This post is part of a two-part series, of which this is the first. In this post, we go a bit into the infrastructure that runs OpenTTD, from BaNaNaS to our main website. The second post will explain a bit about the migration we just did to get to this infrastructure.

Often I get comments that people are surprised how complex OpenTTD’s infrastructure is, and why that is. With this post, I will try to explain a bit what is going on in the backend, and why it takes a bit of effort to keep everything running smoothly.

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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.

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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.

• Download
• Changelog
• Bug tracker

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opt-in survey (about which I write in a bit), it was noticed that our privacy policy and cookie policy is rather out-of-date.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?

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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.

• Download
• Changelog
• Bug tracker