What to play?

[Klaasgras]

I've been playing this great and awesome game for 4.5 years now. For some reason, once in a while I search for a better game but in the end I always get back to OTTD. Firstly, I played with regular vanilla OTTD, but I soon discovered the various patchpack.

I started with Chills Patchpack, then switched to HardPatchPack and then changed again to the SpringPatchPack.

The most important reasons were CargoDist and automatic seperation of timetabled vehicles, and being able to put signals on bridges and in tunnels. Unfortunately, as years went by, a lot of NewGRF's became incompatible with said PatchPacks, so I had to keep switching to newer versions, which also broke saved game compability.

In the mean time, vanilla OTTD has improved in many ways I believe. It has cargodist, but lacks a good vehicle seperator.

Is there someone on the forums who can give me some advice on which version to play? And what features are in vanilla OTTD now, which weren't a few years ago?

[kamnet]

The only significant changes made to OpenTTD in the last few years has been the introduction of CargoDist patch in OpenTTD 1.4.0, and the introduction of MoreHeightLevels patch in OpenTTD 1.5.0. Tons of small improvements have been made, but those two are the major leap forwards.

If you want a solid patch pack with a few extras added, try either the Hard Patch Pack or Reddit Pack. If you want to play with some more experimental, and not necessarily stable patches, but a wide variety of them, try the Spring 2013 Patch Pack. If you want something similar to pure OpenTTD but bleeding edge experimentation, try Cirdan's OpenTTD branch.

[Klaasgras]

I now realise that I don't remember why I quit playing with Vaulter's Hard Patchpack and switched to SpringPatchpack. Maybe going back is a good idea, thanks for your thoughts!

[romazoon]

You can also find a good vehicle separator in the stable already, it s not fully automatic but it does work very well once you sorted out how to make it work (hint : give them some spare time inside the timetable so they can catch back the lateness when it happens)

so amongst the most important thing why you started playing with patchpacks are gone, except signal on bridge and tunnel, (wich are anyway less necessary when you use timetable separating)


You can try Cirdan's version wich is like openttd stable with some very usefull extra (amongst other feature : custombridgehead ( )+signal in tunnel, BUT not on bridge) ....and savegame compatility "relatively" up to date (it means you can load an oldsavegame into Cirdan's version and maybe themore important you can use the "newer scenarios made with recent version and newgrf"

See you, and have fun (again) with OTTD

[Eddi]

in the recent time, i've come to stay away from patchpacks. the added features just don't make up for the lack of stability and savegame incompatibility problems.

[audigex]

I don't know, I stuck with Chill's patchpack for a year or more, and the CargoDest + ITiM was my only OpenTTD version for years before Cargodist hit trunk. If there's a specific feature (or features) you want, in my case Cargodest and ITiM, you may find you're happier with those big non trunk features than with the newer trunk features you don't care about: in which case it's worth losing that savegame incompatibility.

[kamnet]

ChillCore's Patch Pack is probably one of the best maintained AND most inclusive patch pack ever built. It helps that he's very good with coding and was able to integrate a lot of patches together, including reviving some that might have otherwise gone dead. He's now working on contributions to core OpenTTD, which we always need more of.

Cirdan's also done quite a bit of good work as well. I hope one day to see much of his work merged into trunk as well. In fact, I'd probably use it exclusively if it had a daylength patch included.

[Eddy Arfik]

Cirdan's also done quite a bit of good work as well. I hope one day to see much of his work merged into trunk as well. In fact, I'd probably use it exclusively if it had a daylength patch included.

It's not too hard to merge daylength patch with Cirdan's branch, I actually posted a Windows binary with daylength not too long ago, the only downside is save/load compatability is completely broken.

[Klaasgras]

Thank you, gentlemen, for all your thougths.

I think that I will return to Vaulter's Hard PatchPack, becasue it has the stuff I need the most: and automatic vehicle seperator. It's really useful on congested networks. The trunk version of this is just not good enough for me. Spring PatchPack is too buggy. I will keep an eye on Cirdan's efforts, as it looks very promising.

For now, it will be Hard Pacthpack!