OpenTTD 14 beta released

[jfs]

The beta process for OpenTTD version 14 has started!

Version 14 is a massive release, with many new features and many improvements: 40 new features, 80 changes, and almost 150 fixes.
Oh, and this year is the 20th anniversary of OpenTTD!

Apart from the always-present bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements, some of the highlights also include:

• A new ship pathfinder, which can allow you to have more ships in a game, and need fewer or even zero buoys!
• You can now automatically unbunch your vehicles at a depot.
• NotDaylength: You can play as normal, or you can enable "wallclock mode" and have the entire game run on minutes and seconds, instead of months and days.

More explanations of all of these will be posted on the website throughout the coming weeks, covering them all in a single post here would be too much.

Links:

• OpenTTD 14-beta1 release post
• Download
• Full changelog
• Bug tracker

[ebla71]

The beta process for OpenTTD version 14 has started!
Version 14 is a massive release, with many new features and many improvements: 40 new features, 80 changes, and almost 150 fixes.
Oh, and this year is the 20th anniversary of OpenTTD!

Big thanks to everybody who worked on the new release - tried it a little bit with no bugs observed.

Still, a few observations:

- On my computer, a ThinkPad with 13" display the new font really looks bad at an in-game resolution of 1366x768: blurry, too "fat" and the letters "too high", regardless of antialias or not. Had to switch back to the old font immediately. Possibly related to my particular screen configuration, but did not see any improvement here, rather the contrary.

- The feature that I immediately recognized as very useful (and where I don't know if it is new to OTTD 14 or I had just missed it to date) is the option to sort vehicles by transported cargo. That's very nice if you have big games with hundreds of trains and cars to single out just a few.

- There seems to be only one NewGRF in the in-game download so far that supports the new roadstops, which is Korean_Roadstop_Set-0.2 That looks very nice but only works with left-side driving countries, at least at the toll gates, which do not adjust to the driving direction. Is there any other NewGRF that already makes use of this new feature?

- Still dearly missing the "road waypoints". Is there any special technical reason why this is in some of the patches but not in the main game???

[Auge]

Hello

- There seems to be only one NewGRF in the in-game download so far that supports the new roadstops, which is Korean_Roadstop_Set-0.2 That looks very nice but only works with left-side driving countries, at least at the toll gates, which do not adjust to the driving direction. Is there any other NewGRF that already makes use of this new feature?

Meanwhile (since 2024-02-04 20::00:47 UTC) there is a waypointless version of fridaemon's road stop collection for OpenTTD vanilla available in bananas.

fridaemon-road-stops-only.png (13.98 KiB) Viewed 7713 times

- Still dearly missing the "road waypoints". Is there any special technical reason why this is in some of the patches but not in the main game???

Ask JGR, he decided not to include waypoints in his pull request for road stops. Maybe he simply wanted to separate the features, maybe the waypoints wasn't stable enough for him.

Tschö, Auge

[kamnet]

Posted on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... _released/

You found some bugs in the beta1-release, and we found a new beta.

With this update, you can now safely signal to your hearts content again. Full changelog on our website.

We need as many people as possible to test this beta version of the 14.X release series, so you can find and we can squash as many bugs as possible before the actual release.

https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/04 ... 14-0-beta2

[2TallTyler]

Well, third time's the charm, or so they say.

With the 3rd beta of OpenTTD 14, we've restored the cargo types that went missing from some climates.

Please come with us on the treasure hunt for bugs, so OpenTTD 14 can become the best OpenTTD ever.

https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/06 ... 14-0-beta3

[2TallTyler]

unbunch.png (750.61 KiB) Viewed 7373 times

Have you ever waited for a late bus, and then two arrived at once?

This is called “bus bunching,” and I bet you’ve seen it happen in OpenTTD – and not just with buses.

For years, players have requested an easier way to keep vehicles with shared orders spaced out along their route. In OpenTTD 14, we’ve added one.

Read the full story here.

[Zephyris]

303740806-9d2cae45-e126-4067-b345-417099a45ed3.png (155.31 KiB) Viewed 7108 times

How do you update a 30-year old pixel font to make it more suitable for today?

The pixel-art OpenTTD fonts are iconic, but were designed for 640x480 CRT monitors rather than today’s 4k monsters. Without the horizontal smoothing of CRT scanlines, modern pixel-perfect rendering and 2x or 4x upscaling of the old bitmap/sprite-based fonts makes the text jagged and hard to read.

Read more

[pelya]

Android version used Roboto font for ages, because the built-in pixel font misses international characters.
I guess it's time to switch to a new font.

[JGR]

Ask JGR, he decided not to include waypoints in his pull request for road stops. Maybe he simply wanted to separate the features, maybe the waypoints wasn't stable enough for him.

Tschö, Auge

That PR is for NewGRF road stops. As vanilla does not have any support for road waypoints it would not make sense to include the corresponding NewGRF part of that.

[ebla71]

That PR is for NewGRF road stops. As vanilla does not have any support for road waypoints it would not make sense to include the corresponding NewGRF part of that.

Any particular technical difficulties that prevent road waypoint from being included in the original OTTD???

In a way, buoys are "water waypoints" or one could view "road waypoints" as stations with a default "pass non-stop" setting, at least for a person who is not familiar with the code, so it is interesting that road waypoint are more difficult to realize.

It's actually my most highly anticipated feature ...

[JGR]

That PR is for NewGRF road stops. As vanilla does not have any support for road waypoints it would not make sense to include the corresponding NewGRF part of that.

Any particular technical difficulties that prevent road waypoint from being included in the original OTTD???

