#openttdcoop

Great news for our upcoming coopetition ladder! Thanks to TrueLight, a dedicated branch for our coopetition gametypes will be created! If created, you may find it here.

There are already some patches for our purposes around. Additionally, there is this wiki-page dedicated for ideas to be implemented within this branch. Feel free to join our IRC-Channel and report your ideas!

I know how you feel about it – we all fell in love with this blog. One month passed by since we relaunched it. Now it’s time to make a quick review.

As you may have noticed, we switched from 2-columns to 3-columns today. This should ease up the overview and navigation. The whole style should be perfectly integrated with the wiki by now. Great work has been done by Osai.

Some statistics:
By now, we almost reached some 20.000 hits with more than 6500 users. During the past days it has shown that over 300 users visit our blog day by day – we never expected this blog to become that successful! Most referrences come from – make a guess – the tt-forums, of course. The browser statistics show some 8.200 hits with Firefox, followed by some 1900 Internet Explorer 6-hits and some 1850 hits by Apple’s Safari Browser.

One month of existence is a great point to thank all of those people involved: first of all, Brianetta, our host. Second, Osai, for his php-skills and administration abilities. Third, all of the bloggers, like Jinx, XeryusTC and JohnK. Last but not least we want to thank our visitors for their interest in #openttdcoop, Coopetition and OTTD!

YezZz :/
Last night the blog was offline. Somewhen in the night I started to code a new feature for our Serverinfobox! A little information how long we already play on a map! And yay, I was getting more and more tired and stopped coding it! Going to bed and accidentally saving the wrong version of a file called sidebar.php :-/
This created and error and the blog was not available!
But now I come with a brand new and neat feature showing the time we already play a map!
Check it out in real-time, easily scroll over the links for Mainserver/Sandbox and a title comes up with IP-Address and played time.

Enjoy

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!

…probably I am the only one using the builds for Mac OS X, but since some days I had massive desync problems and at the latest version of our Mainserver (r6148), I wasn’t able to play at all.
Today, TrueLight and I, searched for the cause of this heavy problem. We spent several hours in compiling versions and testing them, to find out where this error exactly occured. Again and again we checked kinds of versions to get an interval where the error could be!
Finally, TrueLight dedicated the bug in r6052, fixed it and now everything is working again!!

Due to my hard work, named at this revsion 😀
http://svn.openttd.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/changeset/6176
I am happy to be back at the servers again 😉