#openttdcoop

This was one of the more dull weeks at #openttdcoop. Mucht and Osai were both idle due to various reasons. But we had some new faces to replace them, those faces belong to Rysh and Ryx. We welcome them to our little community.
We also had a restart of the sandbox server, the network plan is the same as we had before but that game was lost in the period where there were no savegames taken from the sandbox.

This week was another silent one again, a lot of people are very busy these days, including Mucht and me. Even Mr. Mainspammer Jinx is celebrating his exams, while XeryusTC is going to school again, he is the King of the Hill in our IRC-Channel. _42_ is running now since 25 days and we have almost 24000 lines of chat, thats great.

We are proud to announce two new aspirants of #openttdcoop:
JohnK and Piratejerk are welcome to play at the mainserver now.
Congratulations 🙂

Finally another long-awaited thing showed up this week:
The Coopeition Branch is up and running, post your ideas and send in your patches there!
For more information check this Post: Coopetition branch finally there

And of course, the shiny robot is alive:
This week Brianetta released the new version (2.0) of his autopilot and its getting very popular. Have a loot at Brianettas post if you want to be part of the development.

This week was a week of coding, we prepared big things to come and did not play too much. SandboxGame 17 finished today and we started a new one already, but the MainserverGame still needs some time.
This week is a good base, for another great week of #openttdcoop

Enjoy

One week later then promised, but a nice revision: r6460 -> the coopetition branch is there.

As I am personally very low on time because of my study, progress will be a bit slowish. But expect more stuff really soon!

First thing on the list: make binaries twice a week. Expect the URL soon!

Update: check http://coop.community.openttd.org for binaries, changes, and to report problems / send in patches.

Last night, I managed to get autopilot 2.0 out of the flat and into the great wide world. All the features you expect from a robot whose job is to sit at the openttd dedicated server console all day. He says hello to people, and he even remembers to unpause the game when people join.

Of course, he was only used to Linux computers, because that’s all I have. So, the first time he saw a Windows computer with OpenTTD, he panicked and managed to crash the server. After a couple of training sessions over the course of today, led in part by tt-forums user glx, he managed to get the hang of a specially adapted server and quite enjoyed himself in the end, earning himself two minor revision numbers.

He’s also quite talkative on IRC. He certainly has a lot more to say than his predecessor. Not only that, but he dilligently writes down everything that people say in the in-game chat for later review and potential blackmail.

Hopefully he won’t go bananas like the last one.

This evening, the sandbox server was upgraded to the newest version of autopilot: Version 2.0

This new version is a little more stable, a little less buggy and has a good deal of new features. Here’s what it does for the Sandbox server:

• Pauses the game when there are less than two players
• Greets all players as they join, giving a message of the day, including a link to the Wiki and an admin email in case of trouble
• Logs all of the in-game chat to a database, so that the game’s conversation can be followed on the web
• Automatically changes the server password every five minutes, to keep the server free from casual vandals and other disruptive types (the server’s password being available through the wiki or from members on IRC)
• Connects the #openttdcoop IRC channel with the in-game chat, allowing people in the IRC channel to converse with players int he game, and vice versa
• Provides a plethora of commands to IRC users, including the ability to see who’s playing on the server, and in which company, and to request various URLs for the community.

Commands are given in the IRC channel by preceding them with a ! or by sending a private message to sandbox. A quick rundown of the commands:

version shows the autopilot version

newgrf (currently disabled due to extreme verbosity) lists the newgrf lines you’d need in your openttd.cfg

companies lists the companies that are in the game

players lists the players that are int he game

url gives the #openttdcoop web site address

wiki gives the URL of the wiki

blog gives the URL of this blog

email gives the email address of an admin (er, mine, as it happens…)
revision shows the revision number of the openttd server

playercount shows you the number of players inthe game

companycount shows you the number of companies in the game

There are a couple of others, too. Commands can be added, modified and removed by the server admins as they see fit.

The software will be released to the general public for testing once the documentation has been written.