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Comment by ninjin | Hacker News Reader

OpenTTD is probably my favourite, but let me put a classic that I really enjoyed into the mix: XBattle [1]. Real-time strategy with an emphasis on area of control and supply line “flow”. All while “abusing” X11 to get multi-player support. It gave me many hours of joy at the Solaris boxes we had at university in the mid 00s. My only concern would be whether it counts as open source with its home-made license [2].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20011128105604/http://cns-web.bu...

[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~ninjin/fdd615d6e32e1316014dece892128697...

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Designing your rail network in transport tycoon feels like software engineering sometimes, having to refactor old lines to fit the new ones in neatly.

A very dangerous game to play though, you'll boot it up in the morning for a way to kill an hour and... it'll suddenly be midnight.

I have played enough OpenTTD in my life that it silently sits in my library, tempting me, but I refuse to open it for exactly the reason you highlighted. it's a massive time sink and I'm far too old to suddenly realize the birds are chirping and the sun is coming up.

XBattle looks so cool, amazing that this game was made 30 years ago. Kind of similar to a game I had been working on (and might just get out of the dustbin to reactivate).

Anyone looking to get started with hexagonal grids should check out [1] from Red Blob Games. Comprehensive tutorial on hex grids explaining coordinates, fields of vision, pathfinding and more.

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

I never understood OpenTTD. Passengers just board your vehicles and go wherever you take them? That makes no sense to me. How is that supposed to work?

I've played a bit of Simutrans, where each prospective passenger has an origin and a destination, and if you can take them there, they use your services, otherwise they don't.

I think the logic is that they only show up at the station if there is a train that goes where they want. Much like in real life how the trains go on a schedule and you get on if it is going where you want.

Now I'm sure the simulation isn't perfect but it seems to make enough sense for game logic.

You can enable a feature called cargodist. This adds the functionality, where passengers have a destination in mind.

I think Railroad tycoon 3 had a good system. Cargo flowed towards a destination, even if there weren't methods to transport goods. Cargo would prefer to take the easiest path though, so if you built a rail line between a source and destination, the cargo would prefer the line.

It depends on a lot of factors, like the size of the town etc. traffic will increase if you make stations, promoting travel between cities. money can also be made by connecting factories with farms etc, fairly simple.

you can go way complex with orders, like only depart when 50% full or 100% full, to optimize your lines.

Passengers in OpenTTD are just a type of cargo like any other resource in the game. They're different from industry cargo in that the building that "consumes" them is the same as the one that "produces" them (residential areas), but there isn't any more to it than that.

Why does it need to make any more sense than that to be enjoyable?

I really liked Xbattle, but seemed pretty dated, and at least when I played required players to xhost + the server, which back then wasn't that unusual.

There was a similar game, written in java (server and client I believe), called Europa. Had a grid of X's, simple UI (tell units where to go) and the "water pressure" would slow from the cities that make armies to wherever you pointed them. Even included things like using 3 armies to make 1 paratrooper that could jump a square or two.

The author even sent me a copy, not sure I still have it though.

XbattleAI did a TCP connection version, I can't remember if it was good enough. See. https://github.com/robertjschulz/xbattleai

The closed source javascript game https://generals.io is a good simplification of XBattle, I've seen one OSS server reimplementation of it.

If you can find the code for Europa I'm interested, I think it was released as OSS but I couldn't find it when looking around.

It wasn't opensource ... till the author decided to just shelve it. See above for download link.

I found the download on the wayback machine (very cool). It's basically a modernized xbattle that has a server/client that doesn't rely on X11 trusting remove server.

To download: https://web.archive.org/web/20050925030417/http://www.cgl.uw...

I made a first version of an XBattle remake over the weekend with Unity [1]. Still needs a lot before it can be released but the basic features are working already.

[1] https://giphy.com/gifs/unity-game-dev-xbattle-stdR5qYdqrgNll...

Does OpenTTD have fully open source content by now?

Yep, it has replacements for the graphics and audio assets. Just "apt install openttd" :)

I would still highly recommend digging up the proprietary assets though, in particular the music [1] is far superior.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI3-Wwl5Xtg

Yes, if only for nostalgia. The modern graphics look smoother/friendlier, but I just want it to look the way it always looked back then. :)

What was the X11 abuse? Did they have an X server and serve multiple X clients, each acting as an individual player? If so, that sounds super clever.

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