With 12.0 in feature-freeze, it is time to talk about what is in 12.0, and why we release early.

In summary: 12.0 makes setting up multiplayer games painless. You no longer need to configure anything in your home network. Playing together are now just four simple steps: 1) You just start a server. 2) You set the server to invite-only or public. 3) You share your invite-code with your friend. 4) Your friend joins your server based on the invite-code.

There is no need to setup port-forwarding, or anything like that. The above will just work, for everyone, as long as you have a working Internet connection.

Depending on your connection, there are some extra infrastructure costs to us, but we hope to cover that increase with donations. Thanks to many of you, we see regular donations. This currently covers our infastructure cost, and we currently foresee no issues going forward. If this changes, we will let you know, and run some kind of fundraiser. Well, I guess in a sense this post is also a fundraiser ;)

As you might understand, this changes the multiplayer experience drastically, and we felt that waiting 6 more months to deliver that to you is not fair. As a result: we are releasing 12.0 early!

In this post, I want to explain in a bit more details how we got here and how it works.

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Rejoice, for we are now in feature freeze for the 12.0 release series!

One last flurry of features, including properly displaying when a vehicle is lost, and some new buttons for macOS TouchBar, if you have one. A fair few fixes for the new networking setup, and a few other things besides.

Testing is more important than ever, so please keep it up (multiplayer especially), and report any issues as normal!

• Download
• Changelog
• Bug tracker

Thanks to your awesome testing, we found one critical bug in 12.0-beta1. To quickly address this, we release our second beta of the 12.X release series.

There are only a few fixes in this release, mostly related to network servers. Most notably:

• Connecting with the same client name thrice hangs the server.
• Reusing of invite-codes was reported poorly.

See the changelog for the full list.

To sweeten the deal, we also sneaked in a feature for cargodist that will make it take travel time more into account when routing passengers, mail and other express cargoes.

As the first issue is critical, and if you are using 12.0-beta1, we urge you to upgrade to 12.0-beta2 as soon as possible.

Please keep up the testing, and report any issues as normal!

• Download
• Changelog
• Bug tracker

Are you dreaming? No, you are not!

Today I have the pleasure to announce to you that we just released the first beta of our 12.X release series!

With our release on Steam not even six months ago we got some excellent feedback from the community on what to improve next. One of the things that stood out: playing together is not easy for many players.

So, in 12.0 we address this problem. Playing together is as easy as one of you starting a server, marking it either “Public” or “Invite-Only”, and sharing the newly introduced invite-code with your friends. They can join your server, just like that. No setup needed on your side, no port-forwarding, nothing.

Sadly, to set expectations, no integration with Steam itself has been added. Integrating with Steam as GPL-licensed software has challenges, which we haven’t resolved yet. But we hope you agree that this new multiplayer experience is the next best thing.

Next to this excellent new feature, a few other new things we introduced are:

• Brand new “Online Players” window to easier see who is in what company, etc.
• Maximum number of NewGRFs you can use in one game has been raised to 255.
• Our official Windows builds are now signed.
• Default vehicles are now compatible with almost all industry NewGRFs.
• Configurable subsidy duration, up to 5000 years.
• Press Ctrl to build diagonal rivers in Scenario Editor.
• Many bug-fixes (over 50 of them), tweaks, changes, and other additions.

(As ever, see the changelog for further details).

And, the much more invisible change, mostly Rubidium has been very busy reworking our codebase to be a bit more modern C++. This hopefully makes a lot of things easier in the future, and make the code more inviting to new developers!

The usual titlegame competition will be announced on the forum shortly. The theme for this version will be “winter”, something to prepare for.

What’s up with the 12.0 you ask? We got tired having the discussion: 2.0 when? So here we are .. 1.11.1 is followed up by 12.0 :) And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

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• Changelog
• Bug tracker

While we are slowly working towards 1.12, we have an in-between-versions surprise for you guys:

OpenTTD is now also available on GOG.com!

A big thanks to the amazing people at GOG.com for helping us getting there; especially their QA team which not only identified problems, but also found a fix for it .. that is just awesome!

So, go give them a big hug, and check it out: https://www.gog.com/game/openttd.