#openttdcoop

Hello, this time I am not going to write an article which would attempt to describe some part of building, or any other kind of documentation helpful for learning directly.

Through the time of me being around, it happened quite a few times that I was asked questions about things from the past, about history of openttdcoop, about what I myself did, what happened here and there.

To be entirely honest, I just got a new keyboard and I am just in the typing mood, which means I will not be paying too much attention to proper well thought out structure of the article or similar things, I will just put it as it comes and one more thing … and do not expect images! 😀

Alright, now we lost 99% readers by not including images, we can continue… It might be short, it might be long, it might be useful, it might not. Either way I hope you enjoy reading as much as possible and perhaps the article will help you understand how the things around here work.

I wish you a good read of the random nonsense which follows :>

Start it!

I do not think any OpenTTD story starts any different than the first phase being to actually start playing OpenTTD. So I did exactly that. Today I do not even know when could have that happened, but that is not quite the important part now.

My own games usually started by trying to connect everything to one or two stations, usually one drop for almost everything, second for steel production and goods drop, or similarly. I did not really change the actual system of the network almost ever, but I often changed newGRFs as I was very interested in those since the beginning.

After some time, I had an era of discovery that no trains are faster (while maintaining reasonable accelration, or being able to carry cargo) than the original ones. I was also quite disappointed by some train sets with their weird flaws influencing gameplay in a bad way. Therefore my discoveries resulted in playing only with original trains, but I often added other newGRFs, like landscape, trees, towns, and so on just to make the game look nice.

The process of game after game continued ad infinitum and although not every game was automatically better than the previous one, the bigger ones were. Point being, I did not finish every game I started, as I simply lost the focus, got bored, and so on. But with the finished games, I always looked at the result and thought what could I do better.

And speaking about looking what to do better, googling started. The wiki at openttd.org and the junctions shown there made me really wtf as they do not really work and everybody who actually plays with traffic probably knows that. The second thing I found was what else than openttdcoop.

Evil discovered greater evil

I started browsing the archives and I do not know if I polluted my pants right away (especially when discovering ProZone Game 5 which was absolutely unmatched in levels of wtf-on-the-first-sight at the time) or later on, or if at all, but I was certainly not just amazed. I felt this is the thing I want to reach, the exact style I want to play like.

With following reading and archive browsing frenzy, I started discovering various nice games, and started to try these concepts on my own.

Why I did not join openttdcoop right away? I do not know, I have no clue at all. Perhaps I just wanted to know stuff before I do, perhaps I simply had so much fun building on my own, and trying the things I learned. Whatever the reason, as I tried everything on my own, I got to know the general logic of the game quite well.

Obviously the problem was that I did not know everything that is used on the servers, I for example had no idea about merging tracks as when I built alone, I just connected lines where I felt like traffic is lower,I connected it. If a line jammed, I just added another line. That often resulted in e.g. 6L_6R with very inefficient traffic, but it worked (not very stable, but worked … somewhat).

Not too long after discovering openttdcoop, I actually joined the public server though. I do not know which game it was, maybe 134, maybe sometime else, I really do not know anymore. Still, I did join, talk to people a bit, but I did not really play or build there. In fact, my first impact I can remember might be somewhere in the 140’s which is quite a few months afterwards.

When finally joining for good, my first surprise came when I confronted mergers and SRNW, neither of which I knew a thing about yet. With people around trying to explain, with the help of wiki articles I managed to somewhat understand what is going on.

Absorbing mayhem

With basically every single thing I learned, I browsed the archives again or just looked for those things in the games I browsed. For example I started appreciating psg 121 that much more, because I suddenly realized how huge impact that game had on SRNW itself. (Public Server Game 121 was the first large scale usage of SRNW as we know it)

All this archive madness not only made me know a lot of openttdcoop building styles and history, but I also got to indirectly know the people even though I did not know them directly from metting them on the server yet.

And not to speak just emptily, seeing some names in many games, on majorly wtf constructions over and over again, one gets to quickly remember names like Mark, Combuster, Osai, ODM, KenjiE20, Chris Booth, XeryusTC, Thraxian, tneo, … You probably do not know those names today, but at the time those were the big people pulling the playing, defining the true awesomeness of cooperation (and brainmelt).

