OpenTTD 1.11
openttd.org
openttd.org
Chris Sawyer (the original developer) is one of those OG 10x developer. Built an entire game + AI + windowed GUI in Assembly in 1992! Even before Windows 3.11 came out.
I still remembered my first impression back in 1994 distinctly. I can open 20 different windows in Transport Tycoon and each window follows its own respective vehicle like a drone cam.
The GUI windows themselves can be resized smoothly and piled on top of each other. Something that older version of Windows couldn't do.
Also, the game was fairly small in size and incredibly stable.
I thought to myself, this developer was a mega genius!
The IDE controller did not survive that, had to reformat the HDD too :(
Then they just operate directly on it, because the engine literally is older than DirectX.
N.B. apart from being more official by virtue of being on the channel of John Broomhall himself, which has accumulated a breathtaking 52 subscribers so far (correction: 53 as of now), the audio quality is also better.
It indicates to me how they approach their work, in an era of content creators wanting higher subscriber counts. But at the same time they're probably well enough off from previous successes, so maybe the necessity for self-promotion isn't there.
Of course I use all kinds of "mods" now to enhance the gameplay - notably JGR's Pack[1] - mostly for the programmable signals and similar extensions, but the core game is mostly the same.
Simply brilliant. It deserves some kind of award/title/recognition for it's.. je ne sais quois.
It's pretty cool that some of the community for this game ended up on the dev team for Factorio, another graphically lacking but deeply wonderful game.
Not true anymore with HD graphics finalized.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101031184339/http://www.funkel...
Simutrans.. you buy one too many buses, or one that is over sized for your route (even barely) and your company is bust in a week.
e: It is also worth checking out OpenTTD's Passenger/Cargo Distribution options: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Passenger%20and%20cargo%2...
"OpenRA is an open source project that recreates and modernizes classic real time strategy games, like Red Alert, Command & Conquer, and Dune 2000."
I remember the small but vibrant modding community that sprung up around Tiberian Sun, which came out just as people were getting online.
And then, a few years later, Glest. There were so many mods and factions for Glest!
The servers run by the OpenTTD reddit even have an online status website with game logs (https://ttdredd.it/). I tended to play there as whenever a game started, there were always a half-dozen players online.
Some notes:
* OpenTTD is more "purely" about transportation. While Factorio has very good train-logic (block-signals vs chain-signals), OpenTTD has bridges, tunnels, terrain modifications, basic signals, path-based signals, entry/exit signals and more. OpenTTD Trains slow down going up hills and around turns: meaning optimal train pathing requires significant thought into terrain flatness and turn radius.
* OpenTTD also has planes, boats, trucks, and busses. Furthermore: log trains can only carry logs, passenger trains can only carry passengers. While the item-tree of OpenTTD is simpler, the overall logistics of transportation are far more complex. Of course, Trains are the most interesting part. (Boats have no collision detection. Trucks have very low throughput and are mainly just an early-game / simplicity option. Airplanes are relatively simple: fill them up until your airports are full)
* OpenTTD train scheduling is far deeper than Factorio. Your schedules can include target dates (ex: 30 days between TownA and TownB, with 4 days target of loading/unloading time), as well as multiple trains that share a schedule. Trains also require maintenance and begin to break down if you neglect maintenance. Learning to build high-throughput maintenance networks is part of OpenTTD.
* Trains evolve throughout the years based off of technology. Early on, coal-based trains are slow, clumsy and unreliable. Eventually diesel trains pop up but are unreliable until the technology matures (in contrast: coal/steam is at max reliability). Then electricity (but diesel is now max reliability, and electric is low reliable). Etc. etc.
* No "inserters", no "biters", no "defense". No blueprints, no factory designs. Its purely a game about moving items from one place to another. Turns out that in of itself is sufficient to make a game around.
* You cannot control the placement of primary industries or cities in OpenTTD. They're part of the "terrain" so to speak, its your job to connect them somehow.
* OpenTTD automatically grows factories / towns / industry based on how quickly you service them (aka: Trains grow things the fastest). The better you service a town, the more passengers it generates. As such, you INEVITABLY will grow until your network saturates.
* As such: good players aim for extremely high bandwidth designs, knowing full well that all aspects of the game will grow to meet whatever bandwidth you design. (In contrast: Factorio only needs to be designed for the level of traffic you ever plan for a region. In fact, mines begin to run out of ore eventually, so traffic slowly declines in any given situation, sans "infinite mining productivity science".) The growth-formulas for towns / industry seems a bit unintuitive at first: but know full well its all about encouraging you to make faster-and-faster train networks.
