#openttdcoop

Yeah we had this discussion… Wiki and Blog… Why a Blog? How to combine them?
Now its done, in a difficult puzzle with more than 1100 lines I change the main.css file of our wiki, created a new skin and did at least a stylistic merge of our beloved Wiki and the brand new Blog! Actually I am not sure whether I changed everything or missed something out, if you find something unformatted or ugly-looking at the wiki please tell me via mail or in our IRC-channel.
For all those who are not familar with IRC yet, we re-activated the webbased-IRC-client. Just check the main menu and get in talk with other coopers. If I will find some time the client will get a style-refresh too.

So far I am done and need to sleep!

Update:
If you have a Wiki account and can not see the New Style, go to preferences and change your skin manually.
I set-up a wiki-page where all errors are shown, if its not on the list, add it or contact me!

Osai

Today I’m going to take you on a trip from my home at south-west Jaravy to my work in central Uherské Hradiste. It is a long tri by train, but I’ve got to do something to earn some money ;).

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The current sandbox game, the 11th, is coming to an end after 12 days in the running.

The game has brought us such sights as The Groucho Marx Station, a big station which serves as a dropoff and pick up for an oil refinery, printing works and food processing plant. The dropoff station serves 230 trains while the pick up station serves 73 trains, a grand total of 303 trains, almost half the trains in the game. The station has been modified and improved countless times to become what it is today.

This game was also the first trial of the bi-directional main line, a concept created by OwenS. The main purpose of the bi-directional mainline is to let trains overtake other trains, allowing every train on the main line to travel at its fastest speed.

A distinct feature of this game was the inclusion of ICE trains on the same network as cargo trains, both passengers and freight are transported using the same lines.

In my opinion this was an excellent sandbox game with interesting ideas put into motion and a few headaches along the way but nonetheless, fun.

Well, another week is over and I will summarize this very special blog-worthy days. A lot of things changed in the community. We have a new member and this is probably the most positive fact around our team. Along with promoting XeryusTC to a full member of #openttdcoop, OwenS and ammler followed his invitation to join our mainserver-team. This means, we have one more player coming close to membership. Also noteworthy: nlhans returned after some months of abscence. thgergo and Itchi also returned to our crew. piratejerkk and John-K are two new nicks around the Sandbox. Summarizing the week, one has to note that there were always some 30+ nicks in our channel during the evening hours!

Now some remarks to the technical aspects of our community. Brianetta steadily improved our Autopilot and the next version is under development/testing. Also, we started using Teamspeak for our efforts – and hey: its great fun! Since you are reading this blog, you may have noticed that we resurrected it and are filling it with user-made opinions and observings around #openttdcoop. The wiki was permanently improved during the past two weeks. The archives were redone and so were many other pages – the Guides need some more attention though. To summarize the technical improvements: check the blog for news around the community, for opinions, thoughts and reports. Check the wiki for gamestyles, for information about users, guides and research & development. Also, the wiki hosts our savegame archive and information about rules and our latest game-idea: the coopetition!

Coopetition – the highlight of the week. In the first gathering, XeryusTC and Ammler challenged Osai and Mucht. Six more clients watched this team vs. team battle for the highest income. In the end, the german-speaking team was the slightly better one. They won with an advantage: they shared the same mother-tongue. We noticed it is highly recommended to find together in native-speaking teams. Each team has its own subchannel on our Teamspeak-Server – you better buy a headset to take this challenge! I tell you: this coopetition is really challenging. It encourages fast building, smart calculating, teamplay and competitive thinking. We are looking forward to extend the idea, create a smart ruleset that allows each team to play their ideas on a fair level.

Stay tuned on this – stay tuned by reading the #openttdcoop-blog!

So we had our first Coopetition tonight, Mucht and Osai versus Ammler and me, and we lost. Congratulations Mucht and Osai! I think we could say that Mucht and Osai won with a clear distance, they won with about a profit of about 2 million every year then ours.
It was really fun to have some competition again, it has been a long time since I had some.

There are some things that could be improved about coopetition:

• Station spread should be lower (we had a big discussion about this ingame)
• We should be notified of a start (I missed the first few months)
• Winners should be declared on more points then only the train profit. We could use use the average rating too for instance.
• Better names for companies :P.