An open source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2

This is the perfect example of IAP done right and wrong.

RCT classic. Full game for around £5. IAP options for the add-on packs £1.99-£5.99. No other IAP anywhere in the app. No adds. IAP done right.

RCT 4 mobile. Free to play. Ad's. IAP £0.61-£93.99. IAP done wrong.

Hell will freeze over before I play RCT 4 mobile. Seriously £93.99 on IAP. I haven't downloaded it, but I'm assuming this is the fairly standard "coin pack" sort of pattern where everything you do in game costs coins.

Problem is that RCT4 actually looks cool. I'd quite like to play it with the updated graphics and mobile friendly interface if the play mechanics were roughly similar to the original. They have just destroyed a once great game.

I also suspect that unfortunately, I bet RCT 4 is more profitable. So companies are going to continue to do it.

Also, the terrible reputation that IAP has means I regularly don't bother with apps because they say 'contains IAP' which makes it far harder for those who want to do it right as people will just immediately ignore the app because of the label. What we need is for the stores to have some way of indicating or listing the number and type of IAP options available before you buy the app.

Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic was developed by Chris Sawyer, who did the first two games, and then left the games industry for decades, partially because of a disgust with the shift towards violence[0][1]. So in a way, Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic is the first "canon" Roller Coaster Tycoon sequel after the first two games.

Also, the first game was almost completely written in assembly[2]. I don't think one can pull that off without having some really high coding standards, so I'm not surprised that the game runs really well!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_Classic (note that it also has just been released on Microsoft Windows and macOS on September 28)

[1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-interview...

[2] http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

Hi, OpenRCT2 dev here.

FYI: OpenRCT2 has support to consume RCT Classic assets as its base. Also, RCT Classic is available on Steam too (Windows and macOS only, though).

Whenever I see IAP on paid apps I'm almost instantly turned off.

Do you know what sort of nature they are? Is the game complete without them? Do they nag about the IAP in game?

That's great thanks. I enjoyed replaying Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 on the ipad.

What I really want next is Pharoah.

I'm glad they finally delivered this. When they first announced RCT mobile everyone was hyped until it came out and was just another build and wait style game. Hoping simcity gets the same treatment (they had an old one but it doesn't really work on new devices and crashed a lot).

And there went my night. Thanks! Better than I imagined this could be done.

I have encountered this bug the other day. Literally unplayable but fun watching the guests vomiting all over the park.

We have had numerous bugs like this in the past. At one point there was a bug where all guests would destroy everything they walked past.

I didn't laugh until I looked at the diff in the commit. Then I couldn't stop laughing.

Wow, that's an amazing resource!

And I've always wanted to put Battle Chess on something modern :D

...oh, 404 dead link. Well, at least Archive caught it and Google does still seems to actually host the files: https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-source/v2...

Someone backed it up, too: https://github.com/linhlc/openbattlechess

But jeez, linkrot is going to be a huge fucking problem.

Thanks for that! I had forgotten about CorsixTH, the reimplementation of Theme Hospital. Such a great game, I spent weeks playing just the demo.

If you're just there to browse working games do a ctrl+f for

<space>Playable

<space>Playable<space>Active

if you're after active playable repos

If someone would re-implement Age of Rifles, that would be fantastic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame_Construction_Set_III:_...

Interesting site, although the clone I (very) briefly worked on isn't on that list. Probably just as well, the project is more or less abandoned.

The essence of it is in good application of macros. Macroassemblers were essential tools for software that wanted all three of complex, high-performance, and fast to build on hardware of that era. Although it's a bit intimidating to write a large program without a higher-level syntax backing it, it's possible to invent coding conventions and reuse strategies that get you to the desired level of flexibility and maintainability, but perhaps without as many built-in checks and a simpler strategy with respect to resource usage(a general-purpose "malloc" is not a thing you would want to do casually in an assembly program since it makes everything considerably harder to track - but simpler fixed-buffer or mark-and-release strategies were fair game).

And if you were a little more ambitious you could also write a custom code generator that added whatever additional features you needed - expansions, type checks, expression evaluators, simple optimizations. Code generation is actually far easier today since the scripting languages now are so much more powerful and feature-rich than what a typical early 90's setup would have(assembly, buggy proprietary C or Pascal compiler, Basic variants).

Of course there's nothing stopping you from taking a similar approach now and custom-generating some source instead of using templates or compile-time evaluation or other fancy features - it's just harder to communicate.

There are many large assembly projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_written_prim...

Even today a minority prefers writing new projects in assembly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281522

Here you can have a look at Prince of Persia's source for the Apple II: https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

That is impressive, was RCT2 mainly just Sawyer too like TT? Makes you reconsider scale when you say Fred/John/Mary is a 10x'er because she/he got a small line of business CRUD app in some high level language with a battery included opinionated web framework shipped in less than month.

How much of the game was actually in assembly? I always heard that it was mostly stuff like the guest AI that was in assembly (which is why you could have hundreds of them running at once), and the graphical stuff was in a higher-level language.

Blows my mind. What sorts of optimizations can you do in assembly better than a good C compiler could?

I'm wondering what % performance improvement he saw from doing it this way.

