#openttdcoop

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.

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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
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Since a few days a nice patch is discussed at the tt-forums. It is another try to implement PBS in OpenTTD. The first idea of PBS is almost three years old. The old PBS was only supported by NPF (the old ‘new-pathfinder’) and since YAPF became the common standard the development was not continued.
We are currently running a dev server with YAPP (r12062M)
IP: dev.openttdcoop.org:3982
You can find the password at our irc channel: #openttdcoop.dev @ irc.oftc.net

This new patch looks really promising. The code is clean and fits to the standard openttd developers prefer. Now, lets have a look at the details. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a while since this idea came in my mind. I experimented to find a better way managing the train flow. The main idea of the SML concept is to shift trains to other tracks if they are free and joining trains use this free track. If the track is not free, the others aren’t either. This works very well but has a disadvantage too: train’s entering a station will primarily enter via the shift-tracks (the innermost).

That’s the point where “shiftback” comes into play.
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Hello community,

long time no post from me… I’m still alive, although my work, some illness and further social activities kept me away from both my PC and #openttdcoop. As Osai wrote before, I’m working on the second scenario for the #osqc which has – again – some epic story around. The scenario goal is not difficult to reach but this time, the main focus is on building a smoothly fitting, yet high capacity track into the landscape. Of course, this implies less “hard-facts” to judge about – it is up to the jury to judge about “soft aspects” as track design, terraforming and network efficiency.

I’m confident to keep up the deadline of february 10th and looking forward to look at savegames of #osqc 1!

Have a nice weekend.