We are getting a lot of questions about bad fonts, only '?' characters for non-latin languages, etc. We would clearly like to state to READ the readme bundled with the game, section '9. Troubleshooting', or online here.

To state this here shortly: you need to specify a font in openttd.cfg in the small_font/medium_font and large_font sections to get proper characters for Japanese, Russian, etc. Some languages have sprite-versions of the fonts available, you can put that in the [newgrf-static] section of the cfg file.

Completely unrelated, but Release Candidate 4 has a bug that it starts up in russian for the first time. The solution is to either try to find your way through all the '?'-s and change the language, delete russian.lng file or set 'language=english.lng' in the config file.

The next Release Candidate (#4 now) is released within two weeks of the previous version. A highly recommended update.

Release highlights of this RC are various desync fixes for a much more stable MP experience, Japanese, Slovenian translations, OS/2 support and the ability to load games without the exactly matching NewGRF files. For a full list, have a look at the tt-forums post here.

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!