#openttdcoop

Today we started a new Member Zone game. That’s great and I hope that all the stressed members will have a bit time to play the game. MemberZone games are a bit different and the last game was finished almost 4 months ago. Some of our members didn’t play a MZ game yet and I was asked what is the difference between MZ and PS.
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Today I deleted the complete wiki/images/thumb folder leading in complete removal of all thumbnails generated by the wiki.
The Reason
The thumbnail folder had an impressive size of 472 Megabyte! Most of the thumbnails were bigger than the original files. That’s not good for the visitors with low bandwidths, because they have to wait ages to load an image and not good for us because it uses a lot of our traffic and disk capacity.
The Solution
I changed the method of converting images, instead of converting them to 48bit or higher or whatever images, we now convert them to png 8bit images with:
$wgCustomConvertCommand = "/usr/bin/convert -resize %wx%h %s PNG8:%d";
The Disadvantages

• This may cause trouble with cached pages, if you don’t see an image, please append ?action=purge to the URL.
• Converting images takes more time due to higher compression
• Pages with a lot of images could time out on the first request. Do a second one in this case.

If there occur any problems, please contact me.

The OpenTTD developers released another beta today. This is probably the last beta release before they start with release candidates. According to the official announcement:

[..], the final version might very well be around before spring.
Tick Tock, Time is ticking…

This sounds very promising.

If you are writing comments very often and want to give them a ‘better-to-recognise’ personal note you should have a closer look at gravatars. Via this service you can specify an avatar for your e-mail address. Our journal fully supports gravatars and you might use it on other pages as well.
Just create an account, verify your e-mail address, upload an avatar and you are done. It’s all free.

Don’t take this wrong, its not a must. I just want to inform you about the technical possibility.