Just days before Christmas we bring you OpenTTD 0.5.0 RC1. Massive amounts of features, fixes and updates make this a more than worthy update.
Go ahead, play it, but not too much to spoil your Christmas, and report any bugs back to us so we can swiftly release a final.

There are a few things you need to be aware of. This mainly concerns Win9x users as mentioned in the previous news item, but also non-latin speakers should read the announcement on the forums.

A few languages are missing quite a few strings: Ukrainian (28), Icelandic (217), Galician (173), Finnish (26), Esperanto (222), Estonian (26), Danish (23), Czech (34) and Bulgarian (39) it would be nice to see these translated as soon as possible. Note that languages missing too many strings will be moved to the unfinished section and not added to a release. If you are interested, head over the the Webtranslator v2. The files are in the downloads section and reports should be reported to Flyspray.

In case some of you were wondering why the latest nightlies refuse to run, or better said, just crash on Win9x (Windows95, Windows98 and Windows ME), here is the deal:

Recently OpenTTD has been converted to use UTF-8 internally, allowing for support of far more languages than it was possible until now. Think in terms of Greek, Russian (native, without sprite-replacement), Japanese, Chinese, etc.
For this to work, UNICODE (MS calls them 'Wide') functions have been added. However these old Windows version have almost no support for UNICODE and an MS layer [dead link](MSLU) is needed. For this to work, the application needs to be compiled with UNICODE support. And here comes the crux...
The compile farm that gives you all these new versions, cannot handle UNICODE applications (more specifically, applications that have a wide startup function are not supported by mingw). So no Win9x support.

When will it work again? For the upcoming version 0.5 we will make a version which will play nicely on your old system. When that is? That's a surprise ;)

Some days ago, we tried to upgrade all compilers for the nightlies (at the compile-farm we use) to GCC 4.1.1. Also, we tried to switch to a glibc version which is nptlonly (for linux targets). While doing this, we broke the whole system. After hours of fiddling, we managed to get it back to work again, and today we finally got all compilers to reach version 4.1.1, which for example fixes the nightly problems for win32. The only target remaining behind is MorphOS, which is using GCC 2.95.3, but that has a completely different story, and doesn't give any real problems at all.

So, so summarize the above: enjoy the new nightlies :)

As it currently seems to be a new thing to send tons of private emails, let me clear up some things:

All communication regarding OpenTTD is expected to be in English, as all developers can read and write that. Any other language is trashed by default. Developers from time to time do reply to your email in their native language, if they know you can read it. But that is up to the developers. It is not up to you to assume they can read any other language than English!

Second, for what reason what so ever, people seem to think they should email me, TrueLight, for any question how small or little or stupid what so ever. I am _not_ an active developer of OpenTTD. The only thing I manage are the web-services of OpenTTD. Please do NOT contact me about anything else.

Your best way in for any communication really is the forum. Else you might want to try the bugs.openttd.org. If you really want to email someone, please email the Lead Developer, which currently is {mailto:darkvater@openttd.org}. But again, use the English language for that communication.

I thank you for your understanding.

[Update] - All hardware is moved, and all services should be operational again.

3 October 2006, around 08:30 UTC, all webservices of OpenTTD will be down for 2 to 3 hours, because of hardware movement.

The servers, where most of the services are currently located (RedBus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), have to be moved to a new location (Eweka DataCenter, Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Because it involes hardware movement, all servers and other related hardware (network, ...) will be shut down, moved to the new location, to be put back online there. We expect it will take around 2 hours to do the movement, and possible an other one for problem solving.

Services involved are: www, dev-space, master-server (also the in-game server-list), mail(list), SVN and torrents.
Services that will be ineffected: bugs, wiki, nightly and translator.
Around 11:30 UTC it should all be up and running again. We will let you know when it does.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop a mail to {mailto:truelight@openttd.org}.