#openttdcoop

While browsing tt-forums I stumbled upon a LED Counter created in an OpenTTD game. This is an amazing work because you require a basic knowledge about electronics as well as about OpenTTD and signaling. This work inspired me and I planned to do some other constructions.

Of course this counter is a complex electronic circuit and we should not look at it in a too close manner. It uses half-adders, memory and a lot of logic gates. But some parts, especially the logic gates, are really interesting.
My first intention was to optimize them to be useful in #openttdcoop network games.

Logic Gates – An Overview

Boolean Operators a.k.a. Signals
First of all, we’ll have a look at the requirements to understand logic gates, as I create them, in OpenTTD. A default signal can be either red or green. These two states can be defined as true and false or as 1 and 0 or zero and non-zero or easily as yes and no. In fact, Read the rest of this entry »

Mergers or joins of different tracks have in recent public server games been a constant issue and the cause of many jams. The scope of this article is to discuss solutions for mergers.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today I deleted the complete wiki/images/thumb folder leading in complete removal of all thumbnails generated by the wiki.
The Reason
The thumbnail folder had an impressive size of 472 Megabyte! Most of the thumbnails were bigger than the original files. That’s not good for the visitors with low bandwidths, because they have to wait ages to load an image and not good for us because it uses a lot of our traffic and disk capacity.
The Solution
I changed the method of converting images, instead of converting them to 48bit or higher or whatever images, we now convert them to png 8bit images with:
$wgCustomConvertCommand = "/usr/bin/convert -resize %wx%h %s PNG8:%d";
The Disadvantages

• This may cause trouble with cached pages, if you don’t see an image, please append ?action=purge to the URL.
• Converting images takes more time due to higher compression
• Pages with a lot of images could time out on the first request. Do a second one in this case.

If there occur any problems, please contact me.

Whenever starting a new game, be it local or on #openttdcoop, one important question to be cleared before starting to build the network always is: “What tilelength (TL) are we going to use for our trains?”.
The chosen setting will mostly depend on the size of the map, as you don’t want to have a hundreds train servicing a single coal mine on a 2048*2048 map. However, there is a great difference between using even tilelengths such as 4, 10 or 20 and odd ones like 5 or 11.

The patch setting “When dragging, place signals every: X tiles” should always be set to “2” when playing on #openttdcoop, and most players will also use this setting if playing alone. If dragging signals, you will always have one piece of track with a signal on it followed by one without one and so on.

Now, if trains are jamming up somewhere in the network, for example behind a full station, those trains should block as little space as possible, so that they won’t for example block the mainline.

As you can see in the first screenshot, with signals every 2 tiles, the trains with tilelength 5 (left) fit almost perfectly in between the signals. However, the TL4-trains (right) always have a gap of more than one tile between them and need as much space as the TL5-trains. To fix that, you would have to place additional signals in the gaps, which might look ugly (especiall for straight track, see below) and is a lot of work, as you would have to do it manually.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good afternoon,

many people question themselves about how large our community actually is. Well, if you define the size of a community on the number of active members, one could estimate some 50-70 regular players.

Another figure for the vitality of a community is the number of visitors and viewers “in the background”. This is some proper measurement for the vitality and attractivity of an online community. Therefore, I’ll give you some facts and figures about our blog today.

These rough figures below are for February so far (therefore, some 6 days).
Visits (without bots): 2149
Visits (bots only): 1443
Unique visits(without bots): 1676
Read the rest of this entry »