So when joining the server, I already had quite a good idea who is who, and given that Mark was active a lot, I got to talk to him a lot as well. Mark was not just one of the pack, he was the person who did the most at those times, the one who made enormous amount of concepts and because of that game plans carried his name. The others were doing a lot of stuff just as well, but not nearly as much. Apart from all the activity and effort, Mark became not just someone I looked up to, but also my friend because of his very nice nature in general. I started to realize that I do not want to just participate as „one of openttdcoop“. I was always curious about the latest developments and the best methods in concepts, I wanted to be the person who helps Mark.

Joining the brainmelt team

Just months after I started actively playing on the Public Server, I cannot describe the cold shower which hit me when Mark announced that he is leaving for Australia for unknown period of time. My openttdcoop world changed drastically that day. On 21st January -that year- (was psg173, find out the rest), we said our goodbyes and openttdcoop community was without a dominant leader since.

As games 174-177 reflect, there was very successful collective effort in keeping our community active. After all, there were many amazing people (many of them members) around, who could still make the action happen no less than Mark.

Usurping lead among the weird people

Sometime in February, I was almost brought to manly tears of happiness when I was told I am an openttdcoop member now. Little did I know what a journey follows…

Here probably comes an era you could call as „my time“ even though I am not too sure if that is a good name to call it at all, but due to many factors, my plans started to win in many games. I was the most active person at the time, I built a lot, and tried to make my plans better than the previous ones, learning from mistakes, and at the same time trying to offer something new to people – a very similar process to when I played alone after all.

Since game 179 I also started to create maps as there simply wasn’t anybody else who would do it. I did not know anything, was not given any hints. All I knew was my experience from offline playing and my own settings/newGRF configurations, and the things I got to know from browsing archives (after all, I often did not try just concepts I found at openttdcop, but also the newGRF settings).

And then it just all went as one big snowball. I perhaps did not have complete control over what is happening, and not always all attempts were successful, but I started to gather many people who would follow me and support my new future ideas. My ideas were that much easier to do as I was the one creating maps, so I could imagine what to do on them and sometimes I obviously did have a very specific idea what to do with the map, like creating a map for a specific plan.

Public Server Game 180 showed a completely outrageously huge progress in SRNW that nobody tried before – not just that we played with orderless trains, but mainly the applied idea to regulate the whole network, not just sidelines. We also managed to create a new train count record of Logic game category, scoring 3000 trains (worth noting that there were around 750 logic trains). Such as game is not just one of the many, it writes into your memories with eternal ink, into your personal hall of fame of unique games which you will always remember. Just like those several truly finished games I talked about when I played offline.

Other weird people

What I did not mention yet is that I was not active at only openttdcoop. I also often played on czech servers, two most noteworthy owners of those servers are Razmir and Valis – if any of you know them. It all started with a rather normal process, first I built a random tiny network on Razmir’s server. I was told I do not build too badly… And I do not know if it is just the way my mind works, but it was like saying „This is fine, but go ahead and melt our brains like there is no tomorrow or the day after that.“ And exactly that happened. I visited their server about as often as openttdcoop servers, but it had a different purpose for me.

Openttdcoop was always the top notch place, the highest league. The czech servers however were a place where I did a lot of experiments. Many of you probably do not know that both of the designs of overflows, and the concepts of refit as we know them today, I actually first used and developed on these czech servers. In fact I played public server game testcases on one of those servers too, before I actually submitted the plan – to be absolutely sure it will work.

I do not mention all this for no reason, but mainly because I met a very specific person in there. If you browse the archive and skim through this era of games in the 180’s, you could notice there one name – Vitus. He very quickly became my right hand, not only was he Czech just like me, but he had completely the same approach to the game as me, and at the time he was the only person who could not just understand and replicate my concepts, but he could build upon them and help me make something even better than last time.

Unforunately studies took Vitus away after quite a short time, but for the amount of time we got, we made the best out of it.

Yet Another WTF – the big one

At the time when even Mark was around, Osai brought up the idea of fail-safe shifters. This idea became the new trend in shifters as it worked better than the previous design in every regard. The problem was, not for me. I thought there are stupidly big gaps because trains aren’t ever stopping (which was actually the point of SML). As I used SML a bit differently in my own games (simply to shift trains elsewhere, disregarding the idea of full-speed-joining), I always built the shifters so that trains can stop there and wait for a gap.

Since failsafe shifters never made trains stop, and left random gaps on the ML, I was impressed by the design, but it probably wouldn’t be me if I did not try to fix that. The first effort coming from this was a hybrid shifter. Those things might still be on the SML wikipage, they might also not be as I might have removed them during the last cleanup … either way, it was a failsafe fullspeed shifter with an extra accelerated join which would let trains wait for a gap, filling those gaps very effectively. Downside was that those things took enormous amount of space, making them never used in a real coop game – only in my test savegames.

