Right now, I'm in the train to Enschede on my way back to Enschede. This afternoon, I've been over at Truelight's today, together with Rubidium and boekabart. We had a little get-together, to celebrate the 10,000th revision of OpenTTD, which we reached last week. It was a nice excuse to finally get together and actually see the faces behind the IRC nicks :-)

We've had a fun afternoon and evening, with lunch, dinner, a lot of chit chat and of course OpenTTD talk. We talked about stuff to do, stuff we did, and how to do it. The biggest topic was the 32 bit graphic rendering, which is a long wanted feature, which actually has seen quite some (prototype) implemenation as well.

Boekabart pointed out that the technical implementation for 32 bit rendering was not being te problem: There are plenty of alternatives for all problems encountered. The true bottleneck here is reaching concensus on which of these alternatives to choose, and decide what parts of it we want to support and what we want to drop.

We concluded that we will probably try to keep supporting the 8bit rendering path, which is useful for low end machines (embedded devices perhaps?) and historical reasons. Furthermore, though we will probably keep supporting NewGRF as well, even though that format was designed with 8 bit (and all the associated nastyness of palleting and colour remapping that doesn't work so well when rendering to 32 bit) in mind.

We made some plans for structuring renderers, blitters and video drivers, also keeping an eye on optimization options. Although personally I won't have time to actually code for the 32 bit effort, the project will have a lot more of my attention than it had before.

The best part of the day, though, was the present boekabart brought into the celebration. He had bought a big cake with the OpenTTD titlescreen printed on it. Of course we made pictures, but I'll forward you to the OpenTTD screenshots section to see it, since though it was printed on a cake, it was still a screenshot :-)

It has been nearly a year since the last release of OpenTTD and it has been about two months since the first time we answered the "When is the next release?" question with "Soon", but it is now finally here: OpenTTD 0.4.5.

I haven't done too much for this release, since I've been busy with all kinds of other stuff, but I'm building the Debian package right now. I'm still looking for a good way to do packaging (combining with svn and a few other tools), but since I do not get so much practice (few releases) stuff is still a little flakey. Ah well, still learning.