#openttdcoop

This week showed little activity on both mainserver and sandbox. On the Sandbox, a game with moneymakers and completed network design was trashed since no one seemed have the right idea how to implement a 4×4 mainline. A new game was set up and started Sunday afternoon.

Starting with the current sandbox game, we added a newgrf to our set, the Tropic Refurbishment Set. From now on, we can play the desert climate again. Also, we have a full backward compatibility with our archived games using the “classic” #openttdcoop-grf-set. We updated our newgrf-page and repacked our set. Make sure you both extracted the .zip and edited your .cfg in order not to loose your sync 😉

Again today, Sunday, Brianetta managed to launch his all-new Autopilot v2.0! Check this page for a complete overview!

I wanted to play tropic again today, and what is better than playing tropic again after a long time? Playing tropic with a train set ofcourse! I choose the Tropic Refurbishment Set for this :). After some minutes of convincing Mucht and Osai (thanks thumb-screws) we decided to load it into the servers. You can download the set from here. And ofcourse you need a new [newgrf] section in your configure file:
[newgrf]
planesetw_459.grf
dbsetxlw.grf
troprs_w.grf
alpinew.grf
pb_hovs_bus.grf
pb_viaduct.grf
basic_platformsw.grf
harbourw_456.grf
jcindstaw.grf
newstatsw.grf
pgs-counw.grf
pgs-freiw.grf
pgs-silvw.grf
pgs-subuw.grf
ukwaypointsw.grf

Have fun playing!

First of all, tnx to Mucht for letting me blog here… he has no idea yet where he got himself into. But okay.
This week, or anywhere near this week, the coopetition branch will finally be created. As I now left the main development of OpenTTD, I finally have the time to sit down for a project, and make it lovely. With help from people like Osai, I am sure we will do just fine.

The coopetition branch will be a branch from the main OpenTTD (trunk), but with some (or heavy) alterations.

The first thing that will be done, is apply the so called MakefileRewrite over it, and FileRelocation. This will make it look totally different, but it will make development so much easier. Anyway, that is the idea.
The second thing that will be done, is to apply some patches we have lying around. These are:

– All things related to Town management EXCEPT funding new buildings
– Better Teamchat functions

After that, we will introduce a GUI thing to select the game mode. Currently we have in mind:

Simulation / Tournament / Head-to-Head / Deathmatch

Also, you will be able to select if the score should be recorded or not (allows ladder-games). Of course this also needs a general authorization system, which will be worked on too.

As you can see, many many many things to do, so a lot of fun doing it. Of course it takes time, so don’t expect it to be done tomorrow. Any ideas, suggestions, tips, what ever are, as always, welcome. Please do limit your ideas to coopetition alike ideas.

One last thing, for those who wonder: binaries of the coopetition branch will be compiled regular, but not on set times. I will request a compile when ever we feel that the current code is ready to be compiled and released. Possible we start an other version numbering, but that has to be seen.

So, that was all I had to blog for now, should bring everyone up-to-date on the ideas.

Since the high number of trains in our games and the complexity of our networks, CPU-Usage is a real problem! Therefor we reduced the number of trains to 400 on the sandbox! But this will probably change within the next days. Today we found something out, all of you and especially the Server Hosts should be interested in.

NOTE: this code parts belong to a dedicated server:

All of you know this part of openttd.cfg

[misc]
display_opt = SHOW_TOWN_NAMES|SHOW_STATION_NAMES|SHOW_SIGNS|FULL_ANIMATION|FULL_DETAIL
resolution = 1680,967


Today we changed this excerpt to this:

[misc]
display_opt =
resolution = 1,1


And now the magic starts, the CPU-Usage dropped from an average of 83%-87% to unbelievable 47%
That’s amazing!
Only one strange thing: the description page for the resolution of the official Wiki says its a client-only setting. But as our tests show, this is somehow not true.

All of you Server Hosts out there, should change the config! Also the coopetition branch is on the way and will probably show up this week! We will have a look at this and try to deactivate the gfx rendering completely!

Stay tuned, Osai.

Altough this week had had less activity comparing to previous ones, various notable events took place:

The current mainserver game makes slow but steady progress. You definitely have to take a look at it since we have a whole new idea for the network there. Also, the Sandbox had quite some activity in the past week.

Bad news on the upcoming Coopetition-Ladder: a lot of code was done before but still a lot of code to be created. It seems like it will take some more days or even weeks to put a steady and comprehensive system online. Don’t worry – it will definitely be completed!

This week was also a week of brainstorming on different coopetition-proposals which can be implemented in our own coopetition-branch on svn.openttd.org. Look here for some of the ideas. Also, you see different game types we created on the bottom of the page, like the tournament and the head-to-head mode.

Looking at the channel-activity we noticed two new nicks at #openttdcoop: TheDancinZerg, senfbr0t and DyzDyzPL ! Welcome to our universe!