[Project] Massively Multiplayer OpenTTD

[pickpacket]

There is a fork of OpenTTD 12.x that allows for an unlimited number of players and companies in multiplayer games. I've tried it a few times with up to 64 companies at once and it's been really fun. The modifications made to the code to allow this are janky, however (stated as such by the creator of the fork) and it sometimes crashes. There are difficulties with the UI when navigating such a large amount of companies as well.

Others have tried to re-implement this with a more holistic approach, but it's a pretty big task. I believe that it's worth it, though. To have an arbitrary limit of players and companies in a multiplayer game would be amazing. It can be hilariously chaotic, for one. And more to it I believe that there are gains to be made on the way there that could be beneficial to the current gameplay.

This task is too big for me to handle on my own. Way too big. I'd like help, and I'd like to do it in an organised manner. In the first step I'd like help brainstorming what needs to be changed to make this work on a technical level, and which GUI changes need to be made to make it manageable. I honestly don't even know where to start.

The second step will be to break this down into smaller, independent chunks. Features that can be added one by one.

Third step is to prioritise these. The order I propose is to put those changes that add value to current gameplay first; if we (I really hope to not be alone in this endeavour) don't manage to finish the entire thing I believe we can add value on the way with each step. That way we can have milestones, and no work we do will be in vain. Maybe you don't want to participate all the way but feel strongly about one or more of the milestone features; maybe you can't commit to a project that may take a couple of years or more in total (let's not underestimate).

As we start on each new feature we can break it down further to analyse how it can be solved. Maybe have coding or testing sessions together, if that's desirable.

In this thread I'd like to gauge interest and get the brainstorming started to hopefully figure out is this is even possible.

[pickpacket]

Here are example of gameplay with lots of players:
VOD, 3:34:46 long. 60+ players (not 100 as intended).
Video, 58:34 long. 64 players in fierce competition.

[2TallTyler]

JustLinuxUser took a stab at this recently, there's code and some comments here: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/pull/12767

One standalone improvement which would be needed for this, and be a good improvement in its own right, is better graphs. Here's a PR for this which unfortunately hasn't seen activity in a few months: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/pull/12793