Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter: August 2005

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Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter: August 2005

Post by orudge »

Donate to the forums: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=9941

TRANSPORT TYCOON FORUMS NEWSLETTER: AUGUST 2005

Welcome to the August 2005 issue of the Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter! Sorry the newsletter's a few days late, I've been quite busy/lazy these past few days. But here it is at last! Oh, and I did have a very nice birthday, thank you very much. I hope you enjoy this regular round-up of news from the Transport Tycoon world.

If you're reading this on the forum and would like to receive a copy by e-mail each month, visit http://tt-forums.net/mailman/listinfo/n ... forums.net or send an e-mail to news-request@tt-forums.net with the subject "subscribe" - an ideal way of keeping up-to-date with the latest news and important announcements on the forum. Traffic is low, and your e-mail address is kept private.

As usual, statistics first... July was a surprisingly busy month compared with June, with 12,211 messages being posted last month - around 393 a day on average, and a couple of thousand more than June. User registrations were up too, with 327 new users joining our ranks. Evidently the fact that it is (meant to be) summer in the northern hemisphere hasn't stopped people visiting their favourite forums! On to some other statistics now: we had some 7.7 million hits last month, 700,000 up on June. 58GB of bandwidth was used - interestingly, the same as last month. This equals some 61,900 individual visits (a little up on last month), with the 20th being the most active day - 293,477 hits were recorded that day. In the country/domain chart, things aren't too different from usual: unknown domains account for 60% of hits, followed by .nl, .net, .com, .uk, .cz, .pl, .au, .fi, .ru, .de, .hu, .yu, .sg, .no, .li, .dk, .at, .se, .nz, .ro, .pt, .et, .sk, .org, .ca, .be, .ch, .hk and, slightly strangely, .arpa at #30. IE is the most popular browser again, although Mozilla on OS/2 is still high up in the charts! Most people who found us via a search engine searched for "transport tycoon", and we had referrals from all over the place. This part of the newsletter was typed up while listening to my own singing.

On to the Off-Topic forum now, and our favourite forum comedian _r_ has this witty round-up of recent events:

"As I look outside the window, raindrops the size of apples are falling. Very small apples, admittedly, apples the size of severely disadvantaged raisins, but apples nonetheless...

(several pages later)

The debate on whether summer is a Good Thing or not raged for the first few weeks of the month. The pro-summer team, headed by astath, and the anti-summer team, led by weirdy, almost duked it out in the mother of all games of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but then decided not to and went to talk about other stuff. However, after all that it seems that summer isn't actually here yet because it's still cold and raining, and it'll probably be bloody snowing tomorrow.

Should a mod be made for TTD which features policemen on station platforms shooting anyone running for a train who has a backpack and/or looks a bit foreign? This was a question not raised in the talk about this month's main event - the London bombings. I'm sure I speak for everyone on the forum when I say that my thoughts go out to anyone affected by the events on both the 7th and the 21st.

Some guy called r has also started two enormously successful gaming-related threads, for screenshots and reminiscing about great achievements respectively. The Harry Potter thread also proved surprisingly popular, since you'd be forgiven thinking gamers would rather read the latest Andy McNab than a book about some speccy twat with a broomstick. The Ashes, War of the Worlds and REM's world tour also got threads, natch.

Electric wildman jazz, Scandinavian shred-metal, manufactured pop, emo, screamo, shouto, post-progressive symphonic indie - what do they all have in common? Examples of them all have been posted last month in the What Are You Listening To? thread, of course.

Anyway. Yesterday at about this time I looked up and noticed a massive moth flying around the room. Now, this is the first time I've ever seen a moth in the daytime. You'd think you'd see more of them, seeing as there's light everywhere...

Enjoy a guest spot Off-Topic Forums commentary next month as I won't be doing it, because I'm out of the country for most of the month."

Anyone want to try their hand at the OT section of the newsletter next month? Let me know!

Locomotion now, and more work has been done on various new objects and graphics, including the High Speed Pack, a variety of individual train models from all over the world, and the RENFE pack. A new UK set has also been started. Illegal_Alien has created a list of many objects - see http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=19614 for more information. Also, this month, an inter-forum competition between TT-Forums, Locomotion UK and Locomotion-Fanpage has started, which could prove to be interesting! Check out the Loco forums for more details. (Anyone want to volunteer to write a more detailed round-up of the Loco forums in future? Please?)

