#openttdcoop

Another week is gone, another report for our yearbook is going to arise. This week, #openttdcoop was under the sign of development. You may have noticed tons of new articles on our wiki. Most articles were dedicated to the idea of Coopetition. You may have a look here to see the broad variety of proposals. To highlight one of the best proposals: in the head-to-head Coopetition a map is “mirrored” and each team plays on one side – so on exactly the same map as the other. Its basically the same game like the “classic” Coopetition but without interference by your opponent. Also, its nice to watch and to compare two different approaches on the same map.

Our ongoing brainstorm on the Coopetition concluded in a lot of PHP-code which has to be written. Osai and XeryusTC are the main developers to do this. We are glad about all your responses, comments, interests and blogviews 😉 . The ladder-system itself may take another two weeks but it will be an expandable system which means: a lot of ideas may be implemented not yet but in the future – if the idea itself is good enough. Therefore all of you are very welcome to write comments on the dedicated wiki-pages or even start a new page in this category. Great news from the official side of OTTD: Coopetition receive an own branch on svn.openttd.org! Furthermore, we were supported Coopetition with a quick server-side-patch to alter several settings. The patch itself can be found here. Thx again to Truelight for his ideas and tons of contributed work!

OTTD itself received a lot of development work this week. The probably greatest piece of work was the TGP merged to the trunk. Also, it is now possible to have a year higher than 2090 (great work, Rubidium). We therefore upgraded to newer nightly versions of OTTD. Unfortunately some smaller bugs caused us to revert our versions twice. We are lucky to have Truelight as a honorary member of #openttdcoop, look here and here for further details on some great moments of bugtracking and fixing. By now, we remain at revision 6176. You may have noticed the new box on the top-left side of this blog where you can read the current status and versions of our servers.

Our IRC received another upgrade by – guess who – right! Truelight! He donated a bot called “_42_” which is our calculator, statistic, translator and much more! You have an overview over its features on our wiki. This great needless stuff is what we searched for a long time 😉

And last but not least some great news on our memberbase itself: after a lot of gaming with a lot of great junctions and stations we decided that Ammler is more than ready to become our next member! Congratulations again to Switzerland! Some days after, Jinx was invited to become our next aspirant. It was a really tough decission since there is a lot of activity on our Sandbox recently and there are more than a lot of valuable players around!

So that’s it for this time. We look forward to see all of you again in the next week!

Hello community,

as every week I will summarize the main events of the past seven days. This week was dominated by the day off for many users here, tuesday the 15th aka as “Maria Himmelfahrt” in Austria. Already at the past sunday, #openttdcoop moved along with #openttd to our new home, the OFTC IRC Network! Only ~20 clients moved along with us right at the same day which showed us the active percantage of players in the community. By the end of the week, a peak number of 41 users was reached in our channel.

What we did not expect is that this whole system of Blog/Wiki/WebIRC is that successful in such a short time. The relaunch of the blog was almost some two weeks ago and this week we reached an average number of unique visitors of around 250 per day! Thank all of you for your interest in our way to bring OpenTTD to a new level.

No weekly review without a short overview on our players: our almost-founding-member StarLite seems to be back from the depths of idleness. Sietse, hylje, Progman and Nord joined our Sandbox to have some cooperative play. We are also happy to see our aspirants ChrisM87 and nlhans a bit more active these days. Our members Osai and Mucht returned from their short-trips.

Also, some news around our Coopetition: the suggested ladder-system is under heavy development. For a long-yet-not-full list of proposals see this page . You will notice that a fully-functional team-management-system could show up during the next weeks. Help us with the development and drop your suggestions at our IRC-channel!

During the week, some teams made tactics and even some training sessions for upcoming Coopetition-games. On Saturday, Osai and Mucht played a shortly announced Coopetition game versus guru3 and hylje, who had neither team-experience nor a headset/microphone to coordinate their efforts. Hence, the matchings were not fair but the game was interesting after all, since Osai and Mucht relayed on their old tactics while guru3 and hylje tried to seek a chance in a short-route-strategy which has shown not to be the best, in the end.

