I think it's nice to see order stuff that people might not be aware of on HN from time to time.
I'd not heard of it, and it looks great. Wonder how feasible a iOS would be? (Currently supports Windows and Mac so at least somewhat portable).
I'd not heard of it, and it looks great. Wonder how feasible a iOS would be? (Currently supports Windows and Mac so at least somewhat portable).
For a game that was originally made in 1995 (openTTD is much newer though), the UI and gameplay work remarkably well on a tablet.
The problem is that the development of these things has been very ad hoc and all the defaults are based on the old Transport Tycoon gameplay, which... has a rather primitive idea of passenger/mail service. But if you turn on the right advanced options and have the right set of trains, it's a fun challenge to design networks with a mix of service classes (super express passenger lines, high capacity metros, branching suburban commuter networks, or trams/buses/ferries where you can't fit tracks) while facing capital constraints and the consequences of your previous decisions (like when your mainline runs through a major urban city center, which puts it close to all the passengers and was a super great idea, but now it can't easily be expanded to have longer platforms because there are lots of tall buildings hemming it in.)
Oh, and you can balance the risk of live upgrades (potentially, crashes and death, if you do it wrong) against the revenue losses and operational complexity of shutting down the trains.
After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network. Instead, Simutrans generates passenger journeys between populated locations at random, and then works out whether they can use your network to complete them. The resulting usage patterns feel much more realistic to me.
Unfortunately the development feels kind of fractured. It allows for different "paksets" which can change most aspects of the game, including the UI. But this seems to have lead to essentially half a dozen versions of the game which all have their own deficiencies. Additionally there's also an experimental version, but only one pakset really works with it.
> After playing Simutrans, I find OpenTTD's passenger destination model kind of weak, as it seems to generate passengers to based on your network.
The vanilla model is crap ("passengers generate in towns and you can take them ANYWHERE YOU WANT to maximise profit!") but the non-manual cargo-distribution setting is ... acceptable, if you just want to build a single passenger network going everywhere anyway. (You'll possibly get more passengers than you rightly deserve from a fragmented early network, but your real challenge is going to be capacity management either way, so it doesn't bother me as much myself.)
As far as iOS, as with many open source projects, a major issue is the licensing probably can't pass the App Store rules.
Are there actual documented incidents of GPL or other FOSS software being rejected from the iOS App Store due to the source code license?
VLC for iOS being the precedent setting example from a few years back.
To answer your question directly, I'm not sure of cases where Apple will outright reject the initial submission of some OSS app - especially if you aren't totally up front about it. But clearly re VLC they will pull it once it is brought up (also leaving to distributing developer open to liability depending on how unhappy the contributors are)
If the tech tree could be spooled up like in Civ V that would eliminate a lot of the necessary menuing.