#openttdcoop

Public server game #91 finished and was again an enjoyable game. The map was a 512 tiles square sub-tropical map with very smooth land. The plan chosen to build was XeryusTC’s plan. As it tied a no terraform plan it was agreed that no terrform should be applied. The plan featured trains of length three on two concentric ML rings, one serving empty trains, the other fully loaded trains. Building progressed very rapidly to a large amount of players active at all times, also many new players.

The factory and refinery station. The no terraform rule made the pre-signal bypass of the entry look a bit strange
Read the rest of this entry »

As a follow up to the blog about Clean building we have noticed that, in recent games, stations frequently aren’t balanced.

During a game it is important to have a balanced network. There are a couple of ways to make the network balanced, one of them is by building a load balancer on the mainline. However a balancer like that isn’t preferred. It is preferred to let stations entries and exits function as balancers of the traffic load over the mainline.

Read the rest of this entry »

For coop gaming there is a wiki guide about proper building and there is a tuturial save game to help you in defining the basics about building on coop servers. During recent games it appears that these guidelines are not followed optimally.

Example image taken from the guide.

Read the rest of this entry »

We didn’t have a weekly review since 15 weeks, but it quite happend a lot those days. Even though I miss the active bloggers who write about games, community and OpenTTD. Anyway I hope you like to read our Blog, it would be depressing me if I write those lines only for me, myself and I.
Back to topic. After quite some weeks of idleness the last week was great. A lot of new nicknames showed up at our IRC-Channel, like Phazrox, Teddy and Kejhic. I’ve also seen some spectators who had been to shy to get active like EoD and eJoJ. C’mon guys. It’s not to hard to join the games and you can’t do anything wrong. At this week we finished Sandbox Game 35 and Sandbox Game 36 is almost done too. Especially at the weekend a lot of players showed up and the progress was really amazing. It would take us ages to play those games alone. The activity is logged from our Bot _42_, and I had a closer look on the numbers. At the weekend, more than 6000 lines of chat have been produced. And two guys came under top 20 in only one week.
Besides I did some stuff with Photoshop and created this little top view of the Map from Sandbox Game 34. In my opinion it looks a little bit like Google Earth.
Ammler did a lot of work on the #openttdcoop NewGrf-Package which reached version 3 now. You will be always up2date if you have a look at the new section ‘Shortcuts’ at the right side. Maybe some more useful links will occur there soon.
On the Mainserver Mucht, Ammler and I finished the Tutorial Savegame and the first page is already written. Mucht is quite busy and had no time the last days. Anyway I think we can finish this within the next two weeks. Stay tuned, its HOT.

Next thing we should take a closer look at is the new Junctionary, we have a clearer structure now, what is primary good for visitors with lower bandwidth and secondary for visitors searching special construction. If you want the hammer, you can still list all objects in one page.
At the moment we don’t have too many objects in the Junctionary. It is up to you, to fill those pages with data, I am not sure whether we should also include non-openttdcoop like constructions or not. But maybe it gets a color-rich compendium somewhen.

You guys have been very active those days and our webstats say something similar, but I still miss the activity at blog and wiki.
Anyway the next game on our Sandbox Server will start soon. Feel free to join.

2006 has been another year full of heights and lows – #openttdcoop slides into its third year of existence. Within the past year, #openttdcoop managed to grow, become a comprehensive community, standardize its servers and spread its reputation to play a solid part of the OpenTTD-universe. A year which is worth to be both reflected and celebrated. Lets have a short review:

Read the rest of this entry »