[News Post] New website and nightlies are back

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[News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by TrueBrain »

Cross posting from the website:

Modernisation of the hosting infrastructure is proceeding, and we have just brought a new version of this main website online. But, you say, nothing changed? You are absolutely correct!

For over the last 15 years, the website was run on Django. Sadly, over the years, fewer and fewer people knew how to update it, and it stalled. So, a few weeks back andythenorth and TrueBrain started to port the website to Jekyll, and put it on GitHub. It is now connected to a CI/CD. This means that any contribution can quickly be tested and validated, and anyone with commit rights can update the website. Including things like news, screenshots, etc!

Additionally, after almost a year of no nightlies, they are finally back. These nightlies are created on new infrastructure, and should be better than ever. Especially the Mac OS version should be a lot more stable, as it is no longer cross-compiled.

Finally, the new binaries are now served from a CDN; this means downloads should be a lot quicker for a lot more people.

This all took a lot of effort (6+ months of work), and hopefully this makes contributing to these parts of our game a lot easier.

If you find any trains stuck at signals please let us know, so we can resolve the issue safely without risk of crashes.
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by PikkaBird »

Hooray, nightlies! Good work everyone involved. :)
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by andythenorth »

Highlights of the new nightlies, compared to 1.8.0:
  • Increase rail type & cargo type limits to 64
  • Overhaul of music system
  • Framerate display window
  • Automatic save when losing connection to a network game
  • Default starting company colour setting
  • API for querying network clients from GS (#6736)
  • Append '(City)' after city names in the town directory
  • New Russian Ruble as currency (#6678)
  • Increase size of industry persistent storage to 256
There is much more, see it on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/commits/master

Contributions have really picked up since April 2018 :D
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by kamnet »

Thank you for all of your work. We really should have some sort of community reward for your contributions!
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Chrill »

Really good work, worthy of praise. If ever there is a TT-Meet with you guys present, I feel you deserve a beer and a pat on the back.
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Transportman »

Great work, just one question about the nightlies: I see the version number has changed to the date (nice, makes seeing which new things have been added a lot easier), but I can't see to which exact commit the nightly corresponds anymore. I can get a good idea by looking at the times, but is there a way to get the exact commit?
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by andythenorth »

Transportman wrote:I can't see to which exact commit the nightly corresponds anymore. I can get a good idea by looking at the times, but is there a way to get the exact commit?
My assumption is that for nightlies, the rev built matches the latest commit in the changelog https://openttd.ams3.cdn.digitaloceansp ... ngelog.txt

Changelog is linked from download page.

If I'm wrong TB will probably say so ;)
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by TrueBrain »

The name of the nightly is like this: '20190126-master-g36e299fb'. It has 3 components: the date it was produced, the branch it was produced from (yes, we should be able to support patchpacks too now), and the 'git hash' of the commit it was based on. This starts with a 'g', meaning 'git', followed by the real hash.

So if you want to know the exact commit, all you have to do is: 'git log -1 36e299fb'.

There you go! The way to get the exact commit :)
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Auge »

Hello
TrueBrain wrote:Modernisation of the hosting infrastructure is proceeding, and we have just brought a new version of this main website online. But, you say, nothing changed? You are absolutely correct!
Do I read it the right way, saying the website is the old one beside the changes behind the curtain?

So there is room for a transformation of the frontend to HTML5 and to a responsive structure, isn't it? All necessary ressources seems to be located in and under the directories "pages" and "static" or are there other places with HTML and CSS ressources?

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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by andythenorth »

Auge wrote:So there is room for a transformation of the frontend to HTML5 and to a responsive structure, isn't it? All necessary ressources seems to be located in and under the directories "pages" and "static" or are there other places with HTML and CSS ressources?
A website redesign would be welcome.

All the resources are there in the repo, or if something is missing, it can likely be added. https://github.com/OpenTTD/website

There are 2 options:

1. reimplement the current design, but update to contemporary methods.

This would mean e.g. removing all the images used for styling, and replacing with css gradients, shadows etc. I did a small part of this already, and LordAro might have a more complete conversion somewhere.

We could also make the current site responsive, although it's not really designed for reflow.

2. implement a new design

This would require design skills. I could do it somewhat, but it's not something I want to be responsible for.

