Mass reset of 1.9.0-1.9.2 scores

As it turns out a number of bugs were introduced in 1.9.0 version of our server that affected town growth making it much faster than it was supposed to be. Unfortunately no one reported them so those bugs went unnoticed for quite some time and were only fixed in 1.9.3 release. Thus now that we stopped running 1.9.2 servers I've reset all CB scores for 1.9.0-1.9.2 versions to keep it fair. Also there was a different bug when some company received money from server. Fortunately it didn't happen very often but still few cash goal scores were reset as well.

1.10.0-beta1

Looks like this time 1.10 will be out before April. And it actually has interesting new stuff some of which I'd like to highlight.

1. You can now search town by name in town directory.
2. Some station and town areas highlights were added. Though zoning patch in CityMania client is still better in my opinion.
3. For a long time there were some shenanigans with station catchment but now it's all gone and every tile you build is adding exactly what it shows to the coverage zone. So old trick with adding rail stations/docks/airports to enlarge catchment are no longer useful. It poses some issues since 3h CB strategy somewhat relied on that so to counterbalance it we may switch classic cb to use non-realistic catchment (range is 4 tiles for everything). Also canals may be allowed as well since exploiting them no longer possible.
4. One more ancient bug was found that apparently pax/mail production of a house was proportional to a square of it population instead of being linear. So, basically, large towns generated unreasonably large amounts of pax and mail. Since implications of this change for classic CB modes are huge those will have to stay with the old behavior. But we'll use the new one for everything else including new CB modes since they only require % of town production to be transported and aren't significantly affected by this change.
5. Airplanes can now crash on a short runway even with crashes disabled in settings. So we'll be switching to using no crash cheat wherever applicable.
6. There is now an option to make it so that industries with builtin stations (like Oil rigs) will require those to be used for taking/supplying cargo. We'll be using that so it won't be possible anymore to just make some rails over the sea and take all that juicy oil.

CityMania client 1.10.0-beta1 is also out and have some improvements of its own so check it out.

1.9.2

I wasn't around to do the update properly, but some servers were running it for a month and now we're updating the rest. Also there was an issue with the client version so I've reuploaded it yesterday.

Zombie apocalypse

Well, I got an idea ... and then I just couldn't stop ... so now we have a bit of a zombie apocalypse on our test server(#0) xD.

Rules are quite simple: zombies destroy stuff, food heals houses, goods damage zombies, passengers to HQ does AOE. There is no particular goal yet or any scoring at all. And, honestly, there is no winning condition either, just constantly increasing level of zombies.

So at this point it's just an experiment that is still far from being a complete gameplay. But let me know what you think of it, what kind of new game mode we can make? How about a citybuilder without strict requirements but you need all that cargo to fend off zombies anyway? Also any small ideas would be nice as well, like I know banks are useless atm, mb they could buff towns so that houses get more HP. Or mb there needs to be some kind of ammo storage system instead of an instant damage for goods. Mb find some use for transmitters scattered along the map?

Suddenly 1.9.1

It was a bit unexpected to see 1.9.1 so soon but it's not a bad sight. So I guess we'll replace 1.9.0 servers with 1.9.1 soon but still keep 1.8.0 ones for a while. And yeah, new CityMania client is out as well.

1.9.0 is not a lie

OpenTTD development picked up pace recently so this year release is finally not just a number. Here is a full changelog and I'll go over some those changes in a moment. But first I want to tell that we're already running 1.9.0 on some servers and more will be switched to it as more players update their game. CityMania client is also ready and have a few features of its own, so check its changelog as well.

As for new stuff in 1.9.0 first thing I want to mention is actually a bit of an issue. There may be a significant performance drop for some players on games with a lot of vehicles. So if your game is lagging definitely try using CityMania client that has this issue fixed and recommend it to your friends ;)

Also there are several significant changes for city-building:

• As towns can now grow up to 70 times faster so GR and next values shown in CityMania client are also about 70 times larger. So what was GR1 is now GR69 and so on. But no core mechanics were affected by that, so end speed of town growth should be the same. Also funding still sets a new house to be built in about 2 days and each CS wastes about 1 day. So all new stuff is only available for games with server controller. We've already took advantage of that in our new CB game modes so growth rate of town should scale much smoother now with amount of deliveries instead of jumping between GR1 and GR2. We also plan to have some fun exploring super-fast growth rates in near future so keep an eye for that ;)
• Town growth rate now updates after each new house, not just every month. So old trick with funding at specific house counts is no longer useful.
• Houses can be built on road turns (that was previously a feature in our town simulator) so our beloved spiral layouts are now even better. And in general there is much more room for creativity with your roads. For example, crazy curly spirals are actually a very viable option now.

