Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter: May 2005

[orudge]

Donate to the forums: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=9941

TRANSPORT TYCOON FORUMS NEWSLETTER: MAY 2005

Welcome once again to the Transport Tycoon Forums Newsletter. It's May, the birds are singing, the air is fresh, and the washing is drying outside because the dryer has broken! Take a moment to read through and enjoy this month's 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.

As with last month, I'll start with a few stats... in the past month, just over 10,100 messages have been posted, over 260 users have signed up and several gigabytes of data was sent to and retrieved from my top-secret backup storage location while the server's hard disk was being replaced. Over the course of the month, there have been some 6.6 million hits in all, using over 52GB of bandwidth. That's some 55,433 individual visits, and the most popular day appears to be the 18th April, with some 307,604 hits (2,602 visits). Of course, visitors from the Netherlands top the country chart again, and then we have .net, .com, unknown domains, and then it's the UK and Australia, as it was last month. Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary then make up the rest of the top 10. IE 6.0 on Windows XP is still the most popular browser, although Firefox is high in the leader board, and interestingly again, Mozilla on OS/2 is the 4th most popular browser (that'll be you, then, Rob!). The most popular string people used on search engines to get here was, wait for it, "transport tycoon". openttd.com was the top external referrer. Most visitors use a resolution of 1024x768 in 32-bit colour, and 46% of visitors appear to access the forums from Europe. These statistics are dedicated to Marty, my pet monkey who unfortunately passed away during the production of these statistics.

Right, statistics over and done with, what else? The hard disk of the server hosting tt-forums had to be replaced yesterday, so apologies for that downtime. Hopefully everything is working now: if not, there is a thread you can reply to with your comments in the News forum.

Now, back to our scheduled programme. Let's start, as always, with Off-Topic, and our usual report by Paranoid "My Name's Not Tombe!" Android. It has been a busy month in off-topicland, still sustaining more than 1 post a day. The main hot topics have been the tragic death of the Pope, the election of the new Pope, the heated discussions on Nazism and stuff that followed, and the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time. Remember, people, you can do a lot worse than buy yourself a copy of "OK Computer".

Legend has it that an evil biblical plague of demons known as "chavs", led by the Evil Lord Whatthebleepareyoulookingatgreebo?, once ravaged the beautiful country of Britain, completely destroying the quaint seaside town of Sphincter-on-Sea and capturing such despondent military/industrial complexes as Manchester and Londonshire. This has also been a hot topic for discussion, as it seems the evil ones are waking up. Chavs, or 'c*nts' as they are affectionately known, seem to be plaguing our streets again. Remember, if you see one of these things in the streets, call the police, who will instantly appear, beat the offender senseless and racially insult him regardless of his actual race.

The great debate on whether you would rather be bald or ginger rages on. A moral dilemma? You betcha.

The What Are You Listening To (or the What Is The Other Person In The Same Computer Room As Owen Listening To) thread continues to display a wide variety of musical tastes of our forumers: new-age skiffle, acid funk, bebop, fusion, Dixieland, ragtime, cool jazz, post-alternative country metal, prog-rock, prog-metal, prog-jazz, prog-dance, prog-trance, prog-pants, prog-prog, acid dinner rap, shred-blues, bubblegum pop, chewing-gum pop, and of course, Ackabilk. Increasingly creative song titles are also appearing, ranging from 'I want to eat your babies' to 'DEATH!!!!!!11111one' to "A Timbered Choir and Thee Tired Ark Octet Perform "Even while I dreamed I prayed, that what was only fear and no foretelling, for what I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who never wanted to go home would never get there now."". It's been one of those months.

Locomotion now, and there was a bit of a squabble about copyrights of custom objects. In the end, things settled down (as they always do) and people are a bit more amicable there. The Locomotion NL Pack has been progressing well - check out its thread here (http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=11476). A number of other objects and scenarios have been released or updated, so check out the appropriate forums for the details.

The general Transport Tycoon forums saw a few resurrections of threads in "General Transport Tycoon" and "Transport Tycoon Original" related to early versions of TTO, the PSX version of TT, and similar issues. In the TTD forum, there was yet another "TTD[Patch] vs OpenTTD" topic, a number of other random TTD-related discussions, some more excellent pictures in the "Pictures of your games" thread. Meanwhile, Jim Powers has been busy creating more wonderful scenarios, including a two-part set, "Russia (Europe Part)" and "Russia (Asia Part)" - challenging scenarios that are well worth a look!

TTDPatch now, and alpha 49 was released, well, just today, featuring a variety of bug fixes, some more work on newindustries (including a new industry generation window by Csaba), a new OpenTTD-style "fifoloading" switch by Mek, and some more new switches from Csaba, including "tempsnowline", allowing a snowline in the temperate climate (should be useful for Michael Blunck's alpine set!). Full details are in the progress topic here (http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=4720&start=60), and on the TTDPatch web site. In related news, TTDX Configurator 2.6.0 has been released, which adds proper support for bitswitches and a number of other useful bugfixes and features, including a GRF autoupdater.

This month has been a very hectic month in the TTDPatch Graphics forum. Perhaps the most major event is the announcement of and then three releases of Pikkabird's BR Miniset, which includes tenders and general improvements for new and original sprites, as well as a brick-arched viaduct. The BR Miniset is not to be confused with the actual full BR Set, a release of which might be coming soon... stay tuned for more details. Another major release is the new Arctic stations by Michael Blunck. The TTRS2 has not been without development, and Zimmlock released the Stock Exchange, which features an excellent burning down animation which is excellent. Also this month, Oz joined the US Transition Train Set, and released new stations for it, including the GCT, a grain station, and a Steel Mill station. Indeed, version 0.85 of the US Set was released this month, and is well worth a download, featuring many many new trains and liveries!

