Logging

The rule on our servers is you sign your own work. This way we can see who’s done what. But it’s not a foolproof system, as players with bad intentions will most likely not sign their destruction, or respond to inquiries of other players. Because of this, admins had to guess who was responsible for such actions, which generally resulted in kicking the player who was the least known. Obviously this is not a fail-safe solution.

To combat this problem our server runs with a custom-written patch. This patch outputs certain game information to a logfile, one file for each game. Firstly it logs information from the server itself. Think of error reports, leaving and joining players, game status and password changes. Secondly it logs all the actions by the players, with their respective price tags and parameters like game tiles. And thirdly all in game chat is also logged. With this information we can accurately determine the culprit, ban him and then reload the game from an autosave to undo any bad changes. This way we are pretty much covered against any sort of in game mishap.

Privacy

Now you could consider me a privacy nut, I’m apparently one of the few who thinks it’s important and shouldn’t be given up so easily as it has been in the previous years. With that in mind I’d like to highlight the privacy side of this situation to calm the uneasy feeling you might get of the idea of being watched in game.

While we are logging everything that goes on in-game, only members, players that have shown to be trustworthy, get access to the log files. And they are not staring at it all the time either, because frankly, there are better things to do then stare at up to 20 Megabytes of text. The way the log is used is that we browse it with a tool whenever we notice bad behaviour on the server. This tool looks at the last X lines in the log, highlighting actions that could be the bad behaviour we are looking for. Think of the levelling of land, actions with huge price-tags and demolitions. This saves us the work of actually having to search for these things ourselves. Basically, we don’t look at the building in progress, we only search for abuse when it’s needed. Last but not least, logs will be deleted after a while. Generally we keep around 5-10 games worth of logs and the rest is discarded.

Statistics

The majority of our playerbase comes with a background in exact sciences, like me. With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to generate statistics from our logfiles. Because who doesn’t like statistics? So more then half a year ago I decided to write a program in Java that parses those log files and generates statistics out of them, like the number of lines typed and money spent.

The program is now hosted on our own Dev server. After a long time of neglecting it’s maintenance, a rewrite to compensate in a change of style and the fixing of some bad bugs, the program is finally up-to-date and all logs excluding the current one are processed. The results of this can be found here. And no, this is not useful. But it’s always interesting to have a look.

Future work

Right now I am working on a system that plots the tile information of actions into an image. Combined with some image processing, it should be possible to build a mini-mini-map, not based on how it looks, but based on how much has changed. This is an example of how such a map could look like:

I wonder if anyone can guess the game number from that image. But once again, not useful, but probably interesting to see. Besides that there is some work to be done on the usability of the program itself and adapting it for use on other servers as well. If you have any more ideas, comments or suggestions, feel free to post your them in the comments or let me know on IRC.

I guess, there are some other possibilities with this feature, I am looking forward.

After testing it I can say its a good idea to show everyone how someone (like us) is building a network. But you need 1) an active game and 2) some space on your hard drive…

[19:35] progman@proglap ~/.openttd $ du -ch
5.4M    ./data
16M     ./save/autosave
16M     ./save
1.9G    .
1.9G    total
[19:36] progman@proglap ~/.openttd $ dir | grep timelapse# | wc -l
7259
[19:36] progman@proglap ~/.openttd $

Just to get an impression how many screenshots have been created (10 local views + 1 global view).

If you now think that it was a great event and it should be repeated: we may do so. Suggestions, critizism and remarks are collected on the corresponding wiki page. Please add your observations and comments there – they may help to improve things the next time

• special wwOTTDgd NewGRF
• closing of airports
• quick goto patch
• build fastest bridge holing Ctrl
• filter vehicles by cargo
• distant join stations
• building rivers ingame
• automatically join the company you were in last time

A complete overview of patches can be found in the thread in the dev section, though some modifications still might be done.

Interested? Then have a look at the wiki page, maybe team up with a bunch of friends and sign up for one of the companies! Stay tuned for further updates and join #wwottdgd on 12th July.

Download links for pre-compiled binaries will be provided on that day, so all you got to do is download, fire up and join our special wwottdgd server. Contact us on IRC or post in the tt-forums thread if you have questions.

If you’re interested in contributing patches or grf, please do so and contact us on IRC (#wwottdgd) or #openttdcoop and add to the discussion on the forum and / or the wiki pages mentioned above.

Thanks to LordAzamath for the nice banner!

Update:
Some of us should visit http://openttdcoop.myminicity.com/ind instead. It is the next level.
Update 2:
Level three is now unlocked, please use: http://openttdcoop.myminicity.com/tra to improve our transport network.
Update 3:
I installed a little plugin which automatically generates the best link to trigger and also shows you our stats (thx Doke for the XML link).

This new patch looks really promising. The code is clean and fits to the standard openttd developers prefer. Now, lets have a look at the details.

Features:

• Works with NPF and YAPF.
• Implements a signal system similar to the one Tekky described (without real bi-di tracks).
• Is fully backwards compatible, normal and PBS signals can be used in parallel.
• Can colour the reserved paths.
• No known bugs (well, unknown bugs on the other hand…)

Installation

Either you are able to compile the game or you can use BuildOTTD (Windows only).

svn co -r 12062 svn://svn.openttd.org/trunk openttd-yapp
cd openttd-yapp
curl -L http://www.tt-forums.net/download/file.php?id=85483 > yapp.patch
patch -p0 -i yapp.patch
./configure && make

If you want to activate the highlighted tracks, start OpenTTD with:
./openttd -d pbs=2 or use the console command (^) debug_level pbs=2

Please check Michi_cc’s post as well and join our Dev-Server

So far the patch is pretty stable in multiplayer.

Download pre-compiled Version

• Win32: OpenTTD_r12062-pbs_win32.zip (2,2MB)

dihedral and me talked about that and we came to the idea to make a “World Wide OpenTTD Game Day”. So, we are searching for a day where most people are online and we all should try to play together.

But first we like to see, if that is technical possible, so we ask you to join the beta server with as many clients as you can. Here is a little howto for joining:

1. Download your nightly here
2. Downloadd our GRF Pack
3. you should be ready to join

Related links:

• http://openttd.dihedral.de/
• http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=34429
• http://www.openttd.org/server_detail.php?id=7318
• irc://irc.oftc.net/wwottdgd

Please join and enjoy playing with many-many others.

The Results (vary with network layout, amount of trains and so on):
cpu usage in percent
Game#34: w/o patch: ~45%; patched: ~40% (~700 trains)
Game#09: w/o patch: ~67%; patched: ~50% (~1300 trains)

Especially games with a big mainline loop profit from this great patch.