Have a banana everyone!
For just a weekend offline I return to discover another new feature merged to trunk OpenTTD when reading the changelog: In the fruit basket I found a bunch of bananas, or more properly spellt, BaNaNaS.
BaNaNaS is an acronym which stands for Base graphics And NewGRF And NoAI And Scenarios and is the new content delivery system of OpenTTD. It allows you to update to the newest version of base grfs (OpenGFX), NewGRFs and NoAI – computer players.
The available online content is managed by OpenTTD on a central server, http://bananas.openttd.org/ . Prospective authors of content may register at the site and upload their work. That includes adding new work or updates of existing work of them. Only the newest version will be available for public download, though, thus making sure that no obsolete work is distributed without good reason. Good reason is, by definition of the terms and conditions, loading an existing savegame which requires and older version of the NewGRF or NoAI.
The client was updated with r15126 and now offers a “Check online content” button in the start menu:
OpenTTD start menu as of r15126
as well as a new addition to the NewGRF selection GUI with the same name:
NewGRF selection GUI with “Check online content” button in the bottem.
When clicking on the “Check online content” button you’re presented with yet another window which allows to select newly available content or already downloaded content along with a description of it:
Content download window
Locally up to date content is displayed with a green bullet, not available one with the checkbox. You can check them to mark those files for download.
So, now that staying up to date started to get way easier than it was before, let’s all congratulate the OpenTTD team for yet another piece of great work. And let’s hope that despite some reservations especially NewGRF authors will jump to this new possibility to really let players have their newest version of their work. At the time of writing there’re already 22 NewGRF available for download 🙂 . So, if you want to make it a success: use it, but don’t abuse it – e.g. only upload content which you’re the author of. Most of all: enjoy this game!
Very nice feature. The end of our GRF-pack I suppose?
Well… I deliberately left out mentioning thoughts in that direction.
Not for the reason of wanting avoid or to further a possible end of the grf pack. At least partially it will be an end of it; but for the time being it is still needed as the base of grfs in our grfpack is still quite far larger than the grfs in the online repository. On the other hand, yes, I would love to see all grfs which we distribute being uploaded by the respective authors to OpenTTD’s content delivery system. It would give us games with more up to date newGRFs.
To me it would make sense to remove GRFs from future versions of the GRF pack as they are added to BaNaNaS