Even though a concept is not used, it apparently does not mean that the idea is useless. Seeing that the hybrid shifters do not quite achieve perfection yet as there still are gaps caused by the randomness, there was no other way to go than figure the hell out how to fix that.

And rather quickly was born the idea which then resulted in the mind-raping brutality today known as ProZone Game 13.

ProZone Game 13 – yes, seriously.

I mentioned that we made the best out of our time with Vitus, and this is exactly what I meant by that. ProZone Game 13 was something absolutely special, extremely hard to pull off, being completely new, using TONS of completely new elements like figuring out how to stop trains reliably, figuring out some timings, figuring out when trains jam here and there in the extreme conditions of maximum train packing.

We not only spent with it an amount of time which should probably be described as totally fanatical, we not only managed to make the concept work, but we also broke the record of a single cargo production, raising the previous record from 100k from psg121 to 154k.

We ended the game because it became simply unplayable on the server. The mainline was not completely full, but the concept worked. And the “was not completely full” clearly did motivate me to change that. Even though server game was not the option, I carried on offline. Offline but not alone, I had endless ICQ (people actually used that in this stone age) chats with Vitus, discussing who found out which error, exchanging saves, train numbers which would cause errors, and so on.

Finally I managed to break the 200k goods per month, and the concept seemed very stable (reaching the 200k meant I had to make many things improve a lot, not just add more stuff). Then the game overwrote the record again, and it was finally done. It was however not just an achievement of “we broke number X”. For me it will always live as the memory of the awesome cooperation and pushing the limits as a team.

The most active times

Time went on, games were played and concepts were pushed forward with every game. More and more amazing games made it into the personal hall of fame, like psg 186 being not just vast improvement of refit attempt from 179, but also the first game which managed to beat 2000 trains, before that reached only by psg131 which had double the map size. The train record got a new rule by that time – 512×512 and similar – like 256×1024 to be legitimate for this record. (we did not use larger maps anyway so it was not too necessary to make such rule, but later on I will describe another example of sanitizing record rules which will be more obvious/important).

And it went on and on again, games like 192 which brought a new concept of passenger transferring ended up quite nicely, but many people started to hate me as I decided the voting by just one vote … and that was the vote of Vitus. The voting took forever and I knew that if he agrees with the plan, it has a bigger value than if 5 people who do not quite know much about the game vote for something else. But you cannot justify that really. And even if I could, it caused a conflict which was my first experience with not being accepted too well by other members, and well, for understandable reasons as if I believe correctly, the second plan was his.

More and more

Not just games were played, but I also started writing ABRs at some point. It became the main tool for everybody to keep up with the pace I set, and for some people it was the tool to follow me as close as possible. Due to this and the constantly improving nature of everything we built, the active people started to learn a lot and the future active member base started to form.

During the 190’s were quite a few big games, from my point of view most noteworthy 192 which I already mentioned, but also 197 with a nice, at that time rather standard refit, 198 with the rings which make not one person say “what the actual f is this”, and 199 which tried to improve and build upon the concept from psg180. Quite interesting to note were also other games, like 191 for which I made quite a special map with a hacked map generator from SmatZ, not to mention that I made every town name in that map on my own – e.g. Crab Combat Academy and other animal stuff. Game 195 was the first game where Sylf had his plan win, and the game turned into a brutal mayhem as we expanded the central roundabout as long as we could.

Public Server Game 196 was very special by the plan, and the result. I originally made the map to suit for concept which was then used in psg199, but as I left for vacation during planning/voting, I did submit the plan but it was not used in the game as it was too complicated to pull off without the plan author being there. Thus ODM won. And nothing against ODM, he is a great person and I love him, but he simply had the experience from the old days, and the game showed various massive problems, like not expecting oil wells to dry out and then have half of the map basically unused, leaving massive traffic on the other end, and similar things.

The experience of such problems probably motivated people to trust my plans that much more, or maybe it is just a wrong speculation from my side and it didn’t have any such effect like that.

Will this never stop or what?

