TRANSPORT TYCOON FORUMS NEWSLETTER: APRIL 2005
Welcome once again to the Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter, this time the April issue! 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 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.
A few stats to begin with... in the past month, over 8,600 messages have been posted, over 325 users have signed up and 37 "Whatcha X-ing at the moment?" threads were created (more on that later). As of the 29th March, there have been some 6.25 million hits in all, using over 52GB of bandwidth. That's some 53,759 individual visits, and the most popular day appears to be the 1st March, with some 268,358 hits (2,069 visits). As has been the case for the past... well, ever since the forums opened, visitors from the Netherlands top the country chart (after those with .net and .com domains), followed by unknown domains and then the UK. Interestingly, Australia comes next, followed by Germany, Finland, Poland and then Hungary at #10. IE 6.0 on Windows XP is still the most popular browser, although Firefox is high in the leader board. The most popular string people used on search engines to get here was, wait for it, "transport tycoon". No monkeys were harmed during the production of these statistics.
A couple of little announcements now... clocks have gone forward (or backwards) in most parts of the world. The forum clock remains at UTC (GMT+0) all year round, so you'll have to update your profile manually to have the times correct. The other announcement is regarding the dreaded 'D' word... donations. I can now accept donations via MoneyBookers (http://www.moneybookers.com), a service which is perhaps better for users not served by PayPal. It currently accept 27 currencies: the Euro, British Pound, Bulgarian Lev, U.S. Dollar, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Czech Koruna, Danish Krone, Estonian Koruna, Hong Kong Dollar, Hungarian Forint, Israeli Shekel, Japanese Yen, Latvia Lat, Malaysian Ringgit, New Taiwan Dollar, New Zealand Dollar, Norwegian Krone, Polish Zloty, Singapore Dollar, Slovakian Koruna, Slovenian Tollar, South-African rand, South-Korean won, Swedish Krona, Swiss Franc and Thailand Baht. In most cases, MoneyBookers' fees are lower than PayPal's. If you would like to donate this way, please visit the MoneyBookers site and send your donation to owen[at]owenrudge[dot]net.
Right, so what's actually been going on this month? Let's start, as always, with Off-Topic, reported upon by funnyman Paranoid Android (formerly Tombe). What are you reading @ da moment? The paragraph about the Off-Topic forum, of course. This month, or a couple of days of it at least, were dominated by threads called 'Whatcha X-ing at the moment?', where X was replaced by pretty much every verb in the English dictionary. Yours truly thought he could hit the nail on the head with the 'Whatcha posting at the moment?' thread, but sadly the humour was lost on everyone. This craze meant that the forum managed to keep up its proud status of having upwards of 1 posts every day. Of course, there was also a thread in which we could post our CD collections. Of course, being a forum filled with computer users, we had the usual stereotypes such as "'Tallica!" and "I don't have any, I download thousands of tracks illegally off Kazzazzazaazaaza every day. I don't care that I'm killing the music industry" </rant>. A similar thread for DVDs appeared, as well as the most stupid thread of the month, Most Stupid Post Of The Day. Oh, yes. Humour. A priest, a minister and a Rabbi walk into a pub. The barman looks up and says 'What is this, a joke?'. Yes.
There were some other interesting threads in the OT forum however, such as the "Hand Made Models" topic, a thread about the fun "Artpad", ramblings about 10GHz processors, problems with USB, railway safety, Red Dwarf... it's all going on in Off-Topic!
Over in the Locomotion forums, the main goings-on of the month were in the Graphics, Modifications & Tools forum, regarding distribution of content, after a site had been found distributing Locomotion content without sufficient credits. The argument was thrashed out a bit, but ultimately, cooled down with a generally amicable resolution. If you play Locomotion, be sure to try out some of the fantastic objects created by our community!
Moving down the forum list, we reach the general Transport Tycoon forums, where Raichase has posted a new version of his Realism Guide primarily for the DB Set (updated for the newest DB Set XL version), but also with information on other sets, such as the US Set. An "Ultra Hard" TTDAlter data file has been created by uzurpator, which adds a great challenge to the game: if you find TTD a bit too easy at the moment, give this a go! And Mr. Jim Powers has been hard at work creating scenarios, as usual... "10 City Circle" and "Lumber Jack" came out this month, and "The Swiss Alps", a remake of "Taming The Swiss", is in development! Be sure to check them out!
TTDPatch now, and we've had four alpha versions released this month: alpha 45, 46, 47 and 48. Alpha 45 was primarily a bugfix alpha, whereas alpha 46 features a major new innovations by the true Master of the Impossible, Oskar Eisemuth: road-side bus stops! No longer do busses have to turn off the main road to enter a bus stop, the bus can just stop at the side of the road, pick up its passengers, and travel on, as you'd expect in real life! Definitely a feature to check out! Alpha 47 also features various bug fixes, while alpha 48 continues with this, and adds a few feature by Mek, draggable diagonal rails. Work on PBS (path-based signalling) is progressing well too, with numerous bugs being fixed.
