OpenTTD 0.7.0-beta1 released

According to changeset 15502 the OpenTTD Developers released the first beta version of OpenTTD 0.7.0. When I started playing several years ago I always observed the roadmap page at the OpenTTD Wiki which always stated that a release of 0.7.0 is far, far, far away and will probably never happen. But finally here we are and there are some great new features (despite the general bugfixes, optimizations and minor tweaks) in the box which you definitely should not miss.
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The Feature – spree continues

Just yesterday OpenTTD got another nice feature added to trunk: arbitrary map edges! From todays nightly onwards the map borders no longer need to be water but can be at any height, allowing for a far greater flexibility and also nicer looking maps which especially adds to certain scenarios (like coastal scenarios where you don’t want to have islands…)
arbitrary map edges (in trunk since r15190)

arbitrary map edges (in trunk since r15190)

The game creation dialogue got a new button which allows you to choose the sides which are enforced to be water:game configuration window

game configuration window
This option is only available though, if you allow freeform map edges in the advanced settings (it is found in the construction section). Congratulations to and two thumbs up for OpentTTD’s newest dev, Yexo. Happy gaming to all.

Merge with trunk of NoAI branch

Fellow coopers,

great news, another big step forward in OpenTTD development: the new framework for computer players has been merged from the NoAI branch into trunk. So, from now on, there’s no need anymore to complain about those stupid AI which OpenTTD had up until now – everyone may programme his or her own AI with as much intelligence as desired. Like many people did as documented in the NoAI subforums. Check out the threads there for different AIs.

Company chart from our first coop game against a few AIs Read the rest of this entry »

Even or odd: the perfect join

the-perfect-join

Back in February, Tim blogged about the differences between even and odd train lengths. This post posed it was better to use odd train length because they use less space when queuing.

To see what happens in a dynamic, i.e. moving, situation, I have built a test track which does a full speed join. It tries to get three trains as close to each other as possible, to see what the minimum distance between trains is. On another test track, I tested what the distance between trains from standstill is.
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Big Christmas present from OpenTTD

Hello folks,

just yesterday I’ve been browsing through the change logs of OpenTTD and stumbled over some remarkable changes Rubidium commited just then. The network code underwent heavy changes – and now a game may have up to 255 clients!

(svn r14730) -Codechange: remove the need for networkclientsockets and networkclientinfo structs to be in a contiguous piece of memory and put them in a pool.
-Note: 255 should really be enough for now… making it any more means network protocol bumps.

and another commit just today:

(svn r14735) -Codechange: remove a bit of bit-waste in the map array (without changing the map array) and make the CompanyIDs contiguous.
-Note: 15 should be enough for now… making it any more means adding more bytes to the map array and thus wasting more bits instead of reducing the bit waste.

which allows now up to 15 companies instead of the usual eight 🙂 .

With the next available nightly our servers will, of course, feature as many clients – and we’ll no longer have the problem that the server might be too full when starting a new game 🙂

A big thanks from #openttdcoop to all devs of OpenTTD for the great work.
merry Christmas