#openttdcoop

OpenTTD Devs brought a lot of new features into the trunk or in other words a lot of patchs have been added to the trunk recently. First of all I didn’t thougt its worth to blog it. But I don’t want to miss them and if you are not reading the changelog constantly you maybe didn’t even notice it.

The Group Interface:
r9874 | rubidium | 2007-05-19 11:40:18 +0200 (Sat, 19 May 2007) | 2 lines

Feature: advanced vehicle lists a.k.a. group interface. Now you can make groups of vehicles and perform all kinds of tasks on that given group. Original code by nycom and graphics by skidd13.

I still miss the rules option, but its good to have those list for organising trains.
Follow the development in this thread at tt-forums.net

2 new Zoom Levels

r9884 | truelight | 2007-05-20 00:48:04 +0200 (Sun, 20 May 2007) | 6 lines
-Feature: 2 new zoom-out levels: 8 times and 16 times

This gives us a better overview over the maps and is also interesting for doing screenshots.
Maybe users with less cpu speed can’t use this feature properly (imagine 800 trains+)

Adjacent Stations

r9905 | maedhros | 2007-05-23 19:33:03 +0200 (Wed, 23 May 2007) | 2 lines
-Feature: Allow building new stations adjacent to existing stations by holding down control. Based on a patch by Wolf01.

Another funky feature and the station-walk-trick is gone!
Read more in the Forum Thread

The Devs did a great job those days, and another -yay- for skidd13 and Wolf01 the patch coders.

If you might not follow the development of OpenTTD so clearly, here is something really great. More eyecandy yet to come. Its awesome:

r9779 | belugas | 2007-05-04 18:27:13 +0200 (Fri, 04 May 2007) | 8 lines

-Feature: Add the possiblity to choose different road patterns for towns to use.
Possible patterns are :
No Road (not available in scenario editor)
Original (for the nostalgics)
Better Roads (same as original, but based on distance of 2 tiles instead of one)
2x2 grids
3x3 grids
Patch by skiddl13

Maybe you have noticed the problems at the sandbox these days. A lot of players are de-syncing randomly. Mostly the problem occurs right after joining and after trys it works, sometimes players de-sync after some month or later though. Anyway we are almost done with the current Sandbox game. A bit of jam fixing is needed.

The good news is, the devs of openttd are still over this problem and hopefully they will release a bugfix soon. As far as I have followed the discussions its a random bits problem again, or maybe something else.

Please don’t be discouraged by those problems, we will update the server as soon as possible.

Update:
The problems seem to be found (not fixed yet). Have a look at the interesting article at TrueLights Blog.
Thank you openttd devs for making our life easier again. 🙂

After playing some OpenTTDCoop games I thought about a local game with a grid all over the map. All you need is a crazy network plan, a lot of time and a jackass who build this plan, me.
Read the rest of this entry »

With centralized aproach which is taken by #openttdcoop community it’s hard to overstress importance of prioritizing traffic streams. It is very essential to keep mainline traffic moving because under high volume conditions, when trains are closely following each other, slowing down one train means slowing down whole lane. That might (and often does) cause a chain of negative events leading substantionaly lower throughput of network and traffic jams at other part. Bear in mind – stoping traffic is nearly instant, however accelerating whole lane might take months of game time. This is something to be avoided at all costs, sideline traffic must wait untill there is a gap and only then merge into ML without any intereference to ML stream.

This is why i recommend designing SLHs with non-blockign idea in mind and having properly sized priority windows.

Read the rest of this entry »