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.

CityMania One Year Anniversary

So one year ago, we started the CityMania servers, we are growing, and the game experience is still really enjoyable, so it's a good time to do an event.

So we will organize a fat 100K citybuilder game on temperate climate.

We plan to do it on June 5th at 19:00 CEST, please have a look to this forum thread for more info.

April Release Day

New major OpenTTD version was released today (1.6.0). But don't let it fool you, there are hardly any changes from 1.5.3 whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to work on our patched client either. Nevertheless, there are still some small but handy new features in this release ;)

Citymania got a new home

So as explained, we moved to another server, a more powerful and with better configuration. The game experience should be the same, but we will be able to provide more customization. One of the main thing you could realize is that our website is now with https, which means that we can talk securely about train now ;)

We will setup more servers soon, and an event might come sooner or later

note : as we changed IP, we have still some small problems, one of them is related to the client fast change server feature, which will be fixed with the next client release.

Server Migration scheduled

We will finally migrate the whole citymania to a new server. This will happen today, servers will be stopped, and hopefully will be back later ;) Keep you updated