1.10.0-beta1 in General

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.

Servers down? in General

Hi, that's very strange because they were running and some players have clearly been playing on them. However there seems to be some issue with their advertisement to a master server so they weren't appearing on a server list. Not sure what's the cause, I'll keep an eye on it.

[Fixed] Client crash on autosave - proposed fix in Bugs

Oh, I thought I fixed that, thanks for reporting! Will include in 1.9.2 or mb sooner if that doesn't come.

P.S. Sorry, I accidentally edited your post. I'll try to restore it but even if I don't it's ok, I'll remember this issue and definitely fix it.

hit the pause... in General

In a long rung I was thinking of doing some kind of "pro zone". I.e. servers that you need to qualify to play on and that run some advanced game modes like 3h CB. Also we can have modes with max of 1 company there and some kind of pausing mechanism. Like making a command to pause but you can only use 15 minutes of pause in total.

Stupid settings in General

All settings are listed with their recommended values.

order.selectgoods: on

It's a hidden setting left from early openttd versions (was called "Deliver cargo to a station only when there is a demand"). If off industry will deliver cargo to all nearby stations even if there is no vehicle picking it up. Don't think anyone needs an explanation why is that bad. If you have some suspicions of having it off you can check that in config file or by typing setting order.selectgoods in console.

breakdowns: off

TLDL; When it comes to dealing with breakdown stupid solutions work better than the smart ones so there is no point in enabling them.

The way breakdowns are implemented in OpenTTD they force you to build your networks in a very specific way. For example, at pretty much any point any train can choose to go to a nearest depot. So you have to make sure whenever it does so it can return to his route. That means building depots on every junction, station, etc. Also even if they're serviced regularly they still break down sometimes so you basically need to have lower train density than you would normally do. It all may sound ok to get working once but it starts to get annoying if you build a lot as instead of building new routes you waste time placing stupid depots and if you miss any you suddenly have trains stuck somewhere they don't belong. also something goal something (cb)...

90degrees: off

inflation: off

economy: smooth

twoway_eol: on

realistic acceleration: on

sharess: off

Add nothing but exploits to the game.

Stupid settings in General

As you probably know there are shitton of obscure settings in OpenTTD and some of them should never be touched. Because people keep asking about them I want to eventually make a list of the most stupid settings with proper explanations that I can just link to. But I'm too lazy to do it right now and I keep forgetting stuff, so I'll start making it here and will update it from time to time. Feel free to comment on this and suggest more settings and good reasons not to use them.

Zombie apocalypse in General

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 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 of it. Maybe citybuilder where there are no 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?

zombies attacking town

1.9.0 is not a lie in General

MacOS builds for CityMania client are now available as well.

1.9.0 is not a lie in General

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 on 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.
Discord server? in General

Yeah, there is a discord server, I didn't publish it yet since I wanted to organize it a bit and add server chat (ingame) there first. But whatever, since you mentioned it here is CityMania discord server, join up everybody! xD

Stayin' Alive in General

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

[Fixed] Servers closed ? in Bugs

ST2, as I already told you I see absolutely no point in joining citymania with btpro. They're completely different both technically and gameplay-wise and even target players of a different skill level. It's also not really a "solution" for anything as it brings more problems than it solves.

Anyway, citymania servers will be back in a week or two and will even have some new features. I'll leave the details for the announcement. Also citymania client for 1.9.0-beta2 is mostly finished already. There are still some issues to sort out due to 1.9.0 changes so I'm not posting binaries just yet. But it's playable so whoever is ok compiling it can get it here: https://bitbucket.org/citymania/cmclient

[Fixed] Servers closed ? in Bugs

Well, it's not like we haven't tried it all. There were 2 hour CB games at some point but they didn't gain traction. And we already have a lot of short game modes: blitz(1h) cb, 5-10-30k multigoal cb, 15m cash. And Classic 3h CB is going to stay as it is since it's the exact same game mode as it was on Luukland and Novapolis and you can compare scores with those.

As for timetables we were running a lot of servers like that at first and I think Server 6 still does run on timetable. But it didn't really work with that small amount of players. No one showed up on time, even for traditional 9pm game. Besides there isn't rly much room on a map for a several teams going all out. So instead of ingame competition it gradually moved to highscores competition.

[Fixed] Servers closed ? in Bugs

Well, main problem is lack of players really. Average of 1-2 active players isn't quite enough to justify running 10 servers 24/7 tbh. And how to attract more players I've no idea. I tried doing cool new features and events but people don't seem to be interested. And openttd itself slowly dying doesn't help either.

On a bright side we can keep it running pretty much forever, just maintenance going to be like that, whenever someone has time for it. Currently we've already restored everything after the crash and are ready to launch servers again. I'm just holding it off for a few days to make it easier to do some improvements I've never managed to finish previously. Nothing too impressive but it will make maintaining servers easier in future.

Btw Openttd 1.9 will also bring some interesting features for CB. But we'll likely have to wait for it till April.

[Fixed] Servers closed ? in Bugs

Not exactly closed, more like abandoned. By both players and admins sadly. At some point server died and so far neither me nor da seem to have time and enthusiasm to fully restore it.

Where are the servers? in General

Hi darulezzz I did some script to restart them without cron so it's not like they've been off this whole time. I just forgot to reply here.

Where are the servers? in General

Yeah, something went wrong with the script that restarts servers :( Should be fine now though, thanks for your report!

LOL ¡¡¡Time traveler!!! in Bugs

Oh, I see, make sense. Will take some time to fix this so please don't exploit it meanwhile.

Also, what do you want me to do with your time, I can reset the quest completely if you wan to repeat it or just take time from your previous runs.

Where are the quest servers? in General

Yeah, we were doing some server maintenance and forgot to enable server restarting script. Should be working fine now. Thanks for your report!

You can check game time with !timeleft command. 1bil server runs for something like 600 years iirc.

LOL ¡¡¡Time traveler!!! in Bugs

Wow, how did that happen?