Release Candidate 3 has been unleashed to the unsuspecting crowds. Download, play, enjoy and get addicted ^^.

Downloads can be found in the downloads section or by clicking on the lighthouse to the right; report bugs to Flyspray.

Most notable changes between RC2 and RC3 are the once-again working signal propagation when editing your tracks that some of you might have noticed, a few crash fixes (station building, news-windows), better newgrf safety scans to allow unifont for example in the static section and the addition of an official Lithuanian translation. The forum post, which can be found here, gives you the full list of changes.

And I know a lot of you have been waiting for this, so with any luck we will have an OS/2 binary for 0.5.0 final. Yes, you heard this right :D. Translators did a great job overall, the offer below by Mihamix still stands for 0.5.0 final.

... for the following languages:

• Afrikaans
• Croatian
• Frisian
• Galician
• Icelandic
• Japanese [MADE IT]
• Latvian
• Nynorsk (New Norwegian) [MADE IT]
• Simplified chinese [MADE IT]
• Traditional chinese [MADE IT]

Here is the deal: If any language listed above will miss at most 100 strings at the end of this week (including weekend), I'll include that in the final and long awaited 0.5.0 release.

Let's go people, I know a lot of you would like to play a localised version of OpenTTD!

You can always check the translation statistics here.

Update!
Due to the big success of this campaign, and since the release of 0.5.0-RC3 delayed the final 0.5.0, I prolong this action until end of this week (14th of January, 2007) or until the final 0.5.0 gets released (whichever comes sooner)! Don't miss it out!

The next release candidate is out, with quite a few bugs found (they never run out, do they?) and fixed. Go ahead, give it a try.

The same things as for RC1 apply for RC2, namely Win9x, unicode, etc. Translators have been great, except for Icelandic and Galician which seem to be inactive. If someone wants to volunteer...

Downloads are just a click away (click on lighthouse), Forum post is here and bugs go to Flyspray.

Happy New Year from the whole development team!

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 ;)