#openttdcoop

Exactly 42 commits were necessary to merge the ‘Yet Another Path Based Signaling Patch’ a.k.a. [YAPP] to the trunk (information from developer). We reported about this interesting patch in february ’08 first and played a PBS game on our Public Server.
I am really looking forward how popular YAPP will get and how it’ll be used in the upcoming games. PBS makes a lot of things much easier, but we should also check how it affects system resources: i.e. cpu usage.
All in all its great to see a patch (of this size) after almost half a year in trunk.

Well done 🙂

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.

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 »

Grab it while it’s hot. Tonight the developers released the forth beta of OpenTTD 0.6.0. The list of features and fixes is huge and shows how much effort the developers put into this project. Great.

You can find the binaries as well as the source code at SourceForge.

This is a little excerpt of the amazing list of changes:
Read the rest of this entry »