OpenTTD Auctions

[yurado]

Hi guys,

I am a student For Computer Science and as part of a study I was asked to add a feature to OpenTTD.
The feature is adding Auctions to the game, that means that each time a company wants to build a station (e.g., bus station, airport, rail station, etc.) , an auction is opened to every company on the server.
Each company can bid how much money they want to each auction.
The data on all the bids is collected for academic reasons.

I've uploaded two bundles for the clients (one for Ubuntu 16.04, and the second for Ubuntu 18.04), those are the links to download them:
Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04

I ran a dedicated server for playing this modified version, it is restarted every 48 hours. this is it's IP address:

Code: Select all

132.68.206.46:3979

Feel free to join the server, I really hope you will like it.
If you have any ideas for improvements or any bugs you noticed, leave me a message.

[jfs]

Hi, sounds like an interesting idea.

However, one of those things you aren't always taught in computer science classes: Software licenses, the GPL v2 license OpenTTD is covered by requires that you also make the complete source code available for any modified version you distribute. As it is now, since you're only distributing binary packages for two Ubuntu versions, anyone not on one of those two versions, or on any other OS, won't be able to try it out.

I'm not running Ubuntu, for instance, so I have no chance of actually testing your new feature.

[ladypine]

Hi JFS,

Sorry about that. The fork will of course be released ASAP.

Regarding the implementation: each request to set up a station results in the initiation of a second price auction for that specific location, with a minimum price that equals the price the station would have cost in the original game. Each player then gets a pop up window, inviting him/her to bud. After 30 seconds, the station is erected by the player who bud the highest bid, but this player will pay the second-highest bud price for the property.

A side effect of the auction is of course that the auctions leak information about other players' 30-second future operations.

Ladypine

[yurado]

Hi,
Sorry for that, this is the repository.
The auctions related code is in the auctions branch.

[odisseus]

A side effect of the auction is of course that the auctions leak information about other players' 30-second future operations.

I see a problem with this. What if I quickly buy some land on the spot where another player wants to build a station? What if the town decides to build a building there?

Also, I can imagine a malicious player building hundreds of bus stations and spamming everybody with auction dialogs.