OpenTTD 0.7.0-beta1 released

According to changeset 15502 the OpenTTD Developers released the first beta version of OpenTTD 0.7.0. When I started playing several years ago I always observed the roadmap page at the OpenTTD Wiki which always stated that a release of 0.7.0 is far, far, far away and will probably never happen. But finally here we are and there are some great new features (despite the general bugfixes, optimizations and minor tweaks) in the box which you definitely should not miss.
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The Feature – spree continues

Just yesterday OpenTTD got another nice feature added to trunk: arbitrary map edges! From todays nightly onwards the map borders no longer need to be water but can be at any height, allowing for a far greater flexibility and also nicer looking maps which especially adds to certain scenarios (like coastal scenarios where you don’t want to have islands…)
arbitrary map edges (in trunk since r15190)

arbitrary map edges (in trunk since r15190)

The game creation dialogue got a new button which allows you to choose the sides which are enforced to be water:game configuration window

game configuration window
This option is only available though, if you allow freeform map edges in the advanced settings (it is found in the construction section). Congratulations to and two thumbs up for OpentTTD’s newest dev, Yexo. Happy gaming to all.

Optimization of Logic – Logic Gates [Part II]

Almost half a year ago I blogged about Logic Gates and already the headline promised that this story is not over yet. Now, I was finally able to concentrate my thoughts about logic gates again and was able to optimize the gates again. As I pointed out earlier the reaction time is too long and gates are reacting too sluggish. The slow processing made the gates only interesting in places which don’t need to be fast. For example the timing of injection. But when it comes to mainlines, sidelines, station entries and many other fancy coop-ish constructions they were more an impediment.
Download Logic Train NewGRF

I hope, this’ll change now, because these new constructions require only one train without any wagons and are extremely small in comparison with the old gates and the once I see nowadays in our games.
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Big Christmas present from OpenTTD

Hello folks,

just yesterday I’ve been browsing through the change logs of OpenTTD and stumbled over some remarkable changes Rubidium commited just then. The network code underwent heavy changes – and now a game may have up to 255 clients!

(svn r14730) -Codechange: remove the need for networkclientsockets and networkclientinfo structs to be in a contiguous piece of memory and put them in a pool.
-Note: 255 should really be enough for now… making it any more means network protocol bumps.

and another commit just today:

(svn r14735) -Codechange: remove a bit of bit-waste in the map array (without changing the map array) and make the CompanyIDs contiguous.
-Note: 15 should be enough for now… making it any more means adding more bytes to the map array and thus wasting more bits instead of reducing the bit waste.

which allows now up to 15 companies instead of the usual eight 🙂 .

With the next available nightly our servers will, of course, feature as many clients – and we’ll no longer have the problem that the server might be too full when starting a new game 🙂

A big thanks from #openttdcoop to all devs of OpenTTD for the great work.
merry Christmas

The magic of SRNW (Self-Regulating Networks)

As you might have seen a guide about self-regulating SBahn was recently added to our Wiki. As #openttdcoop thinks large, we took it a step further and created a complete Self-Regulating Network (SRNW) in our current PublicServerGame (#121). You should definitely check the guide first, to get a better idea of what this article is about.
Though the key points stay the same and I’ll explain them to give you an overview how the network works.
Self-Regulating Network Teaser

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