#openttdcoop

First of all, tnx to Mucht for letting me blog here… he has no idea yet where he got himself into. But okay.
This week, or anywhere near this week, the coopetition branch will finally be created. As I now left the main development of OpenTTD, I finally have the time to sit down for a project, and make it lovely. With help from people like Osai, I am sure we will do just fine.

The coopetition branch will be a branch from the main OpenTTD (trunk), but with some (or heavy) alterations.

The first thing that will be done, is apply the so called MakefileRewrite over it, and FileRelocation. This will make it look totally different, but it will make development so much easier. Anyway, that is the idea.
The second thing that will be done, is to apply some patches we have lying around. These are:

– All things related to Town management EXCEPT funding new buildings
– Better Teamchat functions

After that, we will introduce a GUI thing to select the game mode. Currently we have in mind:

Simulation / Tournament / Head-to-Head / Deathmatch

Also, you will be able to select if the score should be recorded or not (allows ladder-games). Of course this also needs a general authorization system, which will be worked on too.

As you can see, many many many things to do, so a lot of fun doing it. Of course it takes time, so don’t expect it to be done tomorrow. Any ideas, suggestions, tips, what ever are, as always, welcome. Please do limit your ideas to coopetition alike ideas.

One last thing, for those who wonder: binaries of the coopetition branch will be compiled regular, but not on set times. I will request a compile when ever we feel that the current code is ready to be compiled and released. Possible we start an other version numbering, but that has to be seen.

So, that was all I had to blog for now, should bring everyone up-to-date on the ideas.

Since the high number of trains in our games and the complexity of our networks, CPU-Usage is a real problem! Therefor we reduced the number of trains to 400 on the sandbox! But this will probably change within the next days. Today we found something out, all of you and especially the Server Hosts should be interested in.

NOTE: this code parts belong to a dedicated server:

All of you know this part of openttd.cfg

[misc]
display_opt = SHOW_TOWN_NAMES|SHOW_STATION_NAMES|SHOW_SIGNS|FULL_ANIMATION|FULL_DETAIL
resolution = 1680,967


Today we changed this excerpt to this:

[misc]
display_opt =
resolution = 1,1


And now the magic starts, the CPU-Usage dropped from an average of 83%-87% to unbelievable 47%
That’s amazing!
Only one strange thing: the description page for the resolution of the official Wiki says its a client-only setting. But as our tests show, this is somehow not true.

All of you Server Hosts out there, should change the config! Also the coopetition branch is on the way and will probably show up this week! We will have a look at this and try to deactivate the gfx rendering completely!

Stay tuned, Osai.

Altough this week had had less activity comparing to previous ones, various notable events took place:

The current mainserver game makes slow but steady progress. You definitely have to take a look at it since we have a whole new idea for the network there. Also, the Sandbox had quite some activity in the past week.

Bad news on the upcoming Coopetition-Ladder: a lot of code was done before but still a lot of code to be created. It seems like it will take some more days or even weeks to put a steady and comprehensive system online. Don’t worry – it will definitely be completed!

This week was also a week of brainstorming on different coopetition-proposals which can be implemented in our own coopetition-branch on svn.openttd.org. Look here for some of the ideas. Also, you see different game types we created on the bottom of the page, like the tournament and the head-to-head mode.

Looking at the channel-activity we noticed two new nicks at #openttdcoop: TheDancinZerg, senfbr0t and DyzDyzPL ! Welcome to our universe!

I was playing an internet game (version 4.8.0), I created a small network, wich had a good profit. But the red company had a massive station with 20 coal mines around it. It was impossible to beat the red company. So i was building on my little network, and i asked the help of Ammler. Ammler had the good idea to steal the coal from the red company. So we started to steal it, we created 2 coal pickups and a coal drop far from there. We were making good profit with the stolen coal. Then I had the idea to get 1000 points. It wasnt hard to get, the only things we needed were 120 trains and 80 stations, so i’ve began with building road vehicles all around on the map, and Ammler was shortening our coal trains. So we very easy get the 1000 points. And then as finishing touch, the red company only had the coal track, we stole all his coal so he had a bankrupcy!!!

We are real tycoons now!

A screenshot of the 1000 points:

Note: After the bankrupcy of red, another player came in and his company color was red.

You can download the saved game here: Oldskool Rulezz.sav

#openttdcoop joined the popular game of GoogleWhack . The current record was set by Osai:

[13:09] osai: !whack impulsion
[13:09] _42_: Osai: returned 76 hits, no whack.


Join the competition and find “The One”!

Update:
New record by myself!

[13:21] Mucht|work: !whack imbecility
[13:21] _42_: Mucht|work: returned 18 hits, no whack.


Update:
Unbeatable?

[13:25] Osai: !whack superstitiousness
[13:25] _42_: Osai: returned 2 hits, no whack.