New year and with OpenTTD 1.2.0-beta2 we present you the second testing release of the 1.2 series. Like usual for beta releases we have quite a range of bug fixes, some of which fix very nasty bugs in the network code, others which avoid crashes in certain situations.

But as it's a beta release we still have new features. Among those you can now use the game scripts to ask questions to the companies and check the NewGRF parameters also when playing.

Have fun with this new release, give it a proper swirl and test. As usual bugs go to our bug tracker, a full changelog is also available and downloads can be found on our main page.

Finally let me remind you of the titlegame competition. Playing and thus creating a nice titlegame might also be a good test ;-)

Enjoy!

As you might have noticed we have not had a fundraiser these last couple of years. The reason for this is that the donations have increased significantly, especially since the release of the 1.0 series. This means that we have enough donations to pay for our server, which runs the compile farm and hosts the website, for the coming 30 months (paid in advance yearly contract that ends in June). We thank you for all of these donations.

Thus we have some extra money to spend. We have thought about using the money to buy mobile phones for some developers to get a mobile version of OpenTTD started, but none of the developers are interested in that. Also buying Apple hardware to revamp the Mac OS X port has no benefit when no developer, besides planetmaker who already owns a Mac, is interested in maintaining that port.

We finally decided to donate some money to two "projects" that we think have been and still are very important to OpenTTD. First there is the forum graciously hosted by Owen Rudge. The forum hosts the most used first line of interactive support, as well as threads for many of the NewGRFs, AIs, suggestions and patches developed over time. Secondly there is the devzone of #openttdcoop. The devzone hosts the development of OpenGFX, OpenSFX and OpenMSX which are vital for bringing OpenTTD to the big public. It furthermore hosts the development of GRFCodec, NFORenum and NML which are needed for the development of OpenGFX as well as many other NewGRFs.

Although we could start offering these services ourselves, it would mean putting all eggs into one basket of the OpenTTD servers, making it a big single point of failure. Additionally, both the forum and the devzone are vital parts of the OpenTTD community and provide for a lot more than just support for the official OpenTTD versions and rely on donations just as OpenTTD does. Taking over the "official" tasks would only result in duplication of servers and infrastructure, leading to wasted donations. As such, we think it to be prudent to support and thank them for their efforts by donating £200 each to help cover a share of their hosting costs.

We feel this is warranted as many people donating to OpenTTD have no idea that the forums or the development of OpenGFX, OpenSFX and OpenMSX are hosted by third parties and may not realize their donation does not support them, even if they intended otherwise.

It's Christmas, so let us give you a nice present: OpenTTD 1.2.0-beta1.

This release is the first testing release in the upcoming 1.2 series of OpenTTD. It has as usual a wide range of new features new to this series:

Notably, NewGRF support has been improved tremendously, though that will often need support by the NewGRFs themselves: refit for vehicles in stations, much easier to make ground aware houses, industries, airports and objects, range limitation for planes. Also NewGRFs now can display readme, changelog and license information ingame via convenient buttons from the NewGRF dialogue and can link to their Website which will open it in your favourite browser. NewGRF authors may want to check out the specs and changelog for NewGRF v8.

But NewGRFs of course is not all: OpenTTD now supports game scripts capable to define goals, tutorials and similar. They can be implemented in a very similar way to current AIs.

That's still not all: You'll probably immediately notice: you can now zoom-in 2x and 4x compared to previous releases; that'll allow you to enjoy the game better on displays with high pixel densities.

And there's a lot of more things like rivers are now generated during map creation or you can opt to enable maintenance costs for your property which allows to counter a bit the linear money increase as costs for property increase more than linear with the amount of property which needs maintenance. For full list of changes see our changelog.

As this is a testing release, we like to ask you to give it a thorough test, both new features and 'old stuff' as well. Please help us in making the final release of OpenTTD as bug-free as possible by reporting any glitches and bugs you may encounter in our bug tracker.

Also note that there's a running title game competition for this release branch. You may consider to participate, create and submit your vanilla game best suited for this contest.

Enjoy, merry Christmas and happy new year,
Your OpenTTD team

We would like to welcome the estimated 25+k new players in the last 24h which are brought to us by Yogscast! Tnx guys! Yogscast will be playing all kinds of cool and interesting games till christmas, make sure to check them out. If you like what they are doing (or if you are in a general good christmas mood), don't forget to help out with their goats!

Yogscast website
Yogscast OpenTTD Part 1 | Yogscast OpenTTD Part 2

Some interesting stats (at least for a geek like me) of the last 24h:

- 55GB of traffic (normal is ~10GB)
- 4M pageviews (normal is ~0.6M)
- 60k unique visitors (normal is ~10k)

Those are some pretty impressive numbers ;) They are a collection of Yogscast, our just released stable 1.1.4, and of course our regular visitors.

From a SysOp point of view I am very happy with our new server (thank you OVH.de!), it is handling the (heavily?) increased traffic very well, and I have had no stability issues with our webserver or the software :) That makes a goat like me a happy bunny :D


Happy playing guys, and I hope you enjoy OpenTTD as much as we do!

Sinterklaas might have decided to go for less reckless speed, thus visited some places early and also dropped a parcel with OpenTTD 1.1.4. While it may not be exactly on time, the bright side is that you'll have it one day early ;-).

Compared to the RC this new release brings you again less crashes, fixes a nasty memory bug and improves handling of ships near locks. As usual you can get the release from our website, bugs, as usual, go to our bug tracker.

Happy Sinterklaas!