Today, sunday, the Sandbox was restarted after a very short but creative game. We switched to r5993 which will be applied to each of our three servers (Sandbox, Mainserver, Coopetition Server) within the next days. The new revision has the advantage to include the TGP, an advanced terrain-generator.

Lets see what the next week is going to be at #openttdcoop.

There weren’t much things going on this week, although some of them had a big impact (and others will still have).
First of all, there is the big move to OFTC, we did this because #openttd switched to it because devs didn’t like the network ;). Hopefully OFTC doesn’t have someone like lilo who keeps sending global messages all the time.
And then we had the big WebCooper anoyance, I think that everyone in the channel has gotten a part of it, and if you didn’t then you should consider yourself lucky ;). Every member of #openttdcoop is now operator in the channel to prevent such things again, although we’ll be non-op when it isn’t needed.
Then is there the other big thing, my ICE story at the beginning of this week, and a link to it on tt-forums.net which quite some people followed (around 300 according to Mucht?). Quite a nice number of people that (hopefully) will also be reading our blog :). Ofcourse we have the little sandbox “story” too which shouldn’t be forgotten.
And we have a new style on the wiki, it is the same style as the blog has so they suit each other better. We also have an web IRC client now so you don’t have to have a stand-alone client installed.

We also have some new nicknames in our channel, and an old face has returned, and the name behind the face is ChrisM87, he happens to be an aspirant too so we will have some more fun on the mainserver now. That is, if someone would like to start it now we have decided all the game details.

Last but not least, we (as the members) have decided to give the sandbox a hard train limit. The people playing there always manage to get 600+ trains, even though the trainlenght is 7 tiles. The problem with this is that it slows down the server terribly and also the games of people with older hardware, like me, notice problems when they run the game with full detail, full animations and on a high resolution. It is even unplayable for some people on a resolution higher then 800×600 or even 640×480.

Well, another week is over and I will summarize this very special blog-worthy days. A lot of things changed in the community. We have a new member and this is probably the most positive fact around our team. Along with promoting XeryusTC to a full member of #openttdcoop, OwenS and ammler followed his invitation to join our mainserver-team. This means, we have one more player coming close to membership. Also noteworthy: nlhans returned after some months of abscence. thgergo and Itchi also returned to our crew. piratejerkk and John-K are two new nicks around the Sandbox. Summarizing the week, one has to note that there were always some 30+ nicks in our channel during the evening hours!

Now some remarks to the technical aspects of our community. Brianetta steadily improved our Autopilot and the next version is under development/testing. Also, we started using Teamspeak for our efforts – and hey: its great fun! Since you are reading this blog, you may have noticed that we resurrected it and are filling it with user-made opinions and observings around #openttdcoop. The wiki was permanently improved during the past two weeks. The archives were redone and so were many other pages – the Guides need some more attention though. To summarize the technical improvements: check the blog for news around the community, for opinions, thoughts and reports. Check the wiki for gamestyles, for information about users, guides and research & development. Also, the wiki hosts our savegame archive and information about rules and our latest game-idea: the coopetition!

Coopetition – the highlight of the week. In the first gathering, XeryusTC and Ammler challenged Osai and Mucht. Six more clients watched this team vs. team battle for the highest income. In the end, the german-speaking team was the slightly better one. They won with an advantage: they shared the same mother-tongue. We noticed it is highly recommended to find together in native-speaking teams. Each team has its own subchannel on our Teamspeak-Server – you better buy a headset to take this challenge! I tell you: this coopetition is really challenging. It encourages fast building, smart calculating, teamplay and competitive thinking. We are looking forward to extend the idea, create a smart ruleset that allows each team to play their ideas on a fair level.

Stay tuned on this – stay tuned by reading the #openttdcoop-blog!