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.
This requires the use of WinHTTP (for Windows) or libcurl (for all
others except Emscripten). Emscripten does not support http(s)
calls currently.
On Linux it requires ca-certificates to be installed, so the HTTPS
certificate can be validated. It is really likely this is installed
on any modern machine, as most connections these days are HTTPS.
(On MacOS and Windows the certificate store is filled by default)
Reminder: in case the http(s):// connection cannot be established,
OpenTTD falls back to a custom TCP-based connection to fetch the
content from the content-service. Emscripten will always do this.
Owen Rudge