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:
- You just start a server.
- You set the server to invite-only or public.
- You share your invite-code with your friend.
- 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! (current ETA: mid October; you can already try it out via "Testing" beta branch on Steam)
To read more details how we got here and how it works, please check our full blog post:
https://www.openttd.org/news/2021/09/26/new-multiplayer-experience.html