Transport Tycoon Forums

Exactly as the topic title says, I'm a bit a curious to find out how many people still plays TTDP, the patched version of TTDLX? And to be even more specific, how many uses TTDP as their main source for TTDLX rather than OTTD? And to be even more curious, what are the reasons?

This is due to some INFRA-stuff, but as I've started the topic it's only fair that I "come clean" myself;

I still play TTDP over OTTD. But not because I find OTTD to be inferior in any way. It's in fact superior, that we all know! I still play TTDP because there are some features not available in OTTD that I value when using TTDP. Also, and this is perhaps more important, the inability to change newgrf's during gameplay. I'm probably one of few - if not the only one - who tends to stick to one and the same map for years. My last Innovatia lasted for more than 5 years, and while it may seem difficult to understand I do find things to do on a map - even if it lasts for 5 years or more. I view it almost as a real life nation where changes occur all the time.

So what's your story?

I've been sticking to TTDP because of programmable signals and build-on-tunnels - was rather "funny" to see how seemingly everybody else switched to OTTD over time. But, well, last year I switched myself (big maps!) and I don't think I'll go back permanently - but I do miss features, so sometimes I still play a bit of patch

And btw, I've been playing my last OTTD save for about 6-8 months and switched a lot of NewGRFs (and OTTD versions) - the only thing that "broke" to my knowledge were some graphics, easily fixed by replacing the object. I doubt it would've been any different in patch

SAC wrote:the inability to change newgrf's during gameplay

Which does not exist.

oberhümer wrote:

SAC wrote:the inability to change newgrf's during gameplay

Which does not exist.

More helpfully

Thanks both oberhümer and Class165!

I'm aware it's possible to change newgrf's during gameplay in OTTD, but I also take the advices from OTTD devs saying it's not entirely safe and may cause games to get corrupted. And that's good enough for me to avoid using it - especially considering that I in fact play a map for a veeeeeery long time...

SAC wrote: I'm aware it's possible to change newgrf's during gameplay in OTTD, but I also take the advices from OTTD devs saying it's not entirely safe and may cause games to get corrupted. And that's good enough for me to avoid using it - especially considering that I in fact play a map for a veeeeeery long time...

It's equally unsafe with TTDP with the same consequences.

planetmaker wrote:It's equally unsafe with TTDP with the same consequences.

Really? Okey, didn't know that. But I must say that this has never been an issue for me though, and I've been adding and removing .grf's constantly using the same map without consequenses. However, reading some of the topics referred to regarding this using OTTD many people seems to have encountered issues with their maps. And seeing that OTTD devs in general encourage people NOT to change .grf's during gameplay - hence the removal of the option in OTTD, I'd say it's still very much an issue...

It depends a bit on what type of newgrfs you change during a game. Changing industry newgrfs: very bad. Removing vehicle newgrfs: very bad. Adding vehicle newgrfs: not big deal. Changing object newgrfs: no problem, as long as no existing objects end up undefined. Just to name a few.

In your case I suspect it's mostly the eyecandy type of grfs that are changed. And exactly these carry the least risk
It's because OpenTTD has no way of what consequences changing a grf will have, that changing is disabled for all. And that you only should re-enable it if you know what you're doing.


As for your original question: I only play OpenTTD. For me the only thing it's currently missing is custom bridge heads, but given all the other features I get in return make that I can live with that.

Thanks FooBar for clearing that up...

Vehicle GRFs can be removed with no undue effects as long as you do it sensibly (ie. do not have any of said vehicles instantiated).
The same goes for almost all GRF types really. At any rate you should save/backup before you make a GRF change, and if everything goes belly up, just load and try something else.

I for one no longer use TTDP. TTDP development had badly stalled, I saw no point in progressing my game any further (I'd got to the year ~3000 over 5 odd years), and so I decided that a change was in order.
Many of the features missing from OpenTTD are present in various patches. I went straight from TTDP to Chill's Patchpack for that reason.
Custom bridgeheads, enhanced tunnels and trace restrictions are the remaining features I miss most, but as maps are bigger, it's not generally critical.

With the pace of OTTD development, frequent save game format changes, and changes in my playing style, I don't think I'll be doing the multiple-RL-year-games any more either. ^^

I also do not use TTDP. I've been using Chill's Patchpack for a long time because it has just tons of tweaks and features that need to make it into trunk at some point (although it does have a few that don't necessarily need to, IMO). However, ChillPP is significantly behind trunk in other new developments -- aircraft range, autorefit, infrastructure maintenance, automatically generated rivers, etc. OTTD really just has loads of effort being put into it and I can really get behind that.