Stayin' Alive

Finally we're getting back in business after that nasty crash. It wasn't all for naught as I took that time to reimplement our server controller and tidy up the database struture. Though I kind of rushed it's release so there aren't many new noticeable features yet. And, in fact, even some of the old features are somewhat broken atm. For example, cross-server chat. As we ditched the IRC support completely but haven't finished a replacement yet. Quest servers also won't be available for a while as I'm planning to completely overhaul that game mode. But don't worry it'll all be back eventually, better than before. And thank everyone for your support on forum. So nice to see that there are still people who understand CityMania and love it wholeheartedly <3

Database restored

It took a while but we managed to mostly restore the database after the crash. So some game details may be missing but at least all scores and quests should be intact. Our new server controller is also ready so we'll be bringing servers back in a few days.

Recovering from server crash

Quick update here, following a pretty bad server crash, citymania is recovering slowly. We might have lost some of the latest game, but we still have hope, and servers should be back in the next days.

Will keep you updated.

1.8.0

Finally we're out of slumber, client is updated and we started to switch servers to 1.8.0. There has been a lot of stuff happening in OpenTTD development lately, including the movement to Github but sadly no interesting game improvements came out of it yet.

Update failed

Hello everyone! Just dropping in to say there probably won't be 1.7.2 update. It happened to conflict with some recent CityMania changes and I have absolutely no time to deal with it lately. So at this point I think it would be better to skip this one and aim for 1.8 that will hopefully happen in April as usual.

1.7.1 Update

New version of OpenTTD is out. But, as usual, nothing noteworthy about it.

New version of CityMania client is available in downloads section. It's just a version update, there are no other changes. And once again no 32bit version since Visual Studio crashed on it. Nobody seemed to miss it last time though ^^.

Some of our servers are already updated to 1.7.1 others we'll gradually update over the course of month or so.

CityMania Two Years Anniversary Event (June 4th, 16:00 CEST)

Time flies and it's almost two years since we started our servers. And I think it's a good cause to celebrate that we're still alive and kicking :) Nothing too fancy this time, just a regular temperate city-builder without Newgrfs. Though I thought let's give another try to income-based cargo requirements (like in Christmas event). Meaning that you'll be required to make certain monthly income from cargo delivered to your town instead of its amount like in regular CB.

More details on forum.

Unfair advandage rule added

That's not really a new rule since it wasn't ever allowed to use multiple companies for your advantage, even on Novapolis. So I was quite surprised when I noticed that it's not mentioned in our rules anywhere. Guess it was considered to be obvious or something, I don't know. Well, now it's officially there. Though, as I said it doesn't change much, it's still considered to be a pretty minor rulebreak so you may get away with only your score and exp being reset for that game. But if keep breaking it repeatedly you may get yourself banned.

More details about it and some other minor changes on forum.

1.7.0 CityMania client update

Yet another major version update of OpenTTD traditionally released on 1 Apr. Sadly it also become a tradition that new releases have nearly nothing new in them. But this time at least realistic acceleration got enabled by default so may be we'll see less players building dumb tunnels ;)

Interestingly there are so little gameplay changes that you can pretty much use 1.7.0 CityMania client to play on 1.6.1 servers (see client changelog on how to do so). Though keep in mind that it can still desync if you do so, even if not very likely.

So yeah, you can get new version of our patched client here. But there will not be 32bit windows version for a while since stupid microsoft compiler crashed on it.

Christmas Event 2016

Ho! Ho! Ho! Its Christmas again! So it's time for our traditional event. And this year I got into NewGRF making so It's going to be a very unique game mode. You can get a sneak-peek at our preparations for it on our test server (CityMania #0), but some important things will be kept secret till the very event.

More details on forum

Town growth emulator

I updated my town emulator and moved it to CityMania. It now can save layouts on website and has a bunch of new options.

Check forum for discussion.

Second try on 1.6.1

Turns out Microsoft added some new bugs to their C++ compiler in last update. One of them was causing our client to crash when joining ECS servers. So I did a simple workaround, updated binaries are available in usual place. It doesn't contain any new features so Linux and Mac users can skip this update.

1.6.1 update and servers renumbering

Initially I wanted to do new CB window in 1.6.1, but turns out it will take a while, so updating client and servers now.

Also using this opportunity to change some server numbers, as was discussed earlier. Quest servers now move to #10 and #11, and #1 and #2 become cash goal servers instead (former #3 and #4). As for new #3 and #4 they'll host our new multigoal citybuilder (5k, 10k, 30k), check it out if you haven't yet. It is also considered to be a replacement for old GS city-builder, so servers 14, 16, 17 were shut down. Classic CB servers (5, 6, 7) will remain same for now as there is nothing to use their numbers for just yet.

Anniversary Event Finished

It was a close competition for the first two hours, but in the end despr managed to pull ahead finishing 100k goal in 3 hours 11 minutes. Congratulations!

darulezzz was second with 77k town and Gelidis afked his way to the third place with 44k people.

More details can be found here, including savegame.