#openttdcoop

This evening, the sandbox server was upgraded to the newest version of autopilot: Version 2.0

This new version is a little more stable, a little less buggy and has a good deal of new features. Here’s what it does for the Sandbox server:

• Pauses the game when there are less than two players
• Greets all players as they join, giving a message of the day, including a link to the Wiki and an admin email in case of trouble
• Logs all of the in-game chat to a database, so that the game’s conversation can be followed on the web
• Automatically changes the server password every five minutes, to keep the server free from casual vandals and other disruptive types (the server’s password being available through the wiki or from members on IRC)
• Connects the #openttdcoop IRC channel with the in-game chat, allowing people in the IRC channel to converse with players int he game, and vice versa
• Provides a plethora of commands to IRC users, including the ability to see who’s playing on the server, and in which company, and to request various URLs for the community.

Commands are given in the IRC channel by preceding them with a ! or by sending a private message to sandbox. A quick rundown of the commands:

version shows the autopilot version

newgrf (currently disabled due to extreme verbosity) lists the newgrf lines you’d need in your openttd.cfg

companies lists the companies that are in the game

players lists the players that are int he game

url gives the #openttdcoop web site address

wiki gives the URL of the wiki

blog gives the URL of this blog

email gives the email address of an admin (er, mine, as it happens…)
revision shows the revision number of the openttd server

playercount shows you the number of players inthe game

companycount shows you the number of companies in the game

There are a couple of others, too. Commands can be added, modified and removed by the server admins as they see fit.

The software will be released to the general public for testing once the documentation has been written.

Since the high number of trains in our games and the complexity of our networks, CPU-Usage is a real problem! Therefor we reduced the number of trains to 400 on the sandbox! But this will probably change within the next days. Today we found something out, all of you and especially the Server Hosts should be interested in.

NOTE: this code parts belong to a dedicated server:

All of you know this part of openttd.cfg

[misc]
display_opt = SHOW_TOWN_NAMES|SHOW_STATION_NAMES|SHOW_SIGNS|FULL_ANIMATION|FULL_DETAIL
resolution = 1680,967


Today we changed this excerpt to this:

[misc]
display_opt =
resolution = 1,1


And now the magic starts, the CPU-Usage dropped from an average of 83%-87% to unbelievable 47%
That’s amazing!
Only one strange thing: the description page for the resolution of the official Wiki says its a client-only setting. But as our tests show, this is somehow not true.

All of you Server Hosts out there, should change the config! Also the coopetition branch is on the way and will probably show up this week! We will have a look at this and try to deactivate the gfx rendering completely!

Stay tuned, Osai.

…probably I am the only one using the builds for Mac OS X, but since some days I had massive desync problems and at the latest version of our Mainserver (r6148), I wasn’t able to play at all.
Today, TrueLight and I, searched for the cause of this heavy problem. We spent several hours in compiling versions and testing them, to find out where this error exactly occured. Again and again we checked kinds of versions to get an interval where the error could be!
Finally, TrueLight dedicated the bug in r6052, fixed it and now everything is working again!!

Due to my hard work, named at this revsion 😀
http://svn.openttd.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/changeset/6176
I am happy to be back at the servers again 😉

why TrueLight has been a honorary member at #openttdcoop since quite a long time – here’s an example. Highlighted, bug explained, fixed. Respect, Mr. TrueLight!

Since TGP was merged into the trunk, OTTD-maps started to look really good. “Perlin Noise” is the name behind the function which generates this real-world-like maps we all like. The good news for you: #openttdcoop uses TGP since we switched to Nightly r5993.

The bad news for #openttdcoop: it was quite hard to understand why TGP didn’t accept our settings. Usually, for a dedicated server, you edit your openttd.cfg. You may select a TGP-seed in the variable “generation_seed =“. The thing about Linux and OTTD-Dedicated: this seed will not be used by the server! Instead, it always takes the same seed which represents 2^32. For dedicated servers on other system it should work though.

After some three hours of nuisance and despairness we gladly got help by Rubidium. He also gave us a clou for a workaround: just start the server and make a newgame via console (command: newgame).