Before I talk about the big things happening in psg200, I have to note psg199. If I remember correctly, there were only 2 times when Mark actively appeared in the actual game. Those were psg187 and 199. In 187 he made a plan but did not play afterwards. I disqualified my plans and told others to go vote for him so we could play a plan with the name Mark on it, after 15 games of his absence. The second time was 199 where he actually tried to continue with his latest (before he left) developments of a SRNW transfer station. Unfortunately the concept was a bit too simple and did not quite work reliably enough, as it released some trains which did not load. Per usual, this motivated me to improve that…

Public Server Game 200 was celebration of a new year and at the same time – well – getting up to 200 games. I spent an insane amount of time preparing the actual map, picking newGRFs, and thinking what to do in the game. The result you can see on your own, we made islands with various concepts, showcasing what are all the kinds of game we play and what do we use.

In relation to the previous game 199, the efforts in creating a flawless SRNW transfer station were one of the things I focused on in that game, bringing a new way of trying to make the concept actually work. The design I made was actually quite operational, but that did not quite mean it was small or simple to build…

The rest of game 200 were many interesting parts, like constructing the overflow island, creating the logic wtf island with mfb (who joined us in game 199 due to being interested in logic, and showcasing his wrong!! 😀 logic NOT gate). Mfb stayed with us for the future games too :).

When we celebrated the 200 properly, we decided to be lazy and stopped playing, the end. Alright that is not exactly how it was. Public Server Game 201 was one of the most cpu demanding games up to now, breaking one of the last untouched records – world population. Playing the game itself was not as noteworthy as the outcome, even though it was a lot of fun (BEER YORK will always live on in my heart … also because it was a new concept in Sbahn construction). As I talked earlier about sanitizing records, world population was a record from game 101, which reached around 3 million world pop. Problem was, the passengers actually transported were very low. With this we not only made a new record doubling the old one – 6m now, but we also made a new rule that all towns should always be properly serviced before growing them further, the properly being 50% passengers transported or more, but most or all of the towns in that game had well over 60%, most of them even over 70.

More games were played, big wtf going on in 203 … even though the concept was not quite effective, it was quite awesome on the first sight 😀 … 205 was also quite interesting as it brought the new refit station with non-stacking depots (see ABR11 if you don’t know what those are). 207 was quite interesting as a completely new person came and made a plan. I tried to help him, give him advices, and it resulted into me getting a new idea how to utilize SML (which was unused up to this point because pzg13 basically demotivated everybody to use the concept in the normal form at all … plus SML is boring as there is no special fun in expanding going on, just cloning the shifter pattern). That was to use the shifters as a mechanism by which trains would try to get out of the ML loop, trying to shift that way. It was also a lesson that even new people can have major impact on concept development, even if they “”only”” provide the right accidental push for the brainfart avalanche to start moving.

A bit less stable times

In 210s, I was not too happy with the general atmosphere around the server as the amount of people who hated me for winning too many plans was growing quite a bit … but I was just trying to make the best games we could possibly make, I could not stop making plans just to allow worse plans win for no reason. Due to other circumstances in my life (lot of stress during moving, lots of work, various other sub-optimal things), by the start of psg213 I got some kind of a mental breakdown and decided to quit. I wrote a long blog article full of anger and bad feelings, closed the IRC and left.

For 2 days. Then I realized there is no reason why I should throw all the things away, and if reduce activity, then definitely not in such a manner. The welcome back everybody gave me was more than making my decision rock solid. That day I did not realize I could not quit, because I could, but I realized I did not want to, and how much this all meant for me.

And then we did some brutal mayhem in psg213 per usual… I not only loved my reverser SLH and the stack-proof depot station, but also a new trend arose – building downhill mergers for increased acceleration.

What followed 213 could be called a glorious “return” indeed. 214 was insane, giving life to the multi-cargo refit SRNW concept and making just one hub with many lines, guaranteed madness. 215 was a nice pax game to take a break and 216 how else than a record breaking game – this time train count on 256×256. Public Server Game 218 had one of my favorite plans, building a mail network above snow line, and supplying farming network below it. The cherry on the pie was the Swedish rails which have snow-aware bridges.

Public Server Game 219 was very interesting, starting like a normal game, slowly expanding to 3 lines and so on. The plan was not somehow massively special, just a standard cargo game with traffic distribution planned out quite well. But what happened in the second phase of the game was that even though my sit-playing-OpenTTD-all-day time and the era was long gone, my girlfriend went on a trip for like 3 days. What I did was, I went from school, bought a frigging bread and drinks, and for the next few days I did NOTHING else than play OpenTTD, eat bread, drink the stuff, go to toilet and sleep. Result? 2666 trains with a very watery map, but the numbers of the record are nothing compared to the experience of such a focused vacation 😀 it was awesome.