The TTDPatch Graphics forum is always a hive of innovation, and this month is no different. This past month, progress has been made on most sets. Perhaps the most major event is the unveiling of Aydan's rendered planes, which might become a new set entirely as opposed to being included in the main Planeset (due to their slightly "un-TTD" look). Also this month, Zimmlock showed us his newest project, a breathtaking airport, featuring new buildings and runways. He also started work on his stock exchange, which will burn down and be replaced with the World Trade Centre. Considerable progress has been made in the Project Generic Stations thread, with many new stations drawn and uploaded. Also, DanMacK resumed work on the Canadian set, showing off a wonderful-looking Hudson class. Some of the biggest news of the month from Micheal Blunck, with his release of the new version of the New Stations set, showing off every thing from big station halls to car parks. It, combined with new TTDPatch features, allows you to create the perfect station, with beds of flowers and pedestrian overpasses, you name it. Michael also released version 0.81 of the DB Set XL, which fixes some bugs with alpha 46 and implements the new feature of "early vehicle retirement" which helps to avoid purchasing of engines in their end phase of rapid reliability decrease. This double release was a pleasant surprise for the community. A further surprise was the revealation of the European Buildings Set, announced by Michael on the 22nd March, which looks like it'll be a great set. Check out the appropriate topic in the Graphics forum for more details.
Remember, there are still a number of sets in need of drawers and coders. These include:
- 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/
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 new sticky thread in the Graphics forum has also been created (maintained by wallyweb), which should provide a handy reference to anyone looking to find a certain graphics set quickly.
OpenTTD now, and where OpenTTD has been concerned, there have been a few scenarios posted to the scenarios thread, and some outside it, including a Scandinavian scenario and a UK scenario. Also this month, I released an updated OS/2 version of OpenTTD, so if you use OS/2, be sure to hop on over to General OpenTTD to get it. For those users who make use of OpenTTD's multiplayer functions, the forthcoming 0.4.0 should be a pleasant surprise, as most of the desyncs some people have been experiencing should be gone! Don't forget too that the latest SVN (nightly) builds - and therefore 0.4.0 - include such great features as larger maps!
There have been many more suggestions for the game this month, perhaps the most interesting being the suggestion of a port of OpenTTD for Nintendo DS, and some rumblings about an OpenGL version of the game. Check out the Suggestions forum for more. As far as graphics for OpenTTD are concerned, there have not been many new graphics drawn for the game this month, but if you're interested in using TTDPatch graphics sets with OpenTTD, there is a list in the OpenTTD Graphics forum. There has been no development on the new industries patch by Epsilon, with graphics by Born Acorn and Eddy. It is only 2 industries away from completion, so please help with the chemical factory and processing plant. In the Development forum, Celestar has indicated that he will try to get passenger destinations into the trunk after 0.4.0 (a separate spin-off was created some months ago). In addition, a new version of the Subsidaries Management patch by LordOfThePigs was released, to synchronise the codebase with the latest SVN code. There are no plans at present for it to be merged in with the trunk, but after 0.4.0 has been released, it's a possibility. OpenTTD is currently in a feature freeze state, until all known bugs have been squashed. A fairly major development for OpenTTD this month is Path Based Signalling, by HackyKid, as well as his new signal GUI. It is hoped too that these innovations will be added to the trunk when stable
Remember, [url=irc://irc.freenode.net/#openttd]#openttd[/url] can be found on irc.freenode.net (not QuakeNet, home of [url=irc://irc.quakenet.org/#tycoon]#tycoon[/url]), as well as the channel [url=irc://irc.freenode.net/#openttdcoop]#openttdcoop[/url], where co-operative games are played (everyone plays as a single company for mutual benefit).
On to Transport Empire, and the team have finally made their last special FRD meeting, and will soon elect two people who will write the design document. The design document will be based on the FRD and the decisions at their FRD meetings, and will detail the whole way the game will play.
As for our other projects, there was some discussion within the Simutrans forum about graphics (eg, the Winter Scenario and 128x128 graphics), as well as a request for a Mac OS X build of the game, which may be on the cards in the near future. Simutrans 86.00.1 has been released, including support for trams! If you're interested in Simutrans, check it out!
So that's the newsletter for another month... some 1,800 words this month, some 500 or so more than last month! Remember, please donate to the forums if you can, or purchase something from my Amazon UK link (http://www.owenrudge.net/amazon/).
Oh, by the way... happy April 1st. Hope you all enjoyed teh little joke I had!
