OpenRCT2: Open-source implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 with new features | Hacker News Reader

OpenRCT2: Open-source implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 with new features

openrct2.org

230 pointssuperasn69 comments

I play OpenRCT2 with my daughter quite often, it works great, I recommend the OpenGL render engine since it allows for additional zoom and the kids love to see the people walking around and puking all over the park.

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and its spiritual successor, Planet Coaster, are fully 3D and allow you to even "ride" the coasters virtually. Apparently 3 wasn't received so well, but I'm a fan of them all.

Parkitect is the modern spiritual successor to rct1+2, while Planet Coaster is more like 3. The thing I (and some others) don't like about Rct3+planet coaster is that they're park painters where they're more focused on decoration and making a pretty park and the game is trivially easy, vs rct1+2 and parkitect where you generally have to put some work into making a profitable park and there's a bit more focus on the management and simulation.

Parkitect also has multiplayer.

I came here to find an excuse to mention Parkitect. Controlling the sight-lines of your park to hide employee pathways and deliveries in order to be more Disney-like is a great feature. Simultaneously fun and infuriating.

Eh, just slap blank beige walls everywhere and the peeps are happy. Obviously the game can't be expected to rate aesthetics, but the excitement of making a nice park is a bit lessened when you know that a beige solid wall would have done the same job.

Another thing I really don't like about Parkitect is that the physics feel too slow. The coasters don't have the same sense of speed as in Planet Coaster or RCT1 and I think a big part of the reason is the oversized peeps. Which is a shame, because regardless of what I said above, I actually like Parkitect's scenery and ride building the best.

I watch some planet coaster on YouTube and it blows my mind watching the park painters. I can’t do much more than plop down existing models.

Same with some of the City Skylines Youtubers ... I barely can get a functioning traffic network running (without despawning of vehicles) and then there are those who spend ages placing little bushes along the highways because it looks nicer.

RCT3 was buggy, but the fireworks were amazing!

People created genuine art with it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ItBY3H_04I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9WgMeqM3bY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF5n5I6omSA

The devs made the fireworks effect editor accessible from within the game, which allowed the community to create thousands of custom ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI1IrLHN2hk

https://www.shyguysworld.com/Archive/index.php?topic=17808.0

For me, the fact that it was 3-D took away the “magic”.

RCT3 was great but it was so buggy. I think they patched a lot of the bugs with a big update but I was on 56k dialup at the time and couldn't download it. By the time I got ADSL I forgot about it. It's a shame and really sucked for people like me who bought it but couldn't update it.

RCT3's first person riding feature was neat, but the bump in performance requirements meant that building large sprawling parks just wasn't as practical. I've never tried it on modern hardware though.

It runs great on even a 10 year old machine these days.

RCT2 is way better though… level design especially in 3 was lackluster, and the fact that Chris Sawyer wasn’t really involved in it shows.

RC3 was so ahead of its time. Although it was released 18 years ago, it featured first-person 3D simulations of user made roller coasters! In 2004!

Can you imagine it?

I can definitely imagine it because Theme Park World (Sim Theme Park in the US) did this in 1999. It was one of their main selling points.

You weren't just limited to roller coasters either. You could freely walk around the park and walk into any ride all in first person.

Yeah, Theme Park 1 (1994) had pre-rendered videos to emulate riding the rides (and so for things like waterslides and rollercoasters didn't match your layout), but Theme Park World had 3D real-time rides of your layouts.

Yes? What do you imagine games looked like in 2004? That was the year Half-Life 2 came out. Obviously, a game like RCT also has to run a simulation and can’t focus on graphics as much as a shooter. I’m just saying, if anything, RCT3 looked sub-par.

At work I say "the ride never ends" everytime some ongoing issue or everyday shenanigan happens. My colleagues kinda interpreted that as something I say but they have no idea its a reference to Mr Bones Wild ride which is RCT2 meme.

I think that meme strikes a chord in people because there's an inherent relatability to being stuck in a hellish process almost deliberately designed to be as long and soul-crushing as possible. Some websites/user interfaces, "ecosystems", feel like they are Mr. Bone's Wild Ride in cloud-compute platform form.

Mr. Bone's Wild Ride is a kafkian metaphor for our struggles.

There's another thing that was inspired by this. There's a really creative gamer/streamer/creator called "Daniels" who made a sort of troll level in Garry's Mod, a theme park which looked spectacular but had an infuriating and impossible process to enter. Inside the park had various pitfalls and traps to further infuriate participants. This sounds a little bit cruel but it's really fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ZrKehQ_xc

Because you’re butchering the line.

It’s “I want to get off <x>”

One of the lines from the original meme is "I want to get off Mr. Bones' wild ride.", but "Mr. Bones says: The ride never ends!" also features which the parent comment is probably referring to.

