Yet another week of coop
There weren’t much things going on this week, although some of them had a big impact (and others will still have).
First of all, there is the big move to OFTC, we did this because #openttd switched to it because devs didn’t like the network ;). Hopefully OFTC doesn’t have someone like lilo who keeps sending global messages all the time.
And then we had the big WebCooper anoyance, I think that everyone in the channel has gotten a part of it, and if you didn’t then you should consider yourself lucky ;). Every member of #openttdcoop is now operator in the channel to prevent such things again, although we’ll be non-op when it isn’t needed.
Then is there the other big thing, my ICE story at the beginning of this week, and a link to it on tt-forums.net which quite some people followed (around 300 according to Mucht?). Quite a nice number of people that (hopefully) will also be reading our blog :). Ofcourse we have the little sandbox “story” too which shouldn’t be forgotten.
And we have a new style on the wiki, it is the same style as the blog has so they suit each other better. We also have an web IRC client now so you don’t have to have a stand-alone client installed.
We also have some new nicknames in our channel, and an old face has returned, and the name behind the face is ChrisM87, he happens to be an aspirant too so we will have some more fun on the mainserver now. That is, if someone would like to start it now we have decided all the game details.
Last but not least, we (as the members) have decided to give the sandbox a hard train limit. The people playing there always manage to get 600+ trains, even though the trainlenght is 7 tiles. The problem with this is that it slows down the server terribly and also the games of people with older hardware, like me, notice problems when they run the game with full detail, full animations and on a high resolution. It is even unplayable for some people on a resolution higher then 800×600 or even 640×480.
The train limit was the solution to an unexpected problem. Ever since we exhibited the final Pile Transport save, with its record number fo trains, many of the players on the Sandbox seem to be under the impression that a train network’s success is measured by the number of trains running on it. Because it’s so easy to clone trains, these players do just that.
Fact is, on the sandbox, the network is rarely well enough designed to cope with a number of trains on the order of the Pile game. The limit is 400, but that still shouldn’t be seen as a goal. If you hit the limit, you’re making too many trains and not enough track.
In the running game we had no major work on the network after the first two days, but we had many new players who added all industries…
Instead of a trainlimit we should play on smaller maps. 1024x 256 are really fun but needs many trains.
PS: We broke the Pile transport rekorde in sandbox game 9 so i don’t think it’s the reason why (the savegame in the wiki is ~2 days befor the end of the game).
It shouldn’t be about breaking records. Sandbox game 9 was a disaster.