On to the actual Transport Tycoon forums now, and Jim Powers has released another new scenario, "Super Subways II", a scenario which should offer a much enjoyment for the budding TTD enthusiast! "Super Subways II" is the 29th scenario that Jim has uploaded to the forums - quite an achievement, indeed! Also in the TTD forum, the Pictures of your Games topic is as busy as ever, with a number of new shots from many forum users.

TTDPatch, and we are now at TTDPatch alpha 55. These new alphas include major improvements to newindustries, but possibly more exciting is Csaba's latest test alphas, which contain a long-awaited feature: new cargos! In other news, Oskar released version 0.3 of his new shell extension for Windows which now allows users to view the descriptions of GRF files from Explorer, as well as titles of saved games!

This month in graphics has been an exciting one, as Born Acorn will now report. Notable improvements in patch code by Csaboka and Mek allowed new cargos and industries into the fray, and so, a number of sets have begun springing up to take advantage of this! First to start off was Dalestan and Born Acorn's "newindustries" which unfortunately had somewhat slow progress and didn't get finished, although a nice fishery came into view. The first set to be released as a beta was Michael BLunck's "New Cargos" introducing a brewery, and fishing grounds. A lot of newcomers have had problems getting it started, so please use Csaboka's special build available in the TTDPatch General forum. This month saw Zimmlock away from the forums with real life issues, however on the 31st he came back with a proposal for large and small banks using newindustries and cargos. George has also jumped on the bandwagon and announced "George's New Cargos", introducing two new cargos, tourists and petrol. Cornelius also made a new slate industry, and the actual graphics for that are in development. The Arctic Renewal Set saw much progress, with the Pacific bug in OpenTTD being fixed and it being renamed to the "North American Renewal Set" (but don't worry, it's not competing with the US Set!). Danmack's other large project, the Canadian Set, also saw lots of progress. Geo. C. Ghost finish his siding graphics and revealed them to the public in the Project: Generic Stations thread. The TTD Artist competition continued, with a few more winners. Big news this month is that Dinges (after months of hard work) is entering the last stage of his development on the new TTDGraphics site. Cornelius also released the Narrow Gauge Rails set. Remember that some sets are still a long way from completion and require help. Some of these sets are as follows:

- Japan Project
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=5358
http://www.as-st.com/ttd/japan/index.html

- Norwegian Trainset
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=9628
http://nts.thorrune.net/

- Planeset (needs help to finish)
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=4362
http://www.as-st.com/ttd/planes/index.html

- Serbian rail set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=12078
http://www.geocities.com/wilesttdpage/index.html

- Project Generic Stations
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=13575
http://www.as-st.com/ttd/stations/index.html

- UK narrow gauge set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=6123
http://www.thorrune.net/ttt/narrowgaugeset.html

- Dutch train set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=5033
http://users2.tt-forums.net/dutchset/

- Finnish train set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=8234
http://users2.tt-forums.net/finnish/

- French train set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=14756
http://users.tt-forums.net/frenchset/

- Spanish train set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=14884
http://www.as-st.com/ttd/renfetech/

- Deutsche Bahn set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=7715

- UK Renewal Set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=14785

Apologies if any other sets have been missed out: check out the Graphics forum and see them for yourself! Or, if there's a particular graphic you're looking for, check out GRFCrawler (http://grfcrawler.tt-forums.net/), a site developed and run by eis_os, now with more integration with the forums!

In the OpenTTD forums, quite a bit has been happening too, as also reported by Born Acorn. Major feature development has been rather slow, but there are still a number of behind-the-scene changes going on. Ludde himself ("The Creator") returned to the OpenTTD scene, with a number of new developments by him appearing in the codebase. There was some good news for fans of LordOfThePigs' excellent "Subsidaries Management" patch, as it seems it will be merged into the trunk before version 0.5.0. In the development forum Lucaspiller revealed his new 60 players per game patch, and a UTF-8 patch was released by gpsoft. A plethora of other patches were released unto the public, some of which made their way into the Integrated Nightly builds. Also this month, there was some more debating about the banning of land buying, with many people for the banning of it and many people against. Land buying has proved a problem in some multiplayer games where certain individuals abuse the system and block other players from building. A solution is being worked on, but one which will satisfy all users is maybe hard to come by. This month too, the OpenTTD Graphics forum was buzzing with many new and exciting 32-bit graphics being created. In addition, the 32-bit Legoland set was started by Killer 11, and later renamed the Brickland set to avoid any possible copyright infringement. And that's that for another month!

