#openttdcoop

It has been a while since I have posted and early development article of NUTS and now is the time when I am starting another newGRF project – new industries. It all started as I was trying to find some ways how to improve FIRS, but the required changes would be way too major so it is better off to make a separate newGRF. In this article I am going to present to you the ideas that I have gotten so far, and how is the core of the set going to work and of course I am going to explain why.
P.S. if you have any nice ideas about the newGRF name, please do not hesitate to throw them at me 😉

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After a while I am writing an article again. But unlike before, I will not mention building styles, techniques or anything similar. As some of you might know already, I started drawing my own trains some months ago. The set is called NUTS, (Nameless/NUTS) Unrealistic Train Set and it’s home is at the devzone. In this article I would like to make an official introduction to the set and describe why and how is it expected to work. Why do I write this? Basically because I am not going to just describe how is my set going to look as that info can be found on the devzone already, but I would also want to talk about the aspects and behaviours of other sets and what do I see good or bad, or what to consider when making a plan in our games, or even what to think about when choosing newGRFs for your own single player game.

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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.
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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.
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A lot of effort has been put into it by especially Ammler and Planetmaker and we’re proud to announce a new release of the OpenTTD Coop GRF Pack. Version 7.3 has a lot of updates and additional GRF’s that have become available since the previous release.


Heavy Equipment Set in action.

You can read about all changes at this page. The pack is downwards compatible, so previous saved OpenTTD Coop games can still be played if you install the latest GRF pack.

Go get your copy of the pack now!