If you're going to confidently state someone is misquoting something you should probably make sure they are quoting what you think they are quoting.

The second formation doesn’t exist in the game

> On March 26th, 2012, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread in the /v/ (video games) board, which included several screen captures from the amusement park management simulation game Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. The images showed a 30,696 foot roller coaster track with 38 riders that took four years of in-game time to complete. The original poster (OP) provided greentext descriptions of the images, explaining that passengers were constantly yelling “I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.” After the coaster ended, the passengers walked down a large path leading to another entrance to the ride, where they were greeted by an installation of a skeleton with a top hat and a sign reading “The ride never ends.”

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mr-bones-wild-ride

Ty hats user created content, not part of the game. “I want to get off” is an actual thing that guests think in-game and is displayed in various dialogs.

Well its a meme. Good memes are created by general community. Like Sanic which doesn't exist in the game its referring to.

> OpenRCT2 requires the original RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 game files

For assets (graphics, sound, etc.), yeah. OpenTTD, an older sibling project, eventually was blessed with artists willing to remake all of the assets so the game could be played without the original TTD installed.

I think a lot of the charm of RCT2 comes from the specific assets in use and the degree of whimsy and joy they contain, more so than TTD's matter-of-fact trains and planes and such.

It's not like these folks are setting out to make a totally free-as-in-beer game that replaces the old one; they just want to be able to fix bugs and add features, and you can't easily do that with the original retail stuff.

RCT2 is now 20 years old - what do we as a society gain by still not letting those assets be freely redistributed and built upon.

Take it up with Disney, not these fine folk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Those are commercially available from gog.com: https://www.gog.com/en/game/rollercoaster_tycoon_2

And the data files from the demo version do the trick too.

The way they have been working on this has been interesting. Rather than a from scratch approach, they started with the original game and over time replaced component by component the original game bits with open source replacements.

That sounds like that wouldn't hold up in court, it's not a "white room" implementation by any means. I hope it won't be tested though.

Contrast that to OpenTTD or OpenRA where they (AFAIK) re-implemented the engine while still having the same approach of re-using the main games assets.

Edit: taking a look at the source code, I don't think what you're saying is actually true. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was written entirely in Assembly but I cannot find any Assembly files in OpenRCT2. So unless they already finished porting everything, it seems incorrect.

They have finished porting everything. And it was done chunk-by-chunk, but in C++ instead of assembly.

I looked at the source a few years back and saw more than a few functions that looked like the result of decompiling machine code to C. I didn't spend much time trying to see if that's true or not, but in the end it doesn't seem to matter. Still, if you like the game, you should keep a local fork of the repository, just in case.

I think this is the go-to approach for most of these kind of projects. You decompile it and then start refactoring it into C-functions and such that make sense. That this game was originally written in assembly probably helped a lot making the disassemby readable.

I had the discs years ago but lost them at some point. They're available online to pirate, but GOG also has them for a few dollars.

You can use the demo files for RCT2 to play OpenRCT2 for free. It's not encouraged, but OpenRCT2s website has a download link for it.

That's very common for projects like this. ScummVM is another example. If you don't require the original files to run, you're essentially redistributing a commercial game for free, which even for older titles is generally not advised.

It's weird to see genres come and go. Back then it felt like there was a "Tycoon" game for almost everything (well, most of them were fairly terrible, but still...).

TTD was always closer to my heart though really, that and the original Zoo Tycoon. I almost wish there'd be something like this for Zoo Tycoon, while Planet Zoo has some really nice attention to detail with the animals the level of design tuning you can do with scenery / buildings feels a bit overwhelming.

Also check out Theme Hospital open source remake

https://corsixth.com/

The websites are rather similar!

This looks pretty great. I’ve been meaning to get back into RCT2. Does OpenRCT2 _feel_ like the original?

Yes. It’s basically pixel perfect, except that you can enable various improvements.

For instance: RCT2 used a single byte to store many values.

Some of these were reasonable (like the number of cars on a ride).

Others weren’t… like the number of guests in a queue. When it hit 255 additional guests would refuse to enter the line.

Very much so, yeah.

I played this recently. Its amazing what a rush of nostalgia i got, and how well the game holds up.

It is even more amazing realizing what a small team made the game, and that it was written in assembly!

The game holds up very well. OpenRCT2 fixes a variety of bugs as well.

I highly recommend https://m.youtube.com/c/MarcelVos Marcel Vos who explores the limits of the game engine, various rides, etc. Amusingly there are scenarios which require nearly zero effort to win.

Specifically, the ‘small team’ is Chris Sawyer, with art by Simon Foster and music