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Fri, 27 Jan 2012 at 13:36:57 UTC
Out of curiosity, why create a new chart, when there’s already one at http://wiki.openttd.org/FIRS#Cargo_Chart ? Is that chart lacking one or more industries or cargo types, are we trying to provide an alternate view, or were we simply not aware that such a chart already existed?
Nice illustration, by the way. If I were to provide any constructive criticism, it would be to try making the lines a little thinner (so they don’t get all confusing in the middle), and see if there is any way to get rid of all the crossings in the center of the diagram – it gets really cluttered there. Perhaps try to make all the lines go in the same direction (left-to-right, or top-to-bottom), except where needed. Having lines come from all sides can be a bit overwhelming.
Fri, 27 Jan 2012 at 12:41:13 UTC
Ammler wondered on #openttdcoop how I made this chart.
I used Dia, a diagram drawing program on any main platform, and I used gcolor2 on Linux to get all the cargo colours from the game itself. The industry colours I could retrieve from the NewGRF itself, after a suggestion by planetmaker. One grep+sed+sort took care of that. 
The diagram file is (after some more editing) at: FIRS.dia and the colours are in FIRS.rgb.
Hope this works.
M.
Fri, 27 Jan 2012 at 11:18:46 UTC
Indeed, but what I have is, that when planning I get hopelessly lost trying to disentangle the various cargo flows through the chain widgets, so I need something like this to make my own cargo choices in a FIRS game. I hope this will help myself and others to do just that.
M.
FIRS industry and cargo chart.
Since I usually get a bit overwhelmed when playing a FIRS game, by the complex cargo flows, I decided to make a chart of these flows. Here is the first result. Comments and suggestions for improvements are most welcome, but BE SPECIFIC. If you post something like: “I would prefer it cleaner, clearer.” I can do nothing with it. Firstly, because different people mean different things with such a statement, and secondly, because I can not look into your head. Things that need no suggestion, because I will do them already:, or not do at all:
- Use the game icons for the industries.
- Write the cargo name beside the cargo arrows.
- Use more different colours: this I will not do, because I copy the colours used in the chain widgets within OpenTTD, I think that is helpful. For that, comment at http://dev.openttdcoop.org/projects/firs.
- Put the end-industries at the centre, like Houses, Hotel, Food Market, Petrol Pump, Hardware Store.
- Skip the passengers. I may lose them for a while, until a more permanent version is achieved, but in principle: cargo is cargo, and it’s all or nothing with me.
So, what do you think?
Mazur
FIRS cargo chart
General gaming guide at day9tv
There is a channel on blip.tv based on Starcraft 2 by a person called Day9. It is someone who not only knows a damn lot about SC2 gameplay but he is an extremely clever person who thinks about things in an interesting way. And he is entertaining to listen to, at least for me.
What I want to share with you in this post is a link for his 400th daily episode. This time his daily is not completely related to SC2 but it is more of a general talk about how people think not only when playing SC2 or playing games in general. Of course it is not entirely relevant to OpenTTD in all aspects like for example making a surprise attack strategy, but many other points are very valid to consider even here.
Here is the link for the videos and below in the article I will try to show how do I think those points fit even to our environment.
Day9 daily 400
I really enjoy watching is videos despite I do not play Starcraft 2 just because he is such an entertaining person to listen to.
No commentsSTOP SOPA ? #openttdcoop blackout
You may have gathered that the United States are trying to pass a bunch of laws named the Stop Online Pirace Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These laws are a threat to internet freedom and may be copied to other countries if they are passed. Fortunately the former has been put on the shelves indefinitely under the pressure that has been put on the American Congress over the past few weeks but PIPA is still on its way.
User Cleanup and Logo Contest
Today is the day. Today we got out our brooms and cleaned up our user databases.
We have chosen to do this to fight spam! Something nobody likes seeing on their websites. This means that any users without any edits made to the wiki have been deleted. Seeing as the amount of user (including spam accounts) was very high we also decided to check on our blog to spot such accounts and got removed aswell.
If for some strange reason you seem not to be able to login anymore: We’re sorry that this happend to you. But look at it from the positive side: Registering again is just a small task and we are looking forward to your edits and comments!
Something we still have going is our logo contest which is mentioned in this blog. We still accept entries till the 29th of February on logo@openttdcoop.org .
No commentsThanks for all the support
#openttdcoop is run and managed by enthusiasts and volunteers who like this game and cooperative game play. We’d like to take the opportunity at this place to say a hearily “thank you” to all those who make this possible and keep things running and a lively community.
Particular thanks go to Osai and Phoenix. Osai provides the domain for our sites and services. And Phoenix provides us continuously with an account on one of his servers which runs our main game server, the PublicServer. It currently also hosts the ProZone.
