#openttdcoop

Since todays Nightly (r9939), OpenTTD supports Trams. *hands up*
Some facts:

• they act in the same way as busses, only difference you need to build special tramway tracks.
• tram depots look a bit different
• openttd doesn’t include tram grfs by default yet

As long as you don’t add your own tram grf’s the tramway menu stays in-activated.
There are only few tram packages around:

• Serbian Tram Set
• German Tram Set
• Japan Tram Set
• UK Tram Set (not coded yet)

I think we will update our grf package soon, but so far the trams are not announced by an official.

OpenTTD Devs brought a lot of new features into the trunk or in other words a lot of patchs have been added to the trunk recently. First of all I didn’t thougt its worth to blog it. But I don’t want to miss them and if you are not reading the changelog constantly you maybe didn’t even notice it.

The Group Interface:
r9874 | rubidium | 2007-05-19 11:40:18 +0200 (Sat, 19 May 2007) | 2 lines

Feature: advanced vehicle lists a.k.a. group interface. Now you can make groups of vehicles and perform all kinds of tasks on that given group. Original code by nycom and graphics by skidd13.

I still miss the rules option, but its good to have those list for organising trains.
Follow the development in this thread at tt-forums.net

2 new Zoom Levels

r9884 | truelight | 2007-05-20 00:48:04 +0200 (Sun, 20 May 2007) | 6 lines
-Feature: 2 new zoom-out levels: 8 times and 16 times

This gives us a better overview over the maps and is also interesting for doing screenshots.
Maybe users with less cpu speed can’t use this feature properly (imagine 800 trains+)

Adjacent Stations

r9905 | maedhros | 2007-05-23 19:33:03 +0200 (Wed, 23 May 2007) | 2 lines
-Feature: Allow building new stations adjacent to existing stations by holding down control. Based on a patch by Wolf01.

Another funky feature and the station-walk-trick is gone!
Read more in the Forum Thread

The Devs did a great job those days, and another -yay- for skidd13 and Wolf01 the patch coders.

Some of most comonly used elements in network are mergers, pretty much any network node such as hub or station require track/lane mixing. Easiest of them all is just a simple cross of as many lanes there are to as many as needed, however since that would be a one single block – only one train can pass it at given time and that would lower thoughput to pretty much same level as a single lane no mater how many output tracks there are:

Only one train at time can pass through.
Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever had the problem of crossing tracks going parallel to each other. And there was not enough space (width) to build a proper cross which doesn’t slow down trains.
This construction makes it possible to cross 4 tracks (2X2), for example a typical mainline (LL__RR) near a station area or to split some tracks going at wrong points. Of course this works also with only two tracks (1X1), but its not worth to show it.

The keypoints:
+ very small (area is 6×19)
+ double bridges/tunnels don’t cause trains to jam

– it may cause problems with small trains (TL: 2/3, because bridges are quite long)
– its not in the stable releases, you need one of the newer OpenTTD nightlies
I’ll also add it to the Junctionary,
enjoy it and happy building

Today we started Public Server Game #41, which uses the Marsset GRFs. It is already included in the NewGRF-Package v4. You can easily join the server.
On the other hand we are continuing Public Server Game #40 on a temporary machine provided by Alanin. This might be the only time we do this, because its a server with a dynamic IP, but the only process running on it is OpenTTD and MySQL to store the passwords. 🙂
The last time I topped the server we had 611 trains and a cpu usage of 27%, I hope we can create a game with 1k – 1,5k trains and I bet the cpu has more capacity than our network.

To request the servers password you have to join our IRC channel and use the command %password.

Update:
From time to time dnydns is not working. The Server is advertised and you can connect to it by updating the masterserver list in your OpenTTD mulitplayer menu (find server button).