I made a little program that should ease the life of playtesters.
It is a pointy clicky interface to getting and building the source, made for windows.
It is build on top of MinGW and provides everything you would need to get the source, patch it and compile it. It is very much still in beta but I have got to a point where some external testing would be useful.
Version 1.0-RC1
Get it here (~12mb):
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bottd/
Install notes:
Please remember to install to a path without any spaces in it, like C:\BuildOTTD
You should also make sure that you have Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework installed.
You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en
New in 1.0-RC1
Readme updated.
SDL removed.
Now retrieving branch and tags information from openttd.org instead of hardcoded values.
Enlarged Update and Compile button.
New in 0.4.0
Updated the user interface
Program will now work even if called from another working directory
Desktop shortcut now working
New icon (made by Zephyris)
New in 0.3.0
Lots of things has happened and this release is very near version 1.0.0 now.
The finished build is now copied to a userdefineable destination along with the buildlogs. Now also for the old make system.
Ability to grab the needed files from a *TTD install and copy them to the same destination as the compiled exe. This means that you can make ready to play builds in one click. Relevant settings in the options panel.
Better error message when not online (graceful exit)
Bugfix: Updating the source now works even if you previously made a mess of things with some patch

Added option to build latest nightly
New installer that almost halved the size of the install file (thanks Desolator)
New in 0.2.0
The finished build is now copied to a userdefineable destination along with the buildlogs. This is only implemented for the new make system though.
New in 0.1.5
Options panel
Bugfixes
A bit of this and that

New in 0.1.4
Added a Purge button that will delete the local source tree of the branch selected.
Some UI clean-up as well as some code clean-up (no more uncaught exceptions).
New in 0.1.3
Old make works now
Shiny new about box
logging make process now instead of showing it in a shell