The same approach was used for OpenTTD, which is a re-implementation and extension of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, one of the other Chris Sawyer classics. When finally all graphics and sounds had been recreated, version 1.0.0 was released in 2010. Before that the original asset files were required to play the game.

https://www.openttd.org/

Or OpenMW which does the same thing for Morrowind (The Elder Scrolls 3). The main difference here being it runs on Linux natively and fixes tons of engine bugs that never were. They even have their own map editor for Morrowind which is just awesome.

Engines are easier compared to the assets. You only need programmers writing code (hard but easier than finding teams to work on assets)

$10 regular price is well spent.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/285330/RollerCoaster_Tycoo...

https://www.gog.com/game/rollercoaster_tycoon_2

If you want to buy the game, it regularly goes on sale for less than $2 on GOG

OpenTTD was like this as well for quite a while, until they had enough assets to include it in the base game.

I believe there is a Doom variant with the same requirements. It requires the image and sound files.

I am not a gamer so I can't opine on the quality.

If only it wasn't under a restrictive license....

Hi, OpenRCT2 dev here.

We already kind-of do that, but it is scattered. See https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0YvVAW9aoL0jq8XIDee0... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i6IPPi91Xs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJxlCxnmRiU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0HTA79NcIE

These and other useful/current information can be found where most of the community is: on reddit /r/rct and /r/openrct2.

what are Dolphin status reports, and what about them is effective?

Yes its always been a thought that we should do a Dolphin style progress blog but at present there is no one available to write one.

Its fully complete. Because it was reversed engineered function by function, it was never really not feature complete, since it would still call out to existing code in the binary (thought there were some bugs). They've since added a ton of new features not in the original game (eg multiplayer networked mode), native OS X/Linux support, etc.

I contributed a little bit back in 2014/2015 and it was a lot of fun. Because it is almost all hand-written x86 ASM (which is insane), it was actually not too hard to reason about, certainly far easier than what Clang/GCC will spit out.

I also head of it for a while before I gave it a spin. I finally got around to it about 6 months ago.

The game works really well. I don't remember noticing that anything was still missing in singleplayer. Multiplayer... there was something, but I don't remember what. Desyncs for sure, but I think those were always solveable by just reconnecting. I'm not sure what, but there was a reason why my girlfriend and I didn't play it. We played RCT2 a bunch, with one person watching and the other playing, and OpenRCT2 with multiplayer seemed epic, but there was something annoying in multiplayer, I just don't remember what.

By now, it might have improved again. I remember the development going really fast before. And in singleplayer, I don't think there were any bugs that prevented me from playing.

Give it a spin if you were (or still are) into the original Rollercoaster Tycoon!

It's mostly complete: a couple levels consistently crash on me [mac os], but for the most part it's pretty awesome.

SDL2 has SDL_WINDOW_ALLOW_HIGHDPI, which creates the window in high-DPI mode.

I remember playing multiplayer KAM a few years back. I don't know how they wrote the netcode, but the game ended up terribly out of sync pretty fast.

It's a shame the remake has decided to go 3d and lose the original art style. The original really has timeless graphics.

You can turn off mowing the lawn which will keep them on barf duty unless you have a giant flower garden in their work zone. It's pretty much necessary if you have a coaster with a moderate or higher puke value in the park.

Also don't forget that you can put bathrooms near the exit of an upchuck inducing ride to keep the paths a little cleaner.

would add a nice dynamic if their job performance was based on how much they were paid and if you could fire the underperformers.

If you can't find it or it is too scratched, they also sell the full edition of RCT2 on GoG for cheap https://www.gog.com/game/rollercoaster_tycoon_2

He gave a pretty interesting interview early 2016, apparently he was focused on the rerelease of RCT on mobile and enjoying life : http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-interview....

Seems like a humble person with a good life ethos. I like his philosophy with the RCT license of letting others have a go at it since he already made what he wanted.

I wish he would come back to make another game. RCT is so consistently fun so well put together it always impresses me so many years later. That guy is a hero of game design.

If you buy it from GOG you should be able to get the Windows exe, you can then try and install it with WINE. That should give you the game files to import into OpenRCT2.

Buying RTC Classic from Steam (which is available on macOS) is probably a better idea. It's an update to the game featuring both RCT1 and RCT2 campaigns.

Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed it. Especially the later parts. Looking at your GH it looks like it lost some steam? Did you continue on it and if so did it produce anything "surprising"? As in, this should not really be a good coaster but it has great score :-)

I haven't look at this game in particular, but usually you need to buy the original game to get the assests (art, models, audio, etc).

Even official open-source releases like the Quake series still require you to buy the original game in order to run them.

They reimplemented the game from scratch, the whole engine, UI everything. However, the artwork involved is still something you need to get from the original game, much like that used to be the case for OpenTTD.

Hi, OpenRCT2 dev here.

We're gradually moving towards C++, compiling our current C sources as C++ is the first step. Quite surprisingly too, we discovered how shitty a C compiler MSVC is, because just changing the C code of ride drawing to C++ made a huge performance impact there.

Reportedly, GCC also benefited from the switch, but the effect was less pronounced there.