Transport Tycoon Forums: March 2005 Newsletter

[orudge]

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

TRANSPORT TYCOON FORUMS NEWSLETTER: MARCH 2005

Welcome to the March 2005 edition of the Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter! This is a regular round-up of what's been going on in the Transport Tycoon world, and the latest happenings on the forum.

If you're reading this by a forum mass-mail, this is the only issue you will receive by e-mail unless you subscribe to the mailing list - see this page or send an e-mail to news-request@tt-forums.net with the subject "subscribe" - it is highly recommended to keep up with the latest news and important announcements from the forum. Traffic will be very low - 1-2 messages a month, and your e-mail address is never made public.

If you've not been to the forums in a while, then a lot has been going on... we currently have just under 250,000 posts and some 6,200 registered users, and the place is buzzing with activity! Check out the latest projects in the TTDPatch Graphics forum, or the latest innovations in OpenTTD, or just have a laugh in the Off-Topic section. Don't delay, check it out today!

An announcement now for those people who have users.tt-forums.net hosted accounts - please see this topic for information on changes to your account, or you may have trouble logging in. People with hosted accounts on users2.tt-forums.net are not affected. If you would like some TT-related material hosting for free, then please get in touch with me!

Right... this month has been a busy month for the forums. To start off, imagine, if you will, a bearded author writing a great novel. He will not follow the line "The family sat down in the drawing-room for a whisky and a game of backgammon" with the line "Then a bunch of killer martians invaded and shot them all with zap-guns" simply because it doesn't fit. Likewise, anything here that doesn't fit ends up in the Off-Topic forum, and it is certainly thriving at the moment, often with upwards of 1 post made every day. If you do not have a desktop, you can get one from the ever-expanding desktop thread. The Pretty Girls thread is still going strong, even though certain members only go in there to call everyone a bunch of perverts and post pictures of Éowyn. The Token Forum Religious Debate has finally occurred, something that must happen once in every forum's life. The discussion of changing avatars has also appeared, despite the fact that changing one's avatar is punishable by death. The What Are You Listening To thread continues to show the wide variety of music tastes of our forummers, including, but not limited to: Disco-metal, post-rock indie electronica, skiffle, fusion, murder, deathshrednoiseubercoremetal, stadium reggae, acid dinner jazz, and of course, progressive hard house trance techno.

Moving down the forum list, the European patch for Locomotion has finally been released, so if you've avoided upgrading due to the language differences, you can now update and enjoy a few bug fixes.

In the Transport Tycoon Deluxe forum, the talented Mr Jim Powers has been busy churning out scenarios, and his latest enjoyable scenarios, "Noticable Netherlands", "Notable Norway" and "Elegant England Plus" can be found there. The "Pictures of your games" thread is still going strong, with some excellent pictures of various new and existing train sets being posted by a variety of members. Well worth a visit!

Moving onto TTDPatch, and alphas 43 and more recently 44 has been released, with a whole load of new features. Firstly, eis_os has increased the sprite limit significantly, which will allow for much more flexibility with graphics sets in the future - an excellent piece of work there! Csaboka has started work on a "newindustries" switch, which, while not particularly usable at the moment, shows potential for the future. Mek has made a number of GUI enhancements, such as resizable and sticky windows, and a Locomotion-style track-building GUI. These alphas also features a variety of bugfixes, and if you haven't upgraded yet, it's recommended you do.

This month in the TTDPatch Graphics forum, Zimmlock finished his newest building for the TTRS: a hospital, with three stages: old, post-war, and modern. It has construction stages between each of them, including fully animated demolishing of the post-war hospital and its rebuilding into the modern version - a lovely graphic to watch. Also this month, yet more fierce debating usually kept for copyright disputes was seen in the New Stations thread, leading to the creation of a new, cleaner thread and a lock of the old thread. There have been releases of the 'Project: Generic Stations set' throughout the month, and more are expected to be released soon by community coder Aegir. eis_os has announced his intention to create a new program named GRF Compiler, which will decompile and recompile GRF files and is meant as a replacement of GRFCodec. The poll on the relevant thread shows much interest in the new program.

