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.
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.
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.
Well, third time’s the charm, or so they say.
So let’s try this again, shall we? With beta 3, we’ve restored the cargo types that went missing in the sub-artic and tropical climates. We’ve also included fixes for various other issues which are listed in the full changelog linked below.
Thanks to the reports made by many of you, we could solve the issues quickly. But never fear if you’ve missed out so far, there are still a lot of treasures to hunt for in this beta. Please share your findings on our issue tracker.
And watch this space as we’ll soon start with our feature posts about the new things coming with OpenTTD 14. In the first installment, you’ll learn why buses don’t always come when they should and what you can do about it.