated: 2026-10-04

What this is

A transport game in the spirit of OpenTTD set in 800-1500: donkey trails, then roads and rivers, then wooden wagonways with lantern signals. Chosen look: "the living landscape" (detailed 3D). Research pages are in research/.

Decisions made

Decision	Choice
Engine	Unity 6000.3.18f1, URP
Game logic	Hidden tile grid (8 m tiles), smooth landscape drawn over it
Ages	I Trails 800-1000, II Roads and rivers 1000-1250, III Wagonways 1250-1500
Combat	None; swords and axes are cargo

Step 0: look proof (in progress)

Game > Build Look-Proof Valley (UnityProject/Assets/Game/Editor/ValleyBuilder.cs) generates Assets/Game/Scenes/Valley.unity: 2 km terrain, river with a ford, 86,844 trees, a village street, an upland hamlet, a donkey string walking the trail, evening light, tycoon camera.

Frame times on the M4 Pro, in the editor, 2560x1440, 4x MSAA (Game > Run Render Benchmark):

View	First build	With grouped forest renderer
Village, 120 m	12.6 ms	6.2 ms
Forest edge, 70 m	15.3 ms	5.9 ms
Wide, 620 m	27.0 ms	8.2 ms
Fully zoomed out, 1300 m	60.7 ms	8.6 ms

The target is 16.7 ms (60 frames per second).

These figures are from quiet runs and repeat within about 1 ms. While another game was using the GPU on the same Mac, the same benchmark read 30 to 50 ms with identical draw counts and returned to 8 ms afterwards, so a single slow run is not evidence of a regression: run it three times.

Gate result: passed. The first build drew every tree separately, about 50,000 draws per frame; ForestRenderer now sorts trees into 64 m cells and draws each cell in one instanced call.

After the detail pass below, the same views take 9 to 14 ms: the leafy tree models are now kept out to 1 km, and grass, flowers and wheat are drawn near the camera.

Detail pass (2026-10-04)

Firs with tiers of needle boughs instead of plain cones.
Grass tufts and wild flowers on the meadow, drawn within 170 m of the camera.
Strip fields beside the village: ripe wheat and ploughed fallow, inside wattle fences.
Buildings modelled in Blender (tools/blender/build_cottages.py): three cottages and a barn with timber frames, thatch, stone footings, doors, shutters and woodpiles, using CC0 textures.
A pack donkey modelled in Blender (tools/blender/build_animals.py) with sacks and a pack saddle.

Step 1: the Age I game loop (build trails, carry grain and logs, earn money), with the rules written as plain tested code separate from the graphics.
A water surface with ripples and reflections; the river is a flat sheet for now.
Walking animation for the donkeys; they slide along the trail for now.

Status site

tools/progress-site/deploy.sh builds this page from docs/STATUS.md, docs/site/ and the git log, and publishes it to https://ttdelux.kroesneger.nl/ on pislik.

Known placeholders

Broadleaf trees are leaf cards round a simple core and will want real tree models. Terrain and building textures are CC0 from Poly Haven, prepared by the scripts in tools/.

Where the look is heading

Concept sketches, not the game. They show the target look and the three ages.

**The chosen look: the living landscape.** Concept sketch. Rolling terrain, thick forest, timber-framed houses, long evening shadows. Reference games: Train Fever, Transport Fever 2, Manor Lords.

**Age I, 800 to 1000: trails.** Concept sketch. Pack donkeys on dirt trails, fords, timber rafts on the river.

**Age II, 1000 to 1250: roads and rivers.** Concept sketch. Ox carts on roads, timber bridges, river barges, the first keep and windmill.

**Age III, 1250 to 1500: wagonways.** Concept sketch. Horse-drawn wagon trains on wooden rails, lantern signals, trestles and mine tunnels.

**Planned map view: the manuscript map.** Concept sketch for the overview and planning layer: ink on parchment, held and clear ways shown as colour washes.

Commit log

The last 7 commits to the project repository.

When	Commit	What changed
2026-10-04 00:37	75ec24f	feat: cottages, barn and pack donkey modelled in Blender
2026-10-04 00:16	2877209	feat: firs, meadow plants, strip fields and wattle fences
2026-10-04 00:05	840bc2e	docs: note benchmark variance under a shared GPU
2026-10-04 00:00	5488432	perf: draw the forest in instanced cells instead of one call per tree
2026-10-03 23:54	f551d3a	docs: project status and the status site generator
2026-10-03 23:54	43f4768	feat: look-proof valley generated in Unity 6 (URP)
2026-10-03 23:54	0caa25b	docs: art direction and game design research pages