Moving on to Transport Empire, and while progress has been slow, some emergency meetings have been held and Hyronymus and Steve have become the joint leaders of the project. Another meeting has now been scheduled to check the status of everybody and to generally decide upon the project's future. If you think you can help out with Transport Empire in any way, please do visit the TE forums and post a message there, or drop in on one of the IRC meetings.

In the Simutrans world, version 86.05.1 has been released, so pay a visit to the Simutrans forum for information on that!

And finally... well, that's about it, actually.

Well, that's yet another month done, and I can't be bothered to compare the newsletter lengths this month, I'm tired. Somebody else can do it. :) And once again, don't forget to donate, and many thanks to all those users who have! Donations are gratefully accepted, by PayPal, MoneyBookers or other means (contact me privately). Alternatively, consider buying something from my Amazon UK link (http://www.owenrudge.net/amazon/). Your support is appreciated.
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Post by Born Acorn »

Hurrah. another month in life done. Now only another to get the articles done.
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Post by Illegal_Alien »

I will try to be a LocoReporter :) Next month :)
:: Looking for the Locomotion section? Scroll down on the forum index or click here. :: See all releases in Locomotion section? Clicky here! :: Click here for the best tool ever! :: .datCrawler try it! ::
Following roadmap for releases: Whats a roadmap?
Releases of LocoTrains can be found by checking the posts of: LocoTrains - Goold old AMI Trains member of the first hour.
I have Private Messaging disabled, because of the stupid questions i get in my PM box.
Want to talk to me? Get on the #tycoon and #locomotion channel on OFTC thingy. :: Evolution of men: Loosing more braincells, everytime you post...
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Post by Hyronymus »

I sincerely hope TE will get more media attention at the end of this year. It looks pretty sorry to read that we're progressing slowly again. Unfortunately it's true. Funny to read about other projects like OTTD and Simutrans, I hadly ever visit these sections :shock: .
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Post by DeletedUser21 »

Another newsletter! And to be precise this news letter got: 1852 words, 9940 characters without spaces, 11885 with spaces, and 192 lines. :wink:
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Post by Louie Armstrong »

WooHoo my thread got a mention. Thanks for that owen and everyone was good reading.

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Post by lobster »

not only that, but my favourite music as well as my very own person got mentioned. i knew i just had to lick my way upwards. :wink:

anyhoo, a very enjoyable newletter yet again. well done!
"Your mother was a lobster, and your father... was also a lobster" -- The rascal formerly known as astath -- Last.fm -- Official TT-Dave Worley Fan Club

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Post by MeusH »

Great news I think I'll subscribe this newsletter :D
BTW look for word "unto" in the article.
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Post by r »

MeusH wrote:Great news I think I'll subscribe this newsletter :D
BTW look for word "unto" in the article.
Gottit.

"A plethora of other patches were released unto the public"
r - Why be a song when you can be a symphony?


[23:14] r: Don't diss Beck, he invented music!
[23:15] Dave: That's like saying the current pope invented Catholicism.

00:09]r: Heh, no-one's replied to your gay thread
[00:10] Dave: Your mom.
[00:11] r: Say what you want about her, she's a c**t
[00:11] Dave: I take a similar dim view of my own mother.
[00:11]r: Did yours leave your dad for a posh tw*t with a mullet and a handlebar moustache then take what was supposed to be your money for uni as part of the divorce settlement?
[00:12] Dave: Sadly not.
[00:13] r: You know what that means then?
[00:13] r: That means I win.

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Post by orudge »

MeusH wrote:Great news I think I'll subscribe this newsletter :D
Oh no you won't! :(

I haven't yet set up the mailing list again, and all existing addresses are gone from it. :(
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