EDIT: * Latency matters in OpenTTD. All goods have a "rot" rate, so to speak. Things like Coal almost never lose value, but passengers and mail (two things you can transport) are extremely sensitive to latency. Running partially-empty trains for lower-latency is possibly more lucrative than running full-trains (but having your passengers and/or mail wait longer).
Please excuse the minor nitpick of your excellent comment, but there is actually an option for founding new towns in OpenTTD: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Archive/Manual/Settings/Advanced...
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The optional CargoDist settings for passenger / mail is excellent btw. If you plan on using any passenger / mail traffic, I highly suggest turning on that extension. Passengers / mail under CargoDist will plan "routes", and take multiple stops to get to their preferred destination.
A set percentage (say 75%, its configurable) will also want to make a "round trip", and come back home. This allows for more natural "hub-and-spoke" style gameplay for your traffic systems... compared to the default where passengers are willing to be dropped off literally anywhere.
In theory, "Goods" and other stuff can be CargoDist enabled as well. However, I like the idea of "fungible" items (like Coal or Goods), to provide further contrast between passengers/mail and the rest of the game.
Anyway, I've found just to easy to get insane amounts of money when industries where enabled. So playing with passengers only made a bigger challenge in the beginning
Not technically true since you can mix carriages, but like in Factorio having mixed trains is probably a bad idea.
Mixed trains in Factorio offer some awesome benefits if you're a bit creative.
Especially because filter-inserters are cheap and plentiful. So its very easy to reconstruct "main belts" from a mixed Factorio train.
I've lost the blueprint for this 'Trainmall' I made a few playthroughs ago, but the idea is to:
1. Have a generic train loadout that can build any base.
2. Have a small set of "standard" assembly machines that can feed red-requester chests, so that construction-bots can build any (reasonable mid-game) design you can imagine. Remotely and automatically.
Carrying Electric Miners / AM1 machines is inefficient. One base may require miners, while a 2nd base may require assembly machines. By "assembling in the field", the singular iron + gears + circuits (+other stuff) train can feed many different bases without any reconfiguration at all.
Only made possible with mixed-trains.
Yellow belt is limited to 15-items/sec, Red 30/sec, Blue 45/sec. Trains are more complicated, but intersections are usually limited to 20 to 40 trains/minute, depending on intersection design.
This means that even a train track is going to be limited to ~30ish trains/minute (not because of the track itself, but because it will be bottlenecked by some intersection down the track somewhere).
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Mixed just allowed you to utilize those belts more efficiently. For any base smaller than 45-science per second (among the 6 endgame sciencies: red, green, blue, purple, yellow, and white. Military isn't really needed once your defenses are thick enough), aka: a 0.45 rocket-per-minute base or smaller, a __single__ blue belt can theoretically support all of your labs.
Of course, sushi belts require combinators, counting of items, and more. Its a bit complicated. But if you sushi-belt, you get some simplicity benefits (at the cost of combinator complexity).
OpenTTD 1.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772536 -
OpenTTD Compiled to WebAssembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19538715 -
OpenTTD 1.8.0-RC1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725375 -
Few games still receive updates like that...and maybe OpenCiv which was remake of the 1996 Civ 2 which was a new version of the 1991 Civ. Maybe NetHack which was started in 1987 and a fork of the 1982 game Hack has the record for longevity of continuously-updated game.
* no multiplayer or AI, this is all solo/sandbox play... same thing as in TTD, you're economically limited at the start, but after a certain point you just have more money than you could ever spend
* the game is performance limited, once you've grow your network and the towns on your map large enough, first the 2/3x speeds slow down to normal speed, and then eventually even that starts lagging. You can still get 100h+ playtime out of a normal map on a decent computer before it starts becoming too much of an issue, though.
* Bridge building is fairly finicky, RIP "bridge pillar collision". OpenTTD is way more limited but also way more predictable.
All in all, TTD/OpenTTD still has a lot going for it 25-30 years later, and I'll happily play both .
This game was so mind blowing, my friend and me we sit hours making trains. He would make one then me.
OpenTTD was a revolution for me, now I pick up the game and every now and then and enjoy a hefty dose of nostalgia. The little tweaks make it more fun to play and playing against/with others online makes it fun. I think this is still the golden standard of sim games, also this guy pretty much made it on his own... absolutely some kind of mad genius level of programming skills.
Never heard of it...playing right now...thanks for the tip!!
2. Buy an aircraft, and send them to deliver passengers/mail between the two large and far away cities.
3. As long as this aircraft doesn't crash, you're now set to mess around at your own pace. It delivers a solid amount of cash. If the aircraft crashes (bad luck), either restart the game, or take out a loan for a 2nd aircraft.
though it's still extremely profitable, vs. say the infrastructure costs of railways