Further we’d like to thank the OpenTTD team. They donated this year 200GBP to our endeavour, based on existence of the DevZone which hosts graphics, music and sound for the game as well as essential development tools for OpenTTD. Without these base sets, NewGRFs, AIs, game scripts and development tools OpenTTD would lack a lot, too.
But the servers and bandwidth required for wiki, StableServer, this blog, the (ancient) grfpack, the occasional DevServer or also hosting of PatchPacks like ChillPP and CargoDist require servers and bandwidth which come at a cost. So far Ammler and planetmaker pay for the server which hosts all these services of #openttdcoop. Thus we’d like to ask you to consider supporting these efforts with a small donation. You can donate via Credit Card/PayPal:
Alternatively you can contact Ammler or planetmaker for banking details if you prefer another method like bank transfer. Every contribution is welcome.
3 CommentsOpenGFX - OpenGFX 0.4.1 released
OpenGFX 0.4.1 brings a lot of new font glyphs, snow aware rivers and canals and fixes a number of graphical glitches.
Note to maintainers:
Starting with this 0.4 series of OpenGFX, it is no longer based on grfcodec and nforenum, but it is written in NML (version 0.2.1 or newer from the 0.2.x branch is needed). If you want to run a maintainer-clean, you'll need to make use of GIMP subsequently. GIMP has some issues in running nicely in parallel (it might trigger bus errors), thus you may want to trim down the parallelization during building to something like -j3 or maybe even completely off with -j1.
NewGRF Meta Language - NML 0.2.1 released
A bug-fix release from the 0.2 branch. No major new features, just a few new constants to make porting projects to NML 0.3 easier and some bug-fixes.
- Add: CB_RESULT_NO_MORE_ARTICULATED_PARTS, CB_RESULT_REVERSED_VEHICLE and CB_RESULT_NO_TEXT as constants to make porting projects to NML 0.3 easier.
- Fix: Internal error when the ID in a replace-block was not a compile-time constant
- Fix: Crash when referencing a SpriteSetCollection in a graphics-block that was inside an if-block
- Fix: Text files in docs/ were not included in source package
- Doc: Add GPL v2 header to all .py files
Battle of the accents: ProZone game 19 review
V453000 and I have made a video review of the latest ProZone game. It was quite a special game for us as we wanted to manage a Lev4 network. In the video we discuss the parameters and problems of the game as well as showing off quite a few bits of the network.
If you enjoyed the video please press the like button and as always: subscribe for more video content. Starting from the new year I will start doing bi-weekly videos of various games with various guests. Not all videos will be #openttdcoop related but most will be OpenTTD videos 
Wiki Cleanup
As we mentoined in the wiki rebuild and logo contest post. We are looking into rebuilding our wiki.
Part of this process is a clean-up some of the user database aswell.
That’s why we encourage you to create your user page on our wiki. Accounts who do not have a single page edit will be removed. Creation of your user page would be a good first edit. We don’t ask you to build the Eiffeltower. Just tell us something about yourself. How you found us, how you got into OTTD, or whatever you like.
Abandoned accounts without edits will be removed in early January, thus you have sufficient time to make your first edit
Logo Contest & Wiki rebuild
So remember how I kept saying, one day, I’ll just re-do the wiki from scratch someday?
Well, seems someday has happened. Granted, right now, it’s very early, and we’re currently just planning what and how to build up a new wiki.
Part of that will be building a LOT of templates to structure our wiki much better. We’re also planning to revert the skin back to a more standard look, to allow us to upgrade and add things much better, and as such, it’s finally time for a logo. Yes, we’ve been at this for… what? 5+ years? and still don’t have a proper formal logo.
This is where you lot come in, we’re holding a logo contest.
Submissions should be 135 x 135px and ideally have “#openttdcoop” somewhere.
Contest will run until February 29th.
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Fri, 27 Jan 2012 at 14:12:49 UTC
As to your first question, I made it because a. I was not aware of that chart, b. I could not find that chart, and c. I was not aware of that chart.
As to your suggestions: good point, I made them this thick originally to see them more clearly while I was making the connections, but now they’re there, I can make them thinner again. About getting rid of all the crossings: that was why I posted it, I hoped people would look at it and say things like: If you move industry x to that point, and swap a and b, and route cargo y along the other side of z, it all gets much less cluttered. After making this in two days, one gets a little blind to even the most obvious simplifications.
The cargo chart you just mentioned it what I was actually aiming at: simple and clear. It lacks only a few things: Building Materials delivery, Food Market and Hotel.
Oh, and, more importantly, Alcohol. And it does not use the same colours as OpenTTD. Lastly, using the OTTD industry graphics would be nicer.
Mazur.