So either we need a designer, or we could use one of the (ugh exploitation :twisted: ) sites like 99Designs or Fiver, and pay a professional designer to do it. We do have OpenTTD funds for that kind of thing.

Either way, it needs ported to a responsive framework, preferably Bootstrap. And I am happy to help with the re-implementation. :D

Questions go to #openttd irc, or communicate via github issue, thanks :)
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Auge »

Hello
andythenorth wrote:
Auge wrote:So there is room for a transformation of the frontend to HTML5 and to a responsive structure, isn't it? All necessary ressources seems to be located in and under the directories "pages" and "static" or are there other places with HTML and CSS ressources?
A website redesign would be welcome.

There are 2 options:

1. reimplement the current design, but update to contemporary methods.

This would mean e.g. removing all the images used for styling, and replacing with css gradients, shadows etc. I did a small part of this already, and LordAro might have a more complete conversion somewhere.

We could also make the current site responsive, although it's not really designed for reflow.
I made a responsive but very incomplete mockup of the cuurent page a few years ago (the files are lost meanwhile). It's absolutely possible to make the design reflowing (except one want to keep it pixelwise like in a print design).
andythenorth wrote:2. implement a new design

This would require design skills. I could do it somewhat, but it's not something I want to be responsible for.
I am also not a designer. I understand your wariness.
andythenorth wrote:Either way, it needs ported to a responsive framework, preferably Bootstrap. And I am happy to help with the re-implementation. :D
Does that really need a framework? Use of a framework is often like stoning someone with a menhir (i.e. like in Live of Brian).

Tschö, Auge
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by andythenorth »

Auge wrote:Does that really need a framework? Use of a framework is often like stoning someone with a menhir (i.e. like in Live of Brian).
Fair question :D Answer depends on:

* how much we want to build our own grid, which is a 100% solved problem already by css frameworks
* how much we want to attract widespread contributions, other people's hand-crafted css is never attractive to work with

For comparison, we could have not used Jekyll for the website compile. We don't really need it, because a static site generator is easy to write (I have at least 2 already of my own). But Jekyll is complete, and has docs, and is easy for anyone to pick up and work with.

FWIW, I use Bootstrap for every website I build, and have for years :)
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by jfs »

I personally appreciate how the site is completely static and does not depend on downloading huge stylesheets and JS files. It's just fast and just works.
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by TrueBrain »

I think the last post of andythenorth summarizes it best; it is not bootstrap perse that would be a requirement if you ask me, but a non-javascript well-known-and-established framework would be good. Bootstrap is an obvious solution, but please, without the Javascript nonsense :D

But yeah, something that already exists has the preference for sure! Reinventing stuff is not future-proof, we noticed :P (as the website hasn't had any real update in over 10 years .. I guess that is safe to say :D). We are going for safe solutions this time around :)

(hence the Jekyll .. all GitHub Pages are build with it :P Should be safe, right? (famous last words!))


So, come to think of it, a tiny list of requirements:
- Well known framework; this because we want people to be able to contribute over the years to come, without a steep learning curve.
- No javascript (or at least, should work completely without javascript); this is because we have users with things like NoScript. No need to give them a suboptimal website.
- Static website, produced via Jekyll.
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by kamnet »

And here I was going to make the heretical suggestion that since I recently started the conversion of tt-forums to the newest version of phpbb, that maybe we just borrow that and throw in an add-on to produce a general front-page. :)
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Katve »

Would the GatsbyJS framework be option for OpenTTD.org's framework ? Its very fast for smallish static sites and from what I looked up it should also work with no Javascript enabled. It would at least be very modern solution. I am not expert on all matters of OpenTTD.org's needs but I think it could work well. I think with GatsbyJS we could get static site and some of benefits of Javascript for those who want.

Also great work on getting nightlies back !
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Auge »

Hello
Katve wrote:Would the GatsbyJS framework be option for OpenTTD.org's framework ?
Openttd.org just changed to a new framework named "Jekyll".
Katve wrote:Also great work on getting nightlies back !
Yes.

Tschö, Auge
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Emperor Jake »

andythenorth wrote:Highlights of the new nightlies, compared to 1.8.0:
...

You missed group liveries, literally the best feature since path signals :D
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by Toffo »

Fantastic work guys, well done!
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Re: [News Post] New website and nightlies are back

Post by leifbk »

Great! Where are the Linux Nightlies?
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