Ever wondered how a new OpenTTD release is made? How we decide what features to include and what to reject or how some people seem to know the “future” before you? Curious what it means that OpenTTD is Open Source? Or maybe you’ve even wondered what it takes to get your idea included in OpenTTD?
In this post, you’ll get a peek behind the quite transparent curtain and learn more on how OpenTTD is developed.
If you don’t know me, I’m Owen Rudge, and have been involved in the online Transport Tycoon community for almost 25 years. Exactly 21 years ago, I received an ICQ message (look it up, kids) out of the blue from a guy named Ludvig Strigeus (nicknamed Ludde). “Hello, you probably don’t know me, but I’ve been working on a project to clone TTD for a while.” he said, more or less. He didn’t want to release this to the public yet, and wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do with it. (He’d been working on it since 30th June 2002, so I guess that is technically the birthday of what would become OpenTTD…) Ludde sent me a copy of what he’d been working on, and it was very exciting indeed. It was a fully functional version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, written in C. Admittedly incomplete at that time, it was still quite remarkable.
Always wanted to know what kind of OpenTTD game your friends are playing on Steam, Discord or GOG Galaxy? You finally can!
OpenTTD 14.0 comes with a new ship pathfinder which allows ships to travel great distances without the use of buoys. Gone are the days of long strings of buoys and convoluted ship orders. Using ships is now as hassle-free as the other modes of transport. Just add the destination and send the ship on its way!
In this post, I’m going to explain how the new pathfinder works and some of the challenges we had to overcome.
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.