#openttdcoop

Fellow coopers,

great news, another big step forward in OpenTTD development: the new framework for computer players has been merged from the NoAI branch into trunk. So, from now on, there’s no need anymore to complain about those stupid AI which OpenTTD had up until now – everyone may programme his or her own AI with as much intelligence as desired. Like many people did as documented in the NoAI subforums. Check out the threads there for different AIs.

Company chart from our first coop game against a few AIs Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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 🙂

While browsing tt-forums I stumbled upon a LED Counter created in an OpenTTD game. This is an amazing work because you require a basic knowledge about electronics as well as about OpenTTD and signaling. This work inspired me and I planned to do some other constructions.

Of course this counter is a complex electronic circuit and we should not look at it in a too close manner. It uses half-adders, memory and a lot of logic gates. But some parts, especially the logic gates, are really interesting.
My first intention was to optimize them to be useful in #openttdcoop network games.

Logic Gates – An Overview

Boolean Operators a.k.a. Signals
First of all, we’ll have a look at the requirements to understand logic gates, as I create them, in OpenTTD. A default signal can be either red or green. These two states can be defined as true and false or as 1 and 0 or zero and non-zero or easily as yes and no. In fact, Read the rest of this entry »

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.