#openttdcoop

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.

The OpenTTD developers released another beta today. This is probably the last beta release before they start with release candidates. According to the official announcement:

[..], the final version might very well be around before spring.
Tick Tock, Time is ticking…

This sounds very promising.

If you are writing comments very often and want to give them a ‘better-to-recognise’ personal note you should have a closer look at gravatars. Via this service you can specify an avatar for your e-mail address. Our journal fully supports gravatars and you might use it on other pages as well.
Just create an account, verify your e-mail address, upload an avatar and you are done. It’s all free.

Don’t take this wrong, its not a must. I just want to inform you about the technical possibility.

After two month without any progress and some weeks with a lot of discussions, decisions and of course work, we finally release the first beta version of the #openttdcoop NewGrf Package Version 7. This is another big step, because we decided to change the way we administrate NewGrf files. To cut a long story short, we control the files now with Subversion, a versioning system. A lot of you might know this system, because it is used buy our all beloved OpenTTD game as well and those revision numbers are generated by svn.
It is definitely worth too look into svn and add the package to your OpenTTD data/ folder with this method, it saves you a lot of time and traffic. Methods, how to do this, are shown below.
Of course we will provide the normal packages (*.zip, *.rar, *.7z, etc.) as well, to reach all users.

A major and great update is the inclusion of 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 »