New to openTTD

[cleed]

Hello,

I am new to openTTD and would like to play more with it. Though I have no idea what kind of GRFs are good or what patches to add. Could someone give me any good tips?

Thanks!

[kamnet]

if you are new, don't use anything yet. Learn how to play the game, learn how to master the basics, and get a feel for the action. The game by itself without any add ons is very complete, competitive, and entertaining. After you've played a complete game a few times, you will learn how to do just about everything you could possibly do in the game, and you'll get a sense of what your own individual game playing style is like. After that, you'll be ready to explore the various add ons, game scripts, and patches that are available.

[cleed]

Yeah well, I mean I am new to the openTTD as patches scripts etc but I am oldie to TTD. So I guess some tips would be nice, which patches are nice to have etc.

[Alberth]

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=72859 seems relevant

[Brumi]

I usually quote these posts in these situations:
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=69166
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... 9#p1102219

[cleed]

Can I also load GRFs to old saved game or I have to create a new one?

[Alberth]

the latter

[Swoop]

not true Alberth. It depends on what grf youre adding and whats already built in your old game. For example, if your new grf is one that replaces trains then make sure every old train in the game is sold before applying the new grf. I once went through an old save with the magic bulldozer destroying every single piece of industry cos I wanted to try FIRS out on a map with massive passenger infrastructure already built.

[planetmaker]

not true Alberth. It depends on what grf youre adding and whats already built in your old game. For example, if your new grf is one that replaces trains then make sure every old train in the game is sold before applying the new grf. I once went through an old save with the magic bulldozer destroying every single piece of industry cos I wanted to try FIRS out on a map with massive passenger infrastructure already built.

If you believe that you use a safe method: good for you. It may *seem* to work in some cases. However it is not safe at all. On the contrary, it's a good way heading for un-recoverable savegame corruption which may become visible immediately or after long(er) time playing that map. Alberth is totally right.

[Alberth]

not true Alberth. It depends on what grf youre adding and whats already built in your old game.

What is visible on the map is just a small part. Vehicle statistics, availability dates, whether you were autoreplacing some vehicles, acceptance and production cargoes of industries, and even the fact that some newgrf is loaded, is also stored internally.
All this data is not kept separate by newgrf, it is copied as needed into various data structures. In other words, it's all thrown together onto one big heap and linked with each other, to get maximum performance of the game. It's all a sort-of structured spaghetti, you cannot easily pull out a part without possibly taking some other parts with it. The game tries to cope with disappearing newgrfs, and surprisingly often succeeds at least to a large extent, but no warranty.

For example, if your new grf is one that replaces trains then make sure every old train in the game is sold before applying the new grf.

Technically, that's called a "required but insufficient condition". It means if you have trains still driving around while you replace, you are surely doomed. If you delete them first, the outcome is unknown.

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell. Maybe you messed up a vehicle in 50 years from now, maybe you messed up a vehicle 35 years back. Maybe you never buy that vehicle 50 years into the future so you never see the problem. Lack of seeing a problem unfortunately does not imply there is no problem. Even if the problem does show, you may be busy with other things, and not look at the screen, or look at a different part of the map.

I once went through an old save with the magic bulldozer destroying every single piece of industry cos I wanted to try FIRS out on a map with massive passenger infrastructure already built.

Nice generalisation. I tried it once, and it didn't break in an obvious way immediately, therefore it always works.

As comparison, your claim goes as follows for light switches in houes: "I tried toggling a light switch in my house, and there was light. Therefore, toggling any light switch at any time in any house will give light."

Unfortunately you can only proof presence of problems that way (I toggled the switch, and I did not get light). To proof absence, you'd have to toggle all light switches that exist, at every moment of existence, and then check you get light every single time.


I know the world is not as black and white as I say it is. As long as everything goes right, it's all fine. People can and do happily ignore the red warning window. However, I have also seen cases where people really screwed their save game they worked on for months. They were desperate to get it sorted out, but there really is no hope for recovery at all.

I don't think it's good to steer players into an area where the game may totally fail in giving a fun experience, I'd rather advise to play more OpenTTD in a next game with a different NewGRF setup. Bad publicity due to such disasters is imho way more damaging to the community and OpenTTD, than having to spend some more hours playing a game that you want to play in the first place.

[Swoop]

Blimey, feel the hostility!

Its worked fine for me numerous times, I remember changing the version of AV8 about a dozen times a few years ago.....and again when that helpful chap made RAV8. I can also appreciate there will be hidden values that wont like a grf change, but if you want to test a grf on a old save before starting a new game with it it can be done. Fine, its not advised, but it can be done.

And anyone in their right mind keeps a backup save when doing something like this, surely?

[Dave]

It can indeed be done, but I think Alberth is right:

I don't think it's good to steer players into an area where the game may totally fail in giving a fun experience, I'd rather advise to play more OpenTTD in a next game with a different NewGRF setup. Bad publicity due to such disasters is imho way more damaging to the community and OpenTTD, than having to spend some more hours playing a game that you want to play in the first place.

