[Multiplayer] Sleep button for company

[luk3Z]

As you probably know many players just joining the servers, opening new company and leaving...
In this case server going to be full very fast without possibility to create new company.
1. One possible option to prevent this is to set "time to live" for inactive company for max 4+4 hours. Proposed "Sleep company button" could work differently. It could mark company (on gray color) as "sleeping". To make this happen it requires from you some game progress (like 10 years in game, "x" $ bank balance $, "y" number of track pices etc.). This mechanism also need to set value of in game years you want to "sleep" after which your company will become automatically active again (if there are free slots).
2. Other idea is to add symbols along with company colors to extend possible number of companies to 32, 64, 96, 128 etc.
Example:
■ Company 1 Transport
♦ Company 2 Transport
♣ Company 3 Transport
● Company 4 Transport
■ Company 5 Transport
● Company 6 Transport
or symbols with different color:
■ Company 1 Transport
♦ Company 2 Transport
♣ Company 3 Transport
● Company 4 Transport
■ Company 5 Transport
● Company 6 Transport
or just company flags (full block symbol):
██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██

[jfs]

Right now the limitation for number of companies is how the ownership data is stored on the landscape. There's only 5 bits assigned for company ownership which would give up to 32 possible "owners" for a tile, but the way numbers are assigned only 15 are possible for companies. There are reserved values for "nobody", "town", "water", and "spectator", and the range from 18-30 is just undefined.
It might be possible to support up to 28 player companies without having to completely restructure the way things are stored in the landscape, but I'm not sure what other things it would affect.

[Eddi]

there might still be a handful of places which have only 4 bits for owner