PLEASE DO NOT USE - IT IS BUGGY : OpenTTD 0.5.3-RC1

[belugas]

Ladys and Gentlemen, as you may already be aware, we have made available, this evening, a new candidate for release, namely OpenTTD 0.5.3-RC1.
It is still a minor release, still about bug fixes, and still very few features.
But it is a new step toward 0.6

Downloads are over at http://www.openttd.org/downloads.php Please be patient while SF distributes the files and we compile more binaries.

Hope you will enjoy this new effort!
Thanks to Rubidium for his dedication at the job

0.5.3-RC1 ( 2007-06-28 )
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Feature: Make the client list window (for network games) stickyable (r10293)
- Feature: console command to get the current game date (r10137)
- Fix: Waypoints could be renamed when you are not the owner (r10368)
- Fix: Smooth economy did not close primary industries and it allowed increasing of production of industries that should not have rising productions (r10348, r10347, r10290)
- Fix: Acceleration for trains on slopes is not calculated properly [FS#786] (r10344, r10317)
- Fix: The 'old' pathfinders (OPF and NPF) for road vehicles could not find a path when in a tunnel [FS#290] (r10345)
- Fix: Only add the autoreplace menu when autoreplace actually knows about the group [FS#880] (r10337)
- Fix: Signal state sometimes not properly set when the signal "pathfinder" reached the end of a line [FS#910] (r10336)
- Fix: News messages were shown over the endgame/highscore windows [FS#943] (r10333)
- Fix: Rail could be destroyed when building tunnels (r10306)
- Fix: Flush the output of the dedicated server console (r10295)
- Fix: The "pause" key did not work in the scenario editor (r10294)
- Fix: Age non-front engines too (so when you move engines around in the depot they do not get age 0 when they are much older [FS#202] (r10288)
- Fix: Do not make everyone spectator if 1 joining client failed to create new company (r10284)
- Fix: Remove invalid characters (for the file system) from savegame names [FS#916, FS#850] (r10272, r10116)

- Fix: Some old savegames could have the wrong bits unset (r10268, r10147)
- Fix: Do not look in every direction for tunnels when building one, one direction is enough (r10258)
- Fix: [Windows] Do not mess desktop when using ALT-TAB [FS#876] (r10251, r10186)
- Fix: Take the age of the front vehicle for station rating (r10246)
- Fix: Terraforming wipes out canals. Now you always have to remove the canal before terraforming, instead of "just" removing the canal [FS#594] (r10240)
- Fix: Only 2 trains could crash at one time as collision checking stopped on the first hit. This could technically cause desyncs in network games as the collision hash order is not guaranteed [FS#892] (r10222)
- Fix: Land under foundations was terraform when it shouldn't be terraformed [FS#882, FS#890] (r10219)
- Fix: Do not make a 270 degree turn on the international airport when a 90 degree turn is enough (r10187)
- Fix: Crash when trying to get the aircraft movement state of an aircraft going to a just deleted airport [FS#874] (r10165)
- Fix: Airports did not flood when there are aircraft on the airport [FS#601] (r10155)
- Fix: Some vehicles were not drawn when having a high resolution and a high zoom-out level [FS#870] (r10154)
- Fix: Vehicles disappear when crossing certain tiles [FS#869] (r10153)
- Fix: Train disconnects in some old TTD savegames [FS#862] (10151)
- Fix: OpenTTD assumes that the resolution is at least 1 by 1, so force the resolution to be always at least 1 by 1 (r10139)
- Fix: When you got a sufficiently small resolution, there is a possibility for a division by zero when a sound is played (r10138)
- Fix: When removing a dock, a ship will always try to reach the old location of the dock even when it cannot anymore because it the old location of the dock is now land instead of water [FS#810] (r10131)
- Fix: SetCurrentGrfLangID returned the wrong language ids for most languages (r10130)
- Fix: Some NewGRFs use the same (unused in the "current" climate) sprite IDs. Normally this gives some artefacts, but when one NewGRF expects it to be a sprite and another NewGRF overwrites it with a non-sprite nasty things happen (drawing a non-sprite crashes OTTD) [FS#838] (r10109)
- Fix: Multiple subsequent "give money" actions could result in duplicate messages that money has been transfered when it only happened once, or tell you paid money when you did not [FS#834, FS#839] (r10087, r10085)
- Fix: "Deactivate Electrified Railways" did not work [FS#836] (10083)
- Fix: Memory leaks in the networking code [FS#846, FS#844] (r10082, r10075)
- Fix: Coverage area highlight was still show when it was turned off for docks [FS#835] (r10068)
- Fix: Do not use override engine type for articulated wagon parts (r10048)
- Fix: Sprite resulting from '?' substitution was reloaded into the cache entry for SPR_IMG_QUERY instead of the original sprite cache entry. This resulted in unaccounted missing sprite cache memory, and was exacerbated because the original missing sprite was not cached, so it did it again and again and again. Slowdowns and boom (r10038)
- Fix: One could build on (some) slopes when building on slopes was disabled [FS#823] (r10030)
- Fix: When deleting the first engine of a train with multiple engines, only reopen the train window if the player had the original train window open. This fixes 'random' windows opening for multiple players of the same company (r10028)
- Fix: When selling trains, if there were no wagons between multiheaded engines the rear part could be checked despite having already been deleted (10023)