There have been regular updates to the project Generic Stations, which has seen a number of new sprites, and a new release will hopefully be out sometime this month. The Planeset has been progressing well, with Aydan's new rendered planes also providing inspiration and innovation. True colour versions of the planes, with alpha channels, look absolutely brilliant - perhaps these can be integrated into OpenTTD in the future! In other news, Andrex handed over development of his GRF Wizard to me, and I hope to have a new release with any current bugs fixed out soon.

Apart from the BR Miniset, a number of other projects sprung out of nowhere this month, including the French Trains Set and the Spain Set. The French Train Set, led by wallyweb, looks very promising: check out their topic and tracking table for a sneak preview! The Spain Set is also getting off the ground now, and we look forward to the completion of both of these projects in the future!

Remember that some sets are still a long way from completion and require help. Some of these sets are as follows:

- 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/

- French train set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=14756
http://users.tt-forums.net/frenchset/

- Spanish train set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=14884
http://www.as-st.com/ttd/renfetech/

- Deutsche Bahn set
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=7715

- BR Miniset
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=14785

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 site developed and run by eis_os, which now features a Mozilla/Firefox search plug-in!

On to the OpenTTD forums, and we're getting closer to a release of 0.4.0 - a number of bugs have been fixed over the course of the month. A number of unofficial builds have appeared with many new features. A web-based OpenTTD login system has been devised, and a test build released, which should help police certain members of the OpenTTD online community who ruin other people's games. GoneWacko has also been working on some more realistic disasters, such as a forest fire. Expect to see these soon! Mek has got a basic true colour graphics engine working - this isn't currently available for release, but it looks promising! Meanwhile, I have been working on integrating some of Born Acorn's new industries into the game (see "NEW GRAPHICS NEEDED" in the OpenTTD Graphics forum). I planned to release a test build this weekend, but due to lack of time, this will be pushed back to next weekend, likely. Path-based signalling, a new signal GUI, an improved smooth economy patch, subsidiary management... these are all patches that you can download and experiment with, and the unofficial Integrated Nightly Build contains many of these new features that haven't made it into the SVN trunk yet, so if you'd like to give them a try, check this version out.

Transport Empire now, and more meetings have been held to sort out who's writing the Design Document. A vote was held, and Hellfire and uzurpator were appointed. A number of topics have been created now in the General Transport Empire forum to query other aspects related to the game, the web site, and so on.

In the Simutrans world, a variety of versions have been released over the past month, and 86.01 is now the latest version. A topic was also created showcasing Raven's American Railway set for Simutrans, which looks really nice, and might make its way into OpenTTD in the future.

And that, my friends, is that! Word length this month is about the same as last month (slightly more). Now the obligitory "send me money" plea: donations are gratefully accepted, by PayPal, MoneyBookers or other means (contact me privately). Alternatively, consider buying something from my Amazon UK link (http://www.owenrudge.net/amazon/). Your support is appreciated.

Have a nice May!

[GoneWacko]

Woo first post!!!!!One.


Also, damn you for forcing me to finish the forest fire disasterby mentioning it here

*continues to code*

[Paranoid Android]

I feel proud. Parts of my contribution had to be censored.

[GoneWacko]

I feel proud. Parts of my contribution had to be censored.

Yes, I noticed that too

[DeletedUser21]

can't wait what will happen this month.

[G-TANK-G]

can't wait what will happen this month.

ah but Mr. X, what will happen this month?

[Oracle]

Good read as usual. Thanks to Owen and all other contributors.

[DeletedUser21]

ah but Mr. X, what will happen this month?

maybe but unlikely (I guess) a release of OTTD 0.4.0
more bug fixes for TTDpatch alpha 49
Offtopic still going strong, with great topics about topicalities and other funny talk.
A fun to read flamewar between Krtaylor and Urzurpator

Use imagination.

[ThorRune]

Why is "I"? The writer shouldnt do that.

Else, great. 0.3.4 has been right around the corner from the first newsletter

[Zuu]

Sorry, i have been a bit bussy last weeks, and haven't taken me time to do something for the TE-section. However I can't promise that I will do it for this month, as I am at my last weeks at the gymnasium. (Heading for university after summer.)

[Paranoid Android]

Why is "I"? The writer shouldnt do that.

What the hell are you talking about?

[orudge]

Why is "I"? The writer shouldnt do that.

Are you referring to the "I worked on new industries", etc? Because it's a newsletter from me to everyone else, and I felt a bit silly writing "orudge worked on".

[ThorRune]

Well i understood it as if it weas from a mailman, and the "I" sounded odd. Maybe if it had a "I (Owen)" somewhere, itd sound better. Or maybe just keep it this way and just let me be confused, might be the best

[kamatsu]

Is it not interesting, thor-rune, that by trying to point out a potentially confusing segment, you successfully confused more people than were confused before? and that this response is no doubt confusing people further?

[DeletedUser21]

Do you care?
because I don't, I think the letter is fine, and good to read, even with the 'I' in it.

[Purno]

Can't we stop useless discussion in the News forum?

[DeletedUser21]

Agreed