In a way, buoys are "water waypoints" or one could view "road waypoints" as stations with a default "pass non-stop" setting, at least for a person who is not familiar with the code, so it is interesting that road waypoint are more difficult to realize.

It's actually my most highly anticipated feature ...

There likely aren't any major problems. I may look into upstreaming it when time permits.

[ebla71]

Any particular technical difficulties that prevent road waypoint from being included in the original OTTD???

There likely aren't any major problems. I may look into upstreaming it when time permits.

You'd have my eternal gratitude

[jfs]

RC1 was released on the 18th.

Today we released our first candidate for version 14! That means we will start to focus on fixing the remaining bugs and stop adding new features.

Thanks to the reports made by many of you, we have already solved many of the issues. But there might still be a few issues lurking around in this release candidate. Please share your findings on our issue tracker.

Thanks to our translators, about half of the translations are (nearly) up-to-date. For the other half, we might need your help with translating. If your language is missing or has more than a few dozen missing strings, please consider helping to finish your translation.

Download
Changelog

[leifbk]

I don't have a Github account, so I'll report a bug here. The 14.0-RC1 game invariably crashes when I try to build a tram station. As soon as I try to click the Tram station icon, it bombs out. I can work around it by first building a Road station and then build tramlines on top of it.

My own build from source, built yesterday from https://cdn.openttd.org/openttd-release ... rce.tar.xz with GCC 13.2.1 on Gentoo Linux.

Code: Select all

leif@balapapa ~/projects/openttd/openttd-14.0-RC1/build $ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..

crash20240222165027.png

(1.17 MiB) Not downloaded yet

crash20240222165027.sav

(250.07 KiB) Downloaded 225 times

[2TallTyler]

timekeeping-steam.png (134.24 KiB) Viewed 5810 times

I was once the hottest new model on the street. Newspapers heralded my arrival in every town. The titans of industry were inspired to produce more goods when I visited their factories.

But as the years have passed, so do their eyes pass over me, to eye curiously my replacements. Will you try the new style, ma’am? It’s so much better than that old thing.

I’ve watched my friends grow old and die. My brother got caught in traffic and caused a horrific level crossing collision. I get sick more often, wheezing to a halt wherever I am. When I visit the doctor for a spot of renewal, they tell me, “Sorry, I can’t help. You’re too old.” When will I be autoreplaced?

Woe is the tale of the Balogh Goods Truck. But what if we could slow or pause the steady march of time? In OpenTTD 14, you can.

https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/03/23/timekeeping

[LaChupacabra]

Until now, these were only legends. We've been hearing about them for a dozen years. Sea monsters. Powerful, extremely effective in finding a way to distant locations, often faster than anything found on land. Disturbing news is coming from everywhere that one of the most powerful devs has broken the code structures that have been untouched for generations and unleashed these beasts! They're coming! They are getting closer now! Buoys disappear in mysterious circumstances in all waters. It must be their doing! There is no help. It's really happening!

Legends never fully tell what it really is. Only knowledge will allow us to prepare for the inevitable...

Somewhere between #1, #2 and #7 a few points disappeared. This is too significant a change to remain silent about it.

[kamnet]

Somewhere between #1, #2 and #7 a few points disappeared. This is too significant a change to remain silent about it.[;)

Absolutely! This one took me entirely by surprise. So far only Ekranoplan v2 takes advantage of this new feature, and might be the only one that really does. There might also be one or two ships in FISH 2/Shark/Multi-Shark that could also use it but they probably won't be updated for awhile.

[TheDarkGiganotosaur]

I'm really enjoying the new features... the unbunching, timekeeping, and so on.

Oh, and speaking of the unbunching feature, I don't mean to be "mean" but there's just one very small "inconvenience" (not a bug, mind you) in it--and I hope there's still some time left to fix that (if possible) until the 14's grand release. In the orders window, when using the CTRL and left mouse button on a depot, the order used to be automatically set as "Service if needed", instead it automatically sets the order as "Unbunch", which is pretty inconvenient and it's quite annoying and tiresome for me having to manually set the "Service if needed" order, so can this default behavior be restored? Or better yet, implement a code that automatically sets the order as "Service if needed" when it detects any "Full load" orders and "Unbunch" when no "Full load" orders can be found. Or maybe add an option in the settings (in the Vehicles-Orders section) how we want the default order to be set when CTRL + left-mouse-clicking on a depot.

EDIT: Just found and read this, and I'm not in agreement with "stripping" the original behavior (of CTRL + left-mouse-clicking on depot) from servicing in favor for unbunching. However, I'm in agreement with the "I guess we could add a setting to select what happens when you Ctrl+Click on a depot." part which is the most recommended way to circumvent this issue and will definitely benefit both sides. Please take this into consideration.

Anyway, keep up with the outstanding work, OpenTTD team!

[paulcobbaut]

https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/03/23/timekeeping

Minutes per year: Select how long a year lasts. The default is 12 minutes. Set this to 0 to freeze calendar time completely. The maximum is 10,080 minutes, which is one week of real time!

A 24 year old dream is coming true, thanks!!!
viewtopic.php?p=301733&hilit=cobbbaut#p301733

[leifbk]

I don't have a Github account, so I'll report a bug here. The 14.0-RC1 game invariably crashes when I try to build a tram station. As soon as I try to click the Tram station icon, it bombs out. I can work around it by first building a Road station and then build tramlines on top of it.

The bug has been fixed in RC3. See https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/issues/12166



And BTW this OTTD version is awesome. With all the GRVTS RVs running about in the 1940s, It was great to be able to slow down the time by half. I can now upgrade to Bradley T1 and ATP Instructor, and still have time to enjoy the game before the next wave of upgrades come 1950