Leyland Olympian OMSI
A number of years ago, I did some fictional liveries on bus nets and invented some fictional operators to go with them. One such was Apollo Bus (www.flickr.com/photos/108834608@N06/22986087316/in/photol...) which I thought I would revive in the form of an operator of elderly private hire/school buses in OMSI.
The KMB Leyland Olympian has four variants of 9.5 metre, two axle buses. After spending many infuriating hours trying to work out which repaint belonged to which variant (of the four 9.5m variant and the countless 11m variants). Unhelpfully they were only labelled up as 9.5m or 11m so it took some time to re-label them all correctly and with something to identify each bus and what repaint file it used.
I only discovered there were three types of front grille when half of the repaints messed up, so after sorting that out I decided to make something a little less dull than the basic KMB repaints each bus came with. The 9.5m buses are the ones which I will probably use the most, and after getting all the repaint textures lined up as best I could (I somehow managed to overwrite the 9.5m side textures with ones from an 11m version) I tried to think of a livery to go on them all.
The idea of reviving Apollo Bus, with a similar livery but more in the style of an operator who mainly focuses on private hire school contracts, rail replacement etc and a fleet of mostly (if not all) old step-entrance buses. A bit like what South Yorkshire's Brightbus was.
Now, an operator like this would quite happily operate tri-axle buses too (Brightbus had loads) but like I said, I was focusing on the two axle version (tri axles may come later...)
The 'fleet' consists of ten buses in total, and I thought that being in-keeping with the style of operator, each livery would be pretty much the same but with no two buses being identical. So each of the ten buses as its own repaint, which is why some buses have blue skirts, some have blue up to the waist area, and some have blue roofs while others have the whole top deck in blue.
What I would want to do is add a few Metrobuses, perhaps a couple of tri-axles, some maybe in a different 'previous' livery with fleet names pasted over - maybe even the odd Fleetline!
Because having all the buses parked up at Cotterell Uni (clearly, they overestimated the number of open day shuttle buses they needed!) killed my FPS, I sent them out one-by-one with at AI in control, driving around at random. The last bus, which looked kind of like a Metrobus in a way, I then drove to Cotterell bus station while I looked at the other buses along the way. Some of them need areas tweaking, especially around the headlights/dash panels.
What it then reminded me of, since they were everywhere, were the Corporation-type buses of old where, pre-deregulation, a city would be flooded with municipal buses of a seemingly infinite amount. Unfortunately, this effect was kind of ruined by the very de-reg livery and the fact that each bus was a bit crappy and inconsistent with all the other ones.
If the buses were halfcabs in a livery like cream/red, cream/green or cream/blue, then it have the full effect.
This is a similar problem to the route branding style adopted by NCT, as each bus has a highly contrasting livery to one from another line. Before Go2 was introduced, (almost) every bus was green and cream, and the whole fleet had a bigger presence in the city, since small numbers almost identical looking vehicles could be found in all corners of the city, and en masse in the more central areas. Nowadays, a Solo SR in yellow line 70/71 livery looks nothing like an E400 City in red line 44 livery because the colours are totally different and the new livery has yet to reach large parts of the fleet.
While I do like route branding, and the segregation of routes into similar groups (as per NCTs colour line system), the initial implication of coloured stickers and boards adorning the original green and cream livery might have been able to preserve the all-together presence of the fleet (the same presence that swathes of non route branded First, Arriva and Stagecoach buses bring to many cities)
Leyland Olympian OMSI
A number of years ago, I did some fictional liveries on bus nets and invented some fictional operators to go with them. One such was Apollo Bus (www.flickr.com/photos/108834608@N06/22986087316/in/photol...) which I thought I would revive in the form of an operator of elderly private hire/school buses in OMSI.
The KMB Leyland Olympian has four variants of 9.5 metre, two axle buses. After spending many infuriating hours trying to work out which repaint belonged to which variant (of the four 9.5m variant and the countless 11m variants). Unhelpfully they were only labelled up as 9.5m or 11m so it took some time to re-label them all correctly and with something to identify each bus and what repaint file it used.
I only discovered there were three types of front grille when half of the repaints messed up, so after sorting that out I decided to make something a little less dull than the basic KMB repaints each bus came with. The 9.5m buses are the ones which I will probably use the most, and after getting all the repaint textures lined up as best I could (I somehow managed to overwrite the 9.5m side textures with ones from an 11m version) I tried to think of a livery to go on them all.
The idea of reviving Apollo Bus, with a similar livery but more in the style of an operator who mainly focuses on private hire school contracts, rail replacement etc and a fleet of mostly (if not all) old step-entrance buses. A bit like what South Yorkshire's Brightbus was.
Now, an operator like this would quite happily operate tri-axle buses too (Brightbus had loads) but like I said, I was focusing on the two axle version (tri axles may come later...)
The 'fleet' consists of ten buses in total, and I thought that being in-keeping with the style of operator, each livery would be pretty much the same but with no two buses being identical. So each of the ten buses as its own repaint, which is why some buses have blue skirts, some have blue up to the waist area, and some have blue roofs while others have the whole top deck in blue.
What I would want to do is add a few Metrobuses, perhaps a couple of tri-axles, some maybe in a different 'previous' livery with fleet names pasted over - maybe even the odd Fleetline!
Because having all the buses parked up at Cotterell Uni (clearly, they overestimated the number of open day shuttle buses they needed!) killed my FPS, I sent them out one-by-one with at AI in control, driving around at random. The last bus, which looked kind of like a Metrobus in a way, I then drove to Cotterell bus station while I looked at the other buses along the way. Some of them need areas tweaking, especially around the headlights/dash panels.
What it then reminded me of, since they were everywhere, were the Corporation-type buses of old where, pre-deregulation, a city would be flooded with municipal buses of a seemingly infinite amount. Unfortunately, this effect was kind of ruined by the very de-reg livery and the fact that each bus was a bit crappy and inconsistent with all the other ones.
If the buses were halfcabs in a livery like cream/red, cream/green or cream/blue, then it have the full effect.
This is a similar problem to the route branding style adopted by NCT, as each bus has a highly contrasting livery to one from another line. Before Go2 was introduced, (almost) every bus was green and cream, and the whole fleet had a bigger presence in the city, since small numbers almost identical looking vehicles could be found in all corners of the city, and en masse in the more central areas. Nowadays, a Solo SR in yellow line 70/71 livery looks nothing like an E400 City in red line 44 livery because the colours are totally different and the new livery has yet to reach large parts of the fleet.
While I do like route branding, and the segregation of routes into similar groups (as per NCTs colour line system), the initial implication of coloured stickers and boards adorning the original green and cream livery might have been able to preserve the all-together presence of the fleet (the same presence that swathes of non route branded First, Arriva and Stagecoach buses bring to many cities)