#openttdcoop

Hello folks,

Our community is having its fourth birthday this january. The year 2005 – sounds pretty recent, doesn’t it? In fact, if you analyze our community from today’s point of view you’ll notice what a long time 4 years can be! Today, I invite you to join me on my archeologic expedition into the past of #openttdcoop!

Well, as you may have expected, the players which founded #openttdcoop met up in the IRC channel of #openttd, which was located on the freenode IRC network in 2005 (and moved to oftc.net in 2006 or 2007). Most conversation about a game server and such was of course done via IRC – unfortunately, there is little possibility to get some IRC logs from that time. However, the first discovery I made tonight was an article on TT-Forums: Click. In this thread, acidd_uk writes:

Just an idea – how about a community cooperative server. The point being, to set the benchmark for how to make a ‘good’ transport empire. This would involve one server and one company. All players that joined would join the same company. I think the issues this would raise – teamwork, routes, trunk lines etc, would be veruy interesting – everyone has to work together to see what we are capable of. The resulting transport empire would then be the ‘definitive’ OpenTTD company. This would work even better with bigmaps, but would still be nice to do with 0.3.6 🙂

A guy named jabberwalkee_ (a nick which I definitely don’t remember) replied:

now that is the best thing I have ever heard. Autosave points would need to be saved frequently to prevent smacktards from ruining weeks of fun. SOUNDS GREAT TO ME!

Of course it was a great idea! But what about those smacktards who ruin weeks of fun? Sounds familiar, doesnt it? However, one has to see that vandalism was really low at all times, I guess #openttdcoop only banned some 3-5 persons over all 4 years. But at first, the problem was to find a decent server. Expresso, which is know as Xahodo at #openttdcoop had a generous offer to the upcoming community:

Well, tbh I’m on a home connection, but I need to know what the bandwidth needs are for the dedicated server (my connection speed currently is 1536Kb/384Kb).

And as for the machine: would a P200-MMX with 64MB ram do as the machine? (It’s running Linux, currently not optimized for server jobs, but I can change that). The machine is a bit aging, but it is still running fine and doesn’t consume much power (I’ve got a better machine, but it consumes more power).

What a cute question? P200-MMX (sounded like a feature in 2005?), 64MB could possibly do the job? You bet it would not, no way, never ever! Remember: it was not a long way from these very beginnings to those Pile Transport kind of games! In the end, #openttdcoop played games which were kindly hosted by guru3, a long-time member of our community. He also hosted our very first homepage, which I created in a rather uncooperative way – it was barely a HTML-hack with the most important rules and some pictures. However, it was sufficient for us at this time and the gameplay was less sophisticated anyway. This may also be due to the fact that OpenTTD was still very restrictive in 2005 (no diagonal crossings below bridges, few GRFs, 4096 units limit at stations and so on).

Well, TT-Forums offered me another gem tonight: the probably very first pictures of an #openttdcoop game to be published. A for me unknown user Holg reported:

Hey!

Here are some screenshots of our last #openttdcoop (freenode) game. Players were: Expresso, Guru3, ShaggZ and me. Not the largest game we played but someone has to start posting pictures of our games ;). This game tended to focus on city-growing.

Holg

How disappointing – he didn’t mention me! What a luck for him that I can’t remember who this guy may be anyway! On the other side, he left 5 screenshots, which illustrate the gameplay in these days without realistic acceleration: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

In these screenshots you notice some key concepts which accompanied the style of #openttdcoop throughout the years: naming of constructs (dropoff, hub3, …), town growth control, a clear distinction between sidelines and mainlines and a building concept which was followed rather strictly (look at the map shown in picture 4). If you look at picture 3 you may even notice a very early S-Bahn concept – although OpenTTD did not offer an order system which allowed feeders, so it was more like an eyecandy and town-growing measure.

Interesting to analyze how the gameplay evolved rapidly over just a few months – take a screenshot offered by Xahodo in this thread as an example from September 2005 (some 8 months after the first coop game took place). Looks pretty much like nowaday’s #openttdcoop style, doesn’t it? thgergo also posted some screenies of his work in the same game: 1, 2.

Well, so much for today. In the upcoming part of this series, I will have a closer look at some recently dug out savegames from that era – stay tuned!