It's Christmas, so let us give you a nice present: OpenTTD 1.2.0-beta1.

This release is the first testing release in the upcoming 1.2 series of OpenTTD. It has as usual a wide range of new features new to this series:

Notably, NewGRF support has been improved tremendously, though that will often need support by the NewGRFs themselves: refit for vehicles in stations, much easier to make ground aware houses, industries, airports and objects, range limitation for planes. Also NewGRFs now can display readme, changelog and license information ingame via convenient buttons from the NewGRF dialogue and can link to their Website which will open it in your favourite browser. NewGRF authors may want to check out the specs and changelog for NewGRF v8.

But NewGRFs of course is not all: OpenTTD now supports game scripts capable to define goals, tutorials and similar. They can be implemented in a very similar way to current AIs.

That's still not all: You'll probably immediately notice: you can now zoom-in 2x and 4x compared to previous releases; that'll allow you to enjoy the game better on displays with high pixel densities.

And there's a lot of more things like rivers are now generated during map creation or you can opt to enable maintenance costs for your property which allows to counter a bit the linear money increase as costs for property increase more than linear with the amount of property which needs maintenance. For full list of changes see our changelog.

As this is a testing release, we like to ask you to give it a thorough test, both new features and 'old stuff' as well. Please help us in making the final release of OpenTTD as bug-free as possible by reporting any glitches and bugs you may encounter in our bug tracker.

Also note that there's a running title game competition for this release branch. You may consider to participate, create and submit your vanilla game best suited for this contest.

Enjoy, merry Christmas and happy new year,
Your OpenTTD team