OpenTTD 13.3
Only a day after 13.2, we present 13.3. And there is a bit of a story here.
But in short: we made a mistake with 13.2.1, and need to release a 13.3 with no functional change to make sure multiplayer games work as expected.
Archived News
OpenTTD 13.2
As I write this many of the development team and other members of the community are busy having fun at a meet-up in Brussels. Not me though, I’m stuck here doing a release.
We’ve been busy refactoring quite a lot of the underlying code to make future changes easier, but along the way we’ve found and fixed a few more bugs and quality of life improvements that we figured were worth releasing sooner than whenever 14.0 comes along.
Notably, OpenTTD will now automatically disable hardware acceleration if it detects that the last crash happened while initialising the graphics driver. While hardware acceleration works well for the vast majority of people, it causes crashes for people that then required command line arguments or manual config file editing to get it to work. This should be a better solution for those users.
Additionally, there is a change to the default mouse mode on Linux to improve experience when dragging the map (and often to match expected behaviour in other games).
As always, there are plenty of other bugfixes, which you can find in the changelog.
While you’re at it, have you seen the post about the upcoming addition of a automated opt-in survey to OpenTTD 14? If you have opinions, we’d like to hear them! Details here.
Policy update and automated opt-in survey
While working on an automated opt-in survey (about which I write in a bit), it was noticed that our privacy policy and cookie policy is rather out-of-date.
Mostly, we used to store a lot more personal information when you created an account, like email addresses, passwords, etc. As we now use GitHub to handle all that, we can slim down our privacy policy, as we store very little personal information.
For the cookie policy, for years now we only use cookies for the authenticated part of our websites and nothing else.
OpenTTD’s privacy policy has always been: we want to know as little personal information about you as possible. And although these changes were rolled out years ago, the policies did not reflect that yet. They do now!
In short: we removed statements from the policy about information we track, as we haven’t done that for years now.
So, what about this automated opt-in survey you are talking about?
OpenTTD 13.1
OpenTTD 13.0 has been out for two months and we’ve found some bugs to fix.
Most notably, we’ve fixed two kinds of crashes:
- Road vehicles inside multi-track level crossings no longer crash into the side of trains.
- The game no longer crashes when a spectator in a network game tries to interact with a town’s local authority.
For NewGRF authors using the new engine variant feature introduced in 13.0, we’ve added a callback to select how the engine’s name is displayed in the buy menu.
As always, there are plenty of other bugfixes, which you can find in the changelog.
OpenTTD 13.0
Breaking news: OpenTTD 13.0 is now available! Depending on your perspective, we’re either two months early for our usual April 1st release, or a bit tardy for the Christmas 2022 release we intended.
We think the wait has been worth it. This is one of the largest releases we’ve done in several years, with numerous features and improvements covering the user interface, gameplay features, and modding extensions for NewGRF and Game Script creators.
Some of the highlights are:
- Variable interface scaling at whatever size you want (not just 2x and 4x), with optional chunky bevels for that retro feel. This includes better automatic scaling when using HiDPI or mixed DPI setups.
- Direct access to NewGRF/AI/GS settings from the new game window.
- Various small tweaks and improvements to several windows.
- NewGRFs can now provide engine variants that are shown hierarchically in the purchase list.
- Multi-track level crossings to keep road vehicles from stopping in the middle of the crossing.
- Custom league tables for GameScripts.
- More natural rivers which get wider as they flow downstream.
- And much more, which can be seen in the changelog or the previous release announcements!
In addition to these features and improvements, we’ve fixed lots of bugs. (If you played with the RC2 testing release, most were fixed before then. See the changelog for full details.)