The recent years we had so many good entries that we decided to give some of them another spin. Thus for this year you have the choice for the titlegame of the upcoming 1.3 release of OpenTTD. You can choose between the uprunners of the last three titlegame competitions.

An overview over the contestants including savegames and screenshots at various resolutions can be found on the titlescreen's competition page.

There will be only one voting round. Each person may rank up to three entries. Rank these entries in order, your first choice is worth 3 points, your second choice two points and third choice 1 point. Votes can be cast by sending an e-mail to me or a message in the forums which lists at most three favourite entries.

Votes for will be accepted till 14th March 2013, 23:59:59 UTC.

The first release candidate for 1.3.0 has arrived. It brings lots of fixes and even a few final features for the 1.3 series.

Please help testing to smooth out the remaining issues, and report any bugs you recounter to our bug tracker. You can find the download and changelog in the usual place.

Thanks in advance for your support!

For a long time we have had a lot of translators for different languages. Most languages made it to 100% completion, but in the last year(s) many of them have been stalling. For example Hebrew and Esperanto have over 500 untranslated strings while there have been times where they were fully translated. Most of this is due to new features of the last year(s), especially the descriptions for all the advanced settings or the reduction of the number of windows where settings can be changed.

Via this way we would like to ask for people to help with translating those languages that have many untranslated strings. These are mostly languages that seem to have been neglected in the last year and thus need your help.

Becoming a translator for a particular language is relatively straight forward. Just follow the steps described in the FAQ of our web translator. In short this means creating an account and then asking for translation rights for that language.

The following languages have more than 100 but less than 10% untranslated strings. These can be brought up to date with relatively little effort as roughly 200 strings need to be translated.

• Afrikaans
• Arabic (Egypt)
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Danish
• English (Australian)
• Estonian
• Malay
• Norwegian (Bokmal)
• Norwegian (Nynorsk)
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Turkish
• Welsh

The following languages have more than 10% untranslated strings, but had all strings translated at some time. Bringing these languages up to date will require some effort as, on average, 500 strings need to be translated.

• Arabic (Egypt)
• Bulgarian
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Esperanto
• Galician
• Hebrew
• Icelandic
• Irish
• Japanese

The following languages have never reached "finished" status, which means they never reached more than 90%. Getting these languages up into a "finished" state mean translating, on average, over 2000 strings. Most of these translations have been stagnant for years, and has driven us to a policy where we want to see a 90% translated language file before including it into the game.

• Chuvash
• Faroese
• Frisian
• Ido
• Macedonian
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Persian
• Tamil
• Thai
• Urdu

The precise number of untranslated strings can be seen on the statistics page of our web translator. My hope is that, during the following weeks, these lists are reduced in size and maybe even become empty.

Ho ho ho!

The task of the day is to deliver millions of packets. This needs for sure a properly planned network. To give a figure: Santa spends 364 days per year playing OpenTTD to stay in shape for delivering things.

Inbetween the packets Santa even dropped a beta release for the upcoming OpenTTD 1.3! This version delivers a lot of improvements to the usability and interface, especially to the configuration settings, which have grown the past years like Santa's beard :o

Also under the hood there are new features for NewGRFs and Game Scripts. So, make sure to check out the new add-ons which become available when using a 1.3 version.

Check out the download and changelog, and please - if you encounter bugs - report them to our bug tracker.

Happy christmas!
The OpenTTD team

It turns out that no serious bugs were reported since the last RC, so we would like to present you OpenTTD 1.2.3. It's available from the usual place.

If you find any bugs or oddities please don't hesitate to tell us, preferentially via our bug tracker.

Enjoy!
Your OpenTTD development team