I don't think it's wrong to advise people that it CAN be done. But it is wrong to suggest it can be done as long as x and y.

It's also a pretty complex way to get graphics into an existing game!

Anyway, never mind. The OP probably has the answer he was looking for!

[andythenorth]

Blimey, feel the hostility!

Facts and explanations aren't hostility

[kamnet]

I understand the "hostility" from both sides If you go back through my early posts I butted head with a few of the devs over the issue and just how much the player should be informed and what they're allowed to do by default. I never thought the issue of changing NewGRFs in-game was a big deal.

Then I lost my game of three years of my real life because of doing just that.

well actually I had come to the conclusion that they were right long before that, but still evidence that I, had in fact, flown too close to the sun, my wings melted.

[Swoop]

This is a serious question, not a mickey take: How do people lose save games?

I mean, I save every time I'm finished with a session of playing with my trainset using the default name that it saves with.....ie company name followed by date. This means I've got a save game history stretching back right to the start of my game. I also have autosave on every 12 months just in case I lose my head while connecting to a new town and bulldoze something I really shouldn't have. There's even the odd occasion I'll remember to save before starting to build the connection.

The result is I have hundreds of save games that get cleared up about once a year. This is partly because I'm a software developer by trade so the idea of overwriting version saves is an alien concept.

Does everyone else use 1 savegame file per game then? Cos if you're gonna do that then yeah, Alberth is dead right, ferchristsakes don't mess with your grfs.

[kamnet]

What I meant by "lost my game" is that my frequent changing of NewGRFs in the game corrupted it, and it encountered an error with vehicles getting stuck, and not being able to send them back to a road depot or destroy them, which brought my game to a halt. While I, too, have dozens of saved copies of the game, there's no telling where the corruption ended up taking place. So, that's a good reason why not only was the ability to change NewGRFs removed by default and buried, but a good reason to not encourage such actions unless you're really willing to accept that outcome.

Most other people who lose games typically do so because the hard drive or other storage medium they were saved to became corrupted, or the computer itself was no longer usable.

[FLHerne]

This is a serious question, not a mickey take: How do people lose save games?

Does everyone else use 1 savegame file per game then? Cos if you're gonna do that then yeah, Alberth is dead right, ferchristsakes don't mess with your grfs.

One of the points Alberth made earlier is that issues from changing grfs often aren't immediately noticeable.

You can make a change, not see any problems on the surface, and keep playing - and then after 200 ingame years you suddenly find all your industries claim to have negative production rates or various sprites are replaced by random-pixel-mush.
You might have a save file for every ingame month of that time, but there's still nothing you can do about it except to drop everything you've done since the change (if, real-months later, you even remember when you made it - and if you've changed things often, there's no way to thell which is to blame).

Your assumption that grf tweaks either 'succeed' or fail immediately and noticeably is exactly what led to the many "YOUR GAME BROKE FIX IT NOW" -> "You changed grfs, your problem" -> "But that was months ago and it worked perfectly, now fix the bug!" threads and then to the current tendency to simply deny the existence of that 'feature'. Even if you explicitly state that it's unsafe, people seem to just see the neat trick, use it without understanding the risks, and then complain when it comes back to bite them.

[Dave]

Yeah the key issue re: actively peddling the "feature" (or even having it show up in the "default" game) is the amount of ballache it causes the dev team.

e.g.:

13 year old LoLz0rS registers in a state of apoplexy. He has recently picked up the game, and goes into supreme meltdown about how his game with his 30 tile Eurostar coal trains (FFS!) has corrupted in the year 2120, which he's got to by playing for 36 solid hours.

"Did you change the train set you were using?" asks (e.g.) planetmaker.

"ELL OH ELL yes of course EVERYONE does"

"Even though we explicitly tell you it could break your game?"

"I don't care you've broken my life I'm going to cry into my pillow in the dark LOL"

Upshot:

... Hassle is caused. More often than not, when the dev (legitimately) denies all responsibility, said 13 year old starts using profanity and questions the sexual orientation of all around. And then a moderator has to step in.

And quite frankly, I can't be arsed.

[andythenorth]

I 'break' my savegames all the time. Goes something like this:

Add or change something in a newgrf, for example:
- length of a vehicle
- vehicle refits
- industry / industry tile IDs or properties
- strings and substring handling

The 'break' then goes something like:
- reload the grf in game, because I am devloloper and know what I'm doing (and how else would I test newgrfs?)
- ignore any warnings from OpenTTD
- assuming game doesn't crash straight away, play game for a bit
- realise, e.g all vehicles of type x are blocked in stations because they no longer refit some cargo
- or realise that some industry type no longer accepts / produces something
- or game crashes unexpectedly, due to e.g. invalid cb return value, or bad strings

It's 'broken' because I might have played for 5 seconds or 5 hours before the game crashes and/or I find something is completely broken. I can load an older save, but eh, who wants to repeat all the lost stuff?

Removing station tile trackbits and reloading the grf...what larks.

[Dave]

because I am devloloper

Spat my drink out