#openttdcoop

Just a quick note to all people who now generate maps: get a nightly version as of today or newer and thanks to Rubidium the maps can contain automatically generated rivers. The NewGame menu has a new option which allows to set the amount of rivers on a map – though the actual generated amount of rivers may vary depending on the roughness of the terrain.

Be careful with the rivers though – they don’t heal themselves and you can’t build them ingame 😉

Rivers in arctic climate

Preface

From time to time licenses and copyright are discussed again when it comes to find a license for some collaborative work, in the (O)TTD(P) domain mostly when it comes to NewGRFs.

The idea for this article was born back when there was the big discussion about the future license of OpenGFX. At that time there wasn’t even the now well-established online content service of OpenTTD, BaNaNaS, nor was there the DevZone.

In that time (late 2008) we, mostly dihedral and myself, tried to come up with a NewGRF collection which can be freely distributed. The #openttdcoop grfpack is similar to this, so is BaNaNaS now – though both in principle only require that they themselves may distribute the NewGRFs they offer. Thus the right to re-distribute a NewGRF found on BaNaNaS or in the #openttdcoop grfpack is not automatically granted. We contacted many NewGRF authors and asked them to attach a free license to their NewGRFs (most didn’t have any license back then).
Though the initial motivation, ease to extend the #openttdcoop grfpack, is now obsoleted by BaNaNaS in a convenient way, all the arguments exchanged back then remain valid. We read a lot of licenses and had a lot of license discussions with various people. Further, even though copyright is a tedious and boring topic for most people (including myself), copyright and license issues don’t and didn’t get better or easier during the last years.
Read the rest of this entry »

As most of our players will know, we keep a log of activity on our Public Server. Few however know how it works, what is being stored and what we do with it. That’s why this blog will explain the basics of our logging functionality and what that means for openttdcoop and its players.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have had many articles about mergers, merging, balancing, packing, and so on because it definitely is one of the most important parts in our every game. This one is about the counterpart. Splitting. In this article I would like to describe most of the types of splits and show the possible usages.

Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know, we are a community based on cooperation. This also means that we must understand each other and see what each thing is supposed to do. I would like to talk about reading other’s ideas because of two basic reasons. The first is correcting stuff. Why do we have to use signs “on purpose” and why do some stations fail even though they are copied from the working ones? And what does that mean in general?

Read the rest of this entry »