On first start-up, the game will ask if you want to participate
in our automated survey. You have to opt-in, and can easily opt-out
(via the Options) at any time.
When opt-in, whenever you exit a game, a JSON blob will be send
to the survey server hosted by OpenTTD. This JSON blob contains
information that gives a global picture of the game just played:
- What settings were used
- How many humans vs AIs
- How long the game has been played
- Basic information about the OS / CPU
All this information is kept very generic, so there is no
chance we send private information to our survey server.
Nothing in the JSON blob could identify you as a person; it
mostly tells about the game played. At any time you can see
what the JSON blob includes, by pressing the "Preview Survey
Results" button in-game.
The per-AI "start_date" is a lot of custom code, and was rarely
used in the way it was meant.
While at it, also ported this part over to the new timer system.
We won't be able to make it fully self-descriptive (looking at you
MAP-chunks), but anything else can. With this framework, we can
add headers for each chunk explaining how each chunk looks like
in detail.
They also will all be tables, making it a lot easier to read in
external tooling, and opening the way to consider a database
(like SQLite) to use as savegame format.
Lastly, with the headers in the savegame, you can freely add
fields without needing a savegame version bump; older versions
of OpenTTD will simply ignore the new field. This also means
we can remove all the SLE_CONDNULL, as they are irrelevant.
The next few commits will start using this framework.
This adds two byte extra to those chunks, and might feel a bit
silly at first. But in later changes we will prefix CH_ARRAY with
a table header, and then this change shines.
Without this, we could still add headers to these chunks, but any
external reader wouldn't know if the CH_RIFF has them or not. This
way is much more practical, as they are now more like any other
chunk.
Basically, this changes "SaveLoad *" to either:
1) "SaveLoadTable" if a list of SaveLoads was meant
2) "SaveLoad &" if a single entry was meant
As added bonus, this removes SL_END / SLE_END / SLEG_END. This
also adds core/span.hpp, a "std::span"-lite.