The Planeset is getting closer to release, with a new beta release by 459 recently. If you can help them with any of the remaining tasks, please do! There are still various other sets that are looking for coders and artists, so if you have the time, please help out. These sets are as follows:

- Planeset
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=4362
http://www.as-st.com/ttd/planes/index.html

- 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/

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

- Finnish Train Set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=8234

- BR Set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=4700
http://www.xpns.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=BR_Set

- 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

Apologies if any other sets have been missed out. Check out the Graphics forum, and see them for yourself!

In the OpenTTD world, the release of version 0.4.0 is on the horizon. There is currently a feature freeze until the release, with all focus on bugfixes. In the nightly SVN builds, the most major new features, mentioned last month, are the large maps, and multistop. Maps can now be up to 2048x2048 squares - that's 16 times the standard size! Various other limits, such as the number of towns and industries, have also now been boosted. Multistop is the ability to have more then one bus stop or lorry bay per station. In other news, work on a Unicode-supporting version of OpenTTD is progressing well, and hopefully we'll hear more news on this feature - allowing for proper translations into languages like Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese - soon. In the multiplayer world, #openttdcoop was started on the freenode IRC network, where an OpenTTD server is run with only one company. The game is password protected, and players cooperate to create an excellent network - you can get the password in #openttdcoop if you are interested.

Transport Empire now, and the focus has mainly been on the FRD document (discussion of feature specifications). 4 meetings have taken place since last month, and many decisions have been made in this short time about how the game should work from a user's perspective. Soon the design document - the Transport Empire "bible" - will be written, based upon the results of these discussions.

Simutrans 85.04.1 has been released, the first version released by the new maintainer prissi, after Hajo's resignation last month. The game is progressing well, so check it out!

That's about all for this month. A little plea though: the forum is very expensive to run, so if you enjoy it, and can spare some money - any - please do consider donating to keep the forums alive (see http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=9941). Thanks for your support!

Expect to see the next newsletter on, hmm, April 1st! Thanks to Paranoid Android (the funnyman formerly known as Tombe), Born_Acorn, ThorRune and zuu for their contributions to this newsletter.

[Rob]

Although it's a really nice Newsletter, in particulary the authors riming capabilities
, it's unneccessary to send it twice through e-mail though.

I got one from : news at tt-forums dot net
and the other one from : forums at tt-forums dot net

[orudge]

As I said in the second one, it's because you had already subscribed to the mailing list, and then I did a forum-wide mass mail to see if I could reawaken any old users. You won't receive them twice any more, I'm only going to send it out via news@tt-forums.net in future for people who ask to receive it.

[Menno]

can i please get one from info[at]tt-forums[dot]net?

[Rob]

As I said in the second one, it's because you had already subscribed to the mailing list, and then I did a forum-wide mass mail to see if I could reawaken any old users. You won't receive them twice any more, I'm only going to send it out via news@tt-forums.net in future for people who ask to receive it.

Ah yes of course, after carefully re-reading your nice Newsletter I got it.
I do have to say I was distracted by your riming attempt as an excuse for me missing that the first time around though.

[Steve]

Ahhhhh \s!

(In the email version)

[SHADOW-XIII]

orudge if I am right you sent over 6000 those messages ?

[ThorRune]

"tt-forums.net mailing list memberships reminder"

Do i have to recieve that mail once a month like it sais it'll send it? It's another bad reason for my passsword to show on my schreen at school, wich shouldn't really happen at all

[Prof. Frink]

Well, if you'd looked when you signed up, you'd have seen that this was clearly stated, and advised to use a non-critical password.

[Mek]

"tt-forums.net mailing list memberships reminder"

Do i have to recieve that mail once a month like it sais it'll send it? It's another bad reason for my passsword to show on my schreen at school, wich shouldn't really happen at all

You can turn it of. go to http://tt-forums.net/mailman/listinfo/n ... forums.net, enter your e-mail adress, click on unsubscribe/edit options, enter your password, and somewhere down there is an option to not receive the monthly password reminders.