[Edit] Breaking news : Seems there are some bugs introduced in this version. Watch out![/Edit]

[dihedral]

before upgrading the games i host i would really like to know
what exactly does "some bugs" mean ?

[Rubidium]

Something with crashes when trains drive over bridges.

[dihedral]

nice!! - perhaps i'll wait until RC2 ?

[Bilbo]

Yep. The bug is pretty bad, basically opponent can crash your trains with same ease as he can crash road vehicles. Plus if you use bridges, trains will crash happily into themselves. Wait for RC2

[csuke]

maybe make a nice big warning in red letters at the start of this thread?

[Sacro]

before upgrading the games i host i would really like to know
what exactly does "some bugs" mean ?

Fire up the title screen, watch the food train in the top right corner...

[Mchl]

Fire up the title screen, watch the food train in the top right corner...

Which gives me an idea, of a 'debug scenario'. A scenario where such 'basic' (1) bugs could easily be spotted.

(1). By 'basic', I don't mean they're easy to fix, but that they're easy to spot

[maartena]

before upgrading the games i host i would really like to know
what exactly does "some bugs" mean ?

Fire up the title screen, watch the food train in the top right corner...

It gets stuck pretty badly too They must not have play-tested this release too much internally. But hey, that's what we are for heheheh

This release is pretty much useless otherwise because of this bug, but I am pretty positive that RC2 with this bug fixed will be released either today or tomorrow

[Bilbo]

Fire up the title screen, watch the food train in the top right corner...

Which gives me an idea, of a 'debug scenario'. A scenario where such 'basic' (1) bugs could easily be spotted.

(1). By 'basic', I don't mean they're easy to fix, but that they're easy to spot

Good idea.

Well, the title screen qualifies for spotting this bug, but seems noone of the devs noticed that there is something wrong with that train.

[dihedral]

hey - this is not a stable release, as the name says it a "Release Candidate"

that this rc will never make it to the stable 0.5.3 is obvious to all.

looking at the changelog in the first post, i think they have done some amazing work. even if there is a pretty nasty glitch.

thunbs up devs - i am sure you can sass this one out too

[DoruHush]

I am humble player.But I have a problem with this new release.
My trains do not want to climb bridges, will crash with each other
when one is on a bridge and an other is under the bridge. It can't be played. I'm not upset I'm not happy either. I use the nightly.

[Tomsomethingcon]

I am humble player.But I have a problem with this new release.
My trains do not want to climb bridges, will crash with each other
when one is on a bridge and an other is under the bridge. It can't be played. I'm not upset I'm not happy either. I use the nightly.

lmao sorry dude, love the way you said that

but if you read the pervious posts, and severalnew treads started lats night and today, this whould have been explained

you can either go back to the last stable version, or of course use te nightlys

[SirkoZ]

Not only that - also - Oil Wells in all 3 terrains
(instead only in temperate) now _only_decrease.

Instead of this:
if (CHANCE16I(20 + (i->pct_transported[j] * 20 >> 8 ), 1024, r >> 16) &&
i->type != IT_OIL_WELL) {
new += max(((RandomRange(50) + 10) * old) >> 8, 1U);
it should be this:
if (CHANCE16I(20 + (i->pct_transported[j] * 20 >> 8 ), 1024, r >> 16) &&
!(i->type == IT_OIL_WELL && _opt.landscape == LT_NORMAL)) {
new += max(((RandomRange(50) + 10) * old) >> 8, 1U);

- or very similar anyway.

[Bilbo]

Not only that - also - Oil Wells in all 3 terrains
(instead only in temperate) now _only_decrease.

Instead of this:
if (CHANCE16I(20 + (i->pct_transported[j] * 20 >> 8 ), 1024, r >> 16) &&
i->type != IT_OIL_WELL) {
new += max(((RandomRange(50) + 10) * old) >> 8, 1U);
it should be this:
if (CHANCE16I(20 + (i->pct_transported[j] * 20 >> 8 ), 1024, r >> 16) &&
!(i->type == IT_OIL_WELL && _opt.landscape == LT_NORMAL)) {
new += max(((RandomRange(50) + 10) * old) >> 8, 1U);

- or very similar anyway.