Mark returning

In early 220’s my activity might have dropped a little bit, but in 220 a dream came true. After all those nights waiting awake for a long time, after all the mornings reading the logs from last night, Mark has returned home for Christmas. And I mean, damn what else do you do on Christmas than play OpenTTD? Public Server Game 222 was in no other fashion than madness on Mark style, edition royale. After 222 Mark wanted to play SRNW (what else when he is the one who made the first steps in it) … one of the things he tried to achieve before he left to Australia was making a multi-cargo SRNW – e.g. separate networks like psg 172,, trying to think about a concept of splitting trains by their length, or other solutions. Luckily, psg 207 took place beforehand already, so we tried the unreachable waypoint concept with multiple cargoes. Transfer SRNW stations were attempted as well :). 225 was simply insane refit game, ‘nuff said. Well might also say something about 229 and the RV SRNW station, or the layered BBH in psg 230 :).

Welcome server, creating maps and related stuff

I did not mention it yet, but sometime around psg175 or such, the stable (Welcome) server started to run. I started caring about it, trying out some settings and so on. From the beginning it was the welcome server of OpenTTD 1.0.0 so it did not even use newGRFs. But later on it started to do just that. Obviously nothing else could have been a result than me starting to fiddle with newGRFs more than ever before as games on a “normal” server simply run for a lot shorter time than on the PS, but the newGRF configuration is also a lot harder as you need to left all players have some options what to do, and that for as much in the whole game time (e.g. 1920-2000).

I created hundreds of maps and created some specific style which is followed until today on the Welcome Server, creating it to be a peaceful server with various people who have some knowledge about the game.

When preparing the newGRF settings, I was often running into various common problems, typically that a train set has poor variety of engines even though there are hundreds of engines – but none of them useful, or a problem where no train set would support industry sets with unique visual appearance for every cargo in wagons, problems with limited game time usefulness of many sets, and so on.

NUTS: starting to work on it

Sitting here today and knowing the “future” of our story, you probably know exactly what followed. I was collecting those problems and over time it started to grow into motivation to dive into pixel drawing, and create my own train set.

I did not know absolutely anything about newGRF creating, I did not know anything about pixel art. All I had was photoshop and notepad, tt-wiki.net and IRC. First I decided to only draw sprites as coding isn’t quite my strongest part and I was kind of hoping I would get some coder interested in programming the train set.

The process of drawing started sometime around psg 209 which was one of the times when my activity started decreasing. The general idea how the train set would work was already clear, of course without details, but the main job now was to create sprites for the trains to make them look somehow.

I do not know why, but the first train I drew, I really liked. Funnily enough, it is the train used now (0.5.8) as Monorail Medium 1-3, without any further edits. Other than that, I drew tons of trains, trying to discover drawing techniques used mainly in original Transport Tycoon Deluxe graphics. And I discovered many. This gave me a great process of starting (I would not say it gave me a good start as it took several months, so more like starting :> ). On and off, I drew more and more sprites.

Sometime in the last quarter of 2011 I started coding the train set because I realized there is not anybody as active as I would need, who would be willing to code my madness at the rate I drew sprites. So again knowing nothing, I started making some little steps, being confused as HELL what is going on even though NML (the thing for programming newGRFs) is very simple.

Around beginning of March, I realized April fool’s is coming which would make a perfect opportunity to have the set released. I was not exactly super close to having the final result, but under the whip of motivation, I managed to draw an enormous amount of sprites and release NUTS 0.0.1 by 1st April 2012.

ARE YOU NUTS?

That day was probably the most noteworthy day of my OpenTTD story so far. I presented my huge project I was working on for around 8 months to the playerbase I cared about, and the playerbase which was expected to understand and use the train set most effectively.

I obviously was quite exhausted after the massive frenzy of drawing and coding during March so I thought “Nice, now I have it done, the stepping stone is laid. Now I can take some rest.” And exactly that followed, except it was in the exact opposite. NUTS versions were coming out like 3 per week, fixing a lot of bugs we found, even redrawing some of the ugliest trains. The development was not slowing down at all for months. For example when psg 234 was using NUTS and did not have the nicest wagons, I just drew new ones and updated it, just so that we could use it in that game. 🙂 The motivation gained when you know the thing is going to be immediately used is quite powerful!

Interestingly enough, my time recognition is quite blurred from there. I obviously started having more and more work other than OpenTTD, but it mainly stopped being structured, my “time grid” suddenly does not use units of games, but of versions, of features and new things I did for NUTS. And even that is quite rough, I basically remember mainly the latest state, which is obviously what I build upon and live with.

