As of today, you can Wishlist OpenTTD on Steam.

Historically, OpenTTD always had a single home from where we distributed the game. We used to be hosted on SourceForge (you know you are old, if you remember that being a thing :D), and slowly moved towards our own self-created distribution methods. These days, we mostly distribute our game via our website.

But times are changing, and so is our hair. Over the last few months, we have silently been working to become a bit more visible in the world. Don’t worry, not for reasons you might think: OpenTTD has as many active users as it had in 2007. But more because we no longer think it is the right approach to only distribute via our own website.

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So it’s a bit later than usual, but I have the pleasure of announcing the first beta of our 1.11 release series! It’s turned into a bit of a beast of a release. Special thanks to TrueBrain, who’s basically turned OpenTTD into his full-time job over the last few months and has helped squash lots of bugs.

In this release, among many other things, are:

• Lots of improvements to MacOS support, including support for the shiny new Apple M1 (and also Windows ARM, but that’s rather less exciting).
• Towns are better at building, now being able to build tunnels, and also knowing not to build bridges & tunnels that immediately dead-end.
• An option to automatically remove signals when placing rail.
• Inflation is now applied consistently from 1920 to 2090, regardless of start year. So your starting value of money might look a bit different.
• Tweaks to several default settings to improve playability for new players.
• Improvements to several GUI windows, and making renaming & goto-location buttons have a consistent location and name where used.
• Usual array of tweaks and changes and bug fixes.

As ever, see the changelog for further details. The usual titlegame competition will be announced on the forum shortly.

Any rumours about hovercraft are categorically false.

• Download
• Changelog
• Bug tracker

Today is a good day. Today is the day all openttd.org services run on AWS. Today is the day I can finally shut down our OVH dedicated server. Today is the day I can finally retire software like:

• Django 1.2 (released May 2010)
• Debian Etch (released April 2007)
• MediaWiki 1.12.0 (released winter 2008)
• XenServer 6.5 (released January 2015)
• An IRC bot that was not upgraded or restarted since 2016.

This was the longest migration I ever did: 11 months in the making. But we finally did it!

This was mostly made possible by us receiving AWS Open Source credits. This allowed me to try out AWS services, do stupid things (rack up a bill of more than 500 dollar per month .. which is HUGE for us), and all while knowing it wouldn’t clean out our donation-funds (read: the credits covered all our costs for 2020). Sadly, in 2021 we will not receive AWS Open Source credits .. this means no more experimenting. So a perfect time to write up what happened over the last 16 years, and more specifically, last 2 years.

This is going to be a long post, so strap in!

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Way earlier than anticipated, we have a new wiki!

What does that mean?

• All OpenTTD services now use GitHub authentication. You can login everywhere using your GitHub account.
• We restructured the whole wiki. All pages are now categorised and organised in a folder tree.
• Over half of the pages with ancient content were moved into the Archive folder, so the rest of the wiki can breathe again.
• There is a second sandbox wiki, just for experimentation, without hurting the main wiki.
• The whole wiki has support for translations. No more manual cross-linking.
• We parted with user pages. Today everyone can host their private GitHub wiki, which automatically fades into history, when the user is no longer active.
• The search function will be added in a few days. We will use an external search engine, and it has to index everything first.

That’s it in short. But how did we get here?

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Today is a big day for translations of OpenTTD! Translators are now organised as teams of our GitHub organisation.

That means:

• You no longer need an OpenTTD-specific account to become a translator: you can use GitHub accounts for most OpenTTD things now. (bug tracker, BaNaNaS, translations, development, …)
• Becoming a translator is now super easy: you just click a few buttons to become a member of the team.
• There is one team for each language, which allows the translators to get to know each other, and have group conversations within the team.

There is only one downside:

• Everyone who was a translator before needs to reapply.

While this is good news for all translators, this is also a great step forward for our infrastructure: after migrating the source code and bug tracker in 2019, this year we could migrate BaNaNaS and the WebTranslator. This only leaves the Wiki as the last service that still needs an OpenTTD-specific account. (guess what task is next?)