I kind of think of TTDP as OTTD Lite. I find it to be quite stable in it's current form (r2366). For the most part I have not encountered any of the items in the bug report list and suspect that they could probably all be closed off as unrepeatable. That would clear the way to releasing a version 2.6 stable. If anything remains to be done, I would say a newobject button in the scenario editor instead of a sign cheat invocation and perhaps some investigation into upgrading GRF support to version 8 might be helpful. But of course, these would probably require the services of a compile farm, which is currently not available. With all that said, I am a scenario fan rather than a competitive player. I don't even use the AI. Larger maps would be nice but have been determined as too difficult (verging on impossible) to implement and I doubt that I have the attention span for earlier start and later end dates.

wallyweb wrote:But of course, these would probably require the services of a compile farm, which is currently not available.

Mostly they require the services of willing developers, which is much more important than a compile farm. It would be fairly straightforward to set up a small TTDPatch "compile farm" to build DOS and Windows binaries, completely separate to the OpenTTD infrastructure. But what's the point if nobody's actually working on the game?

Should there be a willing developer or two to actually work on TTDPatch and get 2.6 released, I'll happily set up and host some kind of nightly compiling infrastructure!

orudge wrote:Should there be a willing developer or two to actually work on TTDPatch and get 2.6 released, I'll happily set up and host some kind of nightly compiling infrastructure!

Me too. The infrastructure and most of the compile farm are already there. It just needs migrating to the new compile farm. However, without significant changes, I've not seen the "need" for migrating the TTDPatch compile farm yet.

orudge wrote: ...

Rubidium wrote: ...

Thank you both for picking up on this.
Which came first? The chicken or the egg? Do we need developers to justify a compile farm or do we need a compile farm to attract developers?
I think this quote from DaleStan might be appropriate.

DaleStan wrote:If I did so, I am (of course) capable of posting my own TTDPatch builds, but I'd be happier if there were a compile farm that did it for me.

I've sent him a PM pointing him here perhaps to get his thoughts on this.

Seeing as, at the last count, there were zero active TTDP developers, the question of a compile farm is rather moot.
The creation of a new compile farm is not going to spurn the existing devs out of retirement. Being able to compile TTDP yourself is effectively a requisite for the development process and presumably all the existing but inactive devs can do that already.
A compile farm is useful for creating builds for use by the general public, and hence is not actually necessary for devs to do any work.

TTDP died in a large part as it was overtaken on most fronts by OTTD, and also ran into the problem of needing increasingly major/difficult changes to introduce new features, given that almost every aspect is already covered in a thick layer of spaghetti.

OTTD is orders of magnitude easier to develop. It can be fairly trivially modified without overly worrying about breaking things (ignoring issues about getting things into trunk).
It would be far more sensible to concentrate on porting the remaining features from TTDP into OTTD.

JGR wrote: [...] It would be far more sensible to concentrate on porting the remaining features from TTDP into OTTD.

Your fantastic work on "advanced signalling" would come to mind ...

regards
Michael

It would be also nice, if the last nightly could be make so someting like 2.6 Final Version, as there isn't any more development

When i first played with TTDPatch (back at 2005 or so), i found it nice, but then, OpenTTD surpassed it and things are just going fine on OpenTTD developement. But OpenTTD's developement (on the "hard-code"/patch side) should have even more developers working on things, such as custom bridgeheads and custom airports, programmable signalling etc.... (work currently stopped on them). With those features, and maybe something else, the remaining "superfeatures" of TTDPatch could be integrated to OpenTTD.

Every years end I had some urge to play a bit TTDPatch and then changing something.
But I have to say the fun is lost in community problems, hosting, build farm, wiki overtaking and the general complexity of TTDPatch patching nature, so end of 2011 I didn't even touched TTD or Patch.

I do have a ton ideas for TTD, but I can't say the last tests of OTTD changed my opinion to work on it.(Every year I check the source code of OTTD and see what happens on the key concepts and structures.)

Considering 2D Games are obsolete via GDI or SDL, I don't want to invest time in anything TTD related currently. I doubt TTDPatch works stable in Win8 either...

PS: You can find me changing Cities in Motion, so I still like Transport Simulation. And if someone want to create a Browser based TTD with server back-end and/or a true multi core transport game don't hesitate to contact me.