Nuttah = using it!!

Even though I reduced my playing activity to minimum, I quite often at least participated a little bit in games which used new NUTS features – because seeing the stuff in movement after you spent days or weeks making it happen is great. Also that was the place where I often got feedback, and discovered bugs, or got bug reports from people.

With the new features and opened possibilities NUTS gives, there were some innovating games using things like refit, or making passenger games more interesting by interesting engine variety in stats, or well … toyland logic games with engines which have faces and hair? Public Server Game 245 is very special to me as it brought a completely new concept of supplying industries in FIRS, doable only with the combination of universal and regular NUTS wagons.

All this refitting thingy apparently did not lure in just me, but also other people. More importantly, this mayhem also carried on to the next game 246. A standard game by the look of it, but only one thing happened differently: People built. And built. And expanded. And then expanded again. And because the rule of MOAR is merciless, they expanded again, and to make sure it is not nearly sane, again. Then the game went into WTF mode and it was moved to ProZone where it was expanded for a change. Combine the ingredients and you get 3000 poorly accelerating AsiaStars.

Observing how various trains behave (e.g. original trains have a lot of tractive effort in compare to other train sets, which makes the total acceleration trail rather long, but the low speeds very quick, which is actually quite good), I got some deeper understanding on how to make stats of trains vary more, how to make more usages viable, and how to make the spectrum NUTS offers more diverse than before.

Speaking train stats, there is one thing which does not touch only those. Public Server Game 250 meant SLUGS. Although they were present in NUTS before already, now they got capabilities to carry cargo, and become a viable engine. [madness]

Slugs are however a lot more special for my story than just a train which looks like an animal. As throughout my story I played a considerable amount of games without cooperating, I also created my own style I utilize when I play alone. That generally means: Build tracks everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

With that, I got to realize that building long full speed curves is cute, but people learn quicker the important things when they do not have to bother about that. And many NUTS engines do allow to use shorter curves which means people can focus more on systematic structure of the railway instead of focusing on following curve lengths and composition of the tracks.

But this is not just new player friendly, it is also my style friendly. Building high track densities is obviously a lot more convenient when your trains can travel full speed through anything.

And Slugs are the perfect train for that.

Other NUTS development bla bla, read the changelog :>

Up to this time, NUTS has improved considerably, even though I can say with every “current” version at any given time that I am very happy with the outcome, I still know (question is if I will ever stop knowing that) there is still space to improve it, add new things and so on. At this point I can only say I found out yet another usage of trains, allowing to add yet another few train classes, which is always nice as it gives more reason to draw something new.

Don’t try this at home

Related to playing, you can see me play rather rarely. It also took me several months to complete ProZoneGame 2013 which was partially nostalgic – mostly due to reasons mentioned in this article – and partially simply yet another episode of “improve your concept, beat your records”, 102435th episode.

Somewhat Conclusion

In general, all I can say is that I am very happy with the way things work here right now, with the amount of people willing to do things, to participate, and to make this a nice place to spend some free hours at.

[Well some of you lazy bastards could go update some wiki pages and stuff :P]… mostly stuff.

Because I have already mentioned most of the things I have to say, I should probably conclude this thing somehow. Can’t say I feel like hanging myself now so a verbal conclusion will probably have to do.

All I wanted to give you with this article is the experience I have went through when I have been here with you, perhaps it will help you in some way. This has been my story and I am very happy of every moment I spent here, lately of course mainly of my newGRF creations, but of being here to help create such an awesome community as this is. There are many members now who I personally helped, and became friend with. There are many people who might not be members just yet, but they are very nice to see and talk to, not to mention seeing their contributions to the game.

Keep in mind that if you want to do something in this world of OpenTTD, you can always ask others if they want to do the same as you do, be it playing the game, writing wiki or any other contributions. But do not be disappointed if they do not follow – however, you can be sure that if you show them the way by being the first one going in that direction, they might.

There does not existing anything like “I don’t know how to do …”.

If you try, you will either succeed, or fail and learn – and perhaps succeed the next try. And nobody will (most likely) kill you for failing. 🙂 If you want to do something, just do it 🙂 [this is not an advertisement for Nike]

What I mean by all that is:

Do not rely on just someone like me falling into the trap “but he knows this, he does that, he is around for a long time, and so on”, you can do the same – perhaps not on the first try, but you can. Especially if I try to help you when I can. 😉

I hope you enjoyed this special article of spewing random parts of history, and perhaps some use in it, thank you for reading in case you actually got this far.