So oil wells in temperate are meant to be constantly decreasing? This may make oil a bit ... risky commodity ...

[ostlandr]

That explains the mysterious train crashes.

Also, with bridges over water, the trains turn around and go back rather than cross the bridge.

No big, as I keep several versions installed.

[AntBUK]

Oil rigs need to pump more oil in order to make them even comprehensible anyway. I got Oil fields pumping twice as much more often then not.

[huha]

I don't think setting economy restrictions such as constantly decreasing oil output rates is a good idea. (Open)TTD is a game about transporting and networks, not about economy. In order to be able to build a challenging and efficient network, one condition has to be fulfilled: Raw material industries just need to churn out ressources like there's no tomorrow. It's easy (and somewhat boring) to build a network that doesn't get congested when the raw material industries aren't producing much, but it gets harder, more challenging and ultimately fun if industries are producing so much that sophisticated transportation schemes have to be used to be able to get everything away from the industries as well as having a smooth network so all the trains from various industries don't block each other.
Setting arbitrary limits on how industries may in- or decrease kind of defies this concept, as the game starts to get interesting only when lots of trains from several high-output industries have to share the same track.

This is further complicated with grfs that use wagon speed limits, as the ukrs--transportation of coal over long distances gets unattractive during the 60's, as there aren't any fast wagons for coal, as opposed to tankers for oil. Later on with high-speed coal wagons, coal is quite viable again.
OpenTTD should stay a game that can be played without having to worry about managing the whole economic model of industries. In temperate climate, when playing with the ukrs, oil is--in my opinion--one of the best things to transport over large portions of the map. Unlike coal, for which there are only slow wagons for extended periods of time, oil wagons are fast. Oil does pay quite well, but the biggest advantage is that refineries produce goods, whereas power plants produce nothing, making oil transportation a good means for acting as the backbone of a goods-distributing network.

-huha

[PouncingAnt]

I don't think setting economy restrictions such as constantly decreasing oil output rates is a good idea. (Open)TTD is a game about transporting and networks, not about economy. In order to be able to build a challenging and efficient network, one condition has to be fulfilled: Raw material industries just need to churn out ressources like there's no tomorrow.

...

Setting arbitrary limits on how industries may in- or decrease kind of defies this concept, as the game starts to get interesting only when lots of trains from several high-output industries have to share the same track.

-huha

Sorry? The aim of this game was to build an efficient network?

First I heard of it. What happened to all that stuff about "the fun being in the playing" and there "not being any goals"?

I see no reason to change the hard coding of the game just so that players who like to swamp their networks with trains (although, I know that is fun) can have a better time of it. I think adapting to a changing economy can also be part of the fun.

[ostlandr]

I agree with Pouncing Ant.

In my current game (running a nightly with my favorite GRFs) there was a forest on one side of my starting city and a sawmill on the other. That darn forest never did produce enough wood to make it pay to run trains up there (was on top of a hill.) I started the game in 1921, so I had a Shay running from one side of the forest to the main station at the other to help boost production, and three 2-8-0 Consolidations running 3 log wagons and a box car each. Just couldn't get the production up.
The nail in that line's coffin was congestion at my first station. As soon as the Balogh wood truck came out, the Shay and all three road engines got scrapped and most of the line to the woods got torn up (I can't believe I did that! ) Now, trucks haul wood to the city, transfer it to other trucks that haul it to the sawmill, and a goods van takes the backhaul. The rail station at the sawmill gets fed by trains from more distant forests.
The section of track I saved eventually became part of the main line when I expanded East. Would have been great to see grass growing up between the ties, but I don't have that patch installed- yet.

And the first farm I served- grain production tanked, but I was hip-deep in cows!! I had to remove a grain boxcar from each train and add another cattle car.

I enjoy that sort of a challenge. That's what Railroading is all about IMHO.

I don't think setting economy restrictions such as constantly decreasing oil output rates is a good idea. (Open)TTD is a game about transporting and networks, not about economy. In order to be able to build a challenging and efficient network, one condition has to be fulfilled: Raw material industries just need to churn out ressources like there's no tomorrow.

...

Setting arbitrary limits on how industries may in- or decrease kind of defies this concept, as the game starts to get interesting only when lots of trains from several high-output industries have to share the same track.

-huha

Sorry? The aim of this game was to build an efficient network?

First I heard of it. What happened to all that stuff about "the fun being in the playing" and there "not being any goals"?

I see no reason to change the hard coding of the game just so that players who like to swamp their networks with trains (although, I know that is fun) can have a better time of it. I think adapting to a changing economy can also be part of the fun.