[Paranoid Android]

No comments about the actual newsletter.

It's very informative, especially the bit about the off-topic section.

[Lightglobe]

I don't know about that Paranoid Android(i still think of you as Tombe, just like i still think of ThorRune as Zetor). The humour seems a bit weak. And overall,the write has very uneducated writing skills.

So now we have the sarcasm out of the way, moving onto more serious matters........oh wait, were talking about me. Move along, nothing to see here.

[ThorRune]

Why did i just recieve a 3rd instance of the mailinglist? (This time without escaped 'es and "es)

[haakon99]

You wrote about OTTD:

Maps can now be up to 2048x2048 squares - that's 16 times the standard size!

Not so. It is 64 times original size.

Håkon

[Mek]

You wrote about OTTD:

Maps can now be up to 2048x2048 squares - that's 16 times the standard size!

Not so. It is 64 times original size.

Håkon

standard size: 256x256, new size 2048x2048; 256*4=2048, so it's 16 times as large. BUT 2048x2048 is 64 times the new smallest size (wich is 64x64 iirc)

[haakon99]

[standard size: 256x256, new size 2048x2048; 256*4=2048, so it's 16 times as large. BUT 2048x2048 is 64 times the new smallest size (wich is 64x64 iirc)

I get realy scared when devs fail on simple math!

256 * 8 = 2048, 8 * 8 = 64. 64 times bigger. PERIOD!

Håkon

[orudge]

can i please get one from info[at]tt-forums[dot]net?

Don't be a pain.

Ahhhhh \s!

(In the email version)

Yes, that won't happen again, as that's the only time the newsletter is going to be mass-mailed out to all forum users. It certainly increased the number of subscriptions to the mailman list, though.

orudge if I am right you sent over 6000 those messages ?

It got to about 5000 messages or so before I had to go and close down the computer, so the latest 1000 or so members wouldn't have received it. But oh well...

"tt-forums.net mailing list memberships reminder"

Do i have to recieve that mail once a month like it sais it'll send it? It's another bad reason for my passsword to show on my schreen at school, wich shouldn't really happen at all

See what Mek said, you can alter this in the mailman configuration.

Why did i just recieve a 3rd instance of the mailinglist? (This time without escaped 'es and "es)

No idea, can you paste the message headers here?

You wrote about OTTD:

Maps can now be up to 2048x2048 squares - that's 16 times the standard size!

Not so. It is 64 times original size.

Håkon

Well, whatever it is or isn't (256*256=65536, 2048*2048=4194304, 4194304 / 65536 = 64, so it isn't), it's not my fault, ThorRune wrote that, so blame him.

[ThorRune]

Well no but...

Code: Select all

256     x 256   =  65536   // That'd be the size of normal maps
2048    x 2048  =  4194304 // That'd be the size of the new maps
4194304 / 65536 =  64      // OK, i give up :P

No idea, can you paste the message headers here?

As in subject?

Code: Select all

news-request@tt-forums.net	Unknown date	 	news Digest, Vol 2, Issue 1

The Transport Tycoon Forums	Tue, 4:40 pm	 	Transport Tycoon Forums: March 2005 Newsletter

The Transport Tycoon Forums	Tue, 4:13 pm	 	Transport Tycoon Forums: March 2005 Newsletter

[/code]

[Paranoid Android]

I don't know about that Paranoid Android(i still think of you as Tombe, just like i still think of ThorRune as Zetor). The humour seems a bit weak. And overall,the write has very uneducated writing skills.

Do better, or get the fùck out of my sight.

[Zuu]

Not realy. A email is built up of a head and a body just as a html document. The head part contain adress information, encoding data etc. while the body contains the actual message.

Usally email clients shows just a lttle part of the headers like subject, sender and date. But what Owen asked for was all headers.

* In the Thunderbird email client you can select Veiw -> Headers -> All in the menu, or Veiw -> Message Source for esier copy-paste.
* In Horde webmail client you can click on 'message source' to get the whole message in a new window including the whole head and body.

If you use hotmail there is a risk that you are in thier trap as they like to hide as much as possible for the users (including usefull data).