#openttdcoop

With centralized aproach which is taken by #openttdcoop community it’s hard to overstress importance of prioritizing traffic streams. It is very essential to keep mainline traffic moving because under high volume conditions, when trains are closely following each other, slowing down one train means slowing down whole lane. That might (and often does) cause a chain of negative events leading substantionaly lower throughput of network and traffic jams at other part. Bear in mind – stoping traffic is nearly instant, however accelerating whole lane might take months of game time. This is something to be avoided at all costs, sideline traffic must wait untill there is a gap and only then merge into ML without any intereference to ML stream.

This is why i recommend designing SLHs with non-blockign idea in mind and having properly sized priority windows.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello Community,
you might have noticed the steady progress of creating the fourth version of our New-Grf Package. The new pack will have a folder structure which is supported since OpenTTD 0.5.1. A liceneses are included and the package will be a full-legal one.

Please check the latest voting, I wan’t to know how your ambitions about the package type are. Do you wan’t to stick to zip again, which is almost 9MB big or do you use newer archive types like 7-zip which can shrink file size to 5,7MB? Post your thoughts and ideas as comments to this post, if you have any, or just vote silently.

If you are an author of a GRF which is included in our pack, please use the Forum Thread@tt-forums.net to contact us. I.e. when you want to have your package being included or you have any kind of proposal, problem, critic or whatever. Actually I don’t see any reason for __not__ including a grf. It’ll be published to a lot of players, a lot of players will use it and we provide the hosting and server stuff. Isn’t that great?

For more information check the Wiki category

Last week another nice patch showed up at Forums. The “High sea level-Patch” makes it possible to change the Level on which the sea starts. It makes it possible to create tunnels under the sea, to create lakes and rivers in higher areas of the map. The map’s become more colorful now and some things map-designers always dreamt of become true.

Check this image for a first impression and imagine what could be possible.

Actually water floods everything in normal OTTD and in the patch there is a solution which stops at tiles of the same level, otherwise the whole map would be flooded if you make one mistake at a higher terrain level. In my opinion there are some complete new ideas for the handling of water in OpenTTD needed. What are yours?

And don’t forget to check the authors page

In the past weeks we updated Wiki and Blog. I got a little bit deeper into the stuff and brought some good old features back.
Thx to minime we have a working php-lib again fetching Server information. If you have a closer look to the left side, you can see whether servers are online or not, how many clients are connected, and if you hover over the server title you can even see how long the game is already played in real-time.
I finally fixed most of the style-erorrs of the wiki which came with the update.

If you want more details about the games, check out our new ServerPage and the new Banner for Forum-Signature purposes.

We are also awaiting the Passenger Destinations being stable. Therefor we created a new channel + server for Beta-Testing. If you want to get in touch with this Patch on mulitplayer base join #openttdcoop.dev @ irc.oftc.net.

I did a tons of other stuff but I already forgot what it was. 🙂

Basically, the concept is to separate empty and full trains hence giving them different priorities and manipulating train streams with more efficincy while still maintaining single network.
Express in this case means trains headed to the end of mainline, either to drop or drop/pickup station.
Local would be the opposite – from drop to SLH and raw materials pickup stations.

All bi-directional trains carrying goods, pax and other applicable cargo that under circumstances goes both ways – should be using express lanes. All full trains headed to drop – should be using express lanes, but are lower priority and to be inserted into express stream with minimal interuptions of express trains stream (read: priority queue and loadbalancers needed).
All returning to pickup empty trains are getting there via local lanes, which are hubbed in close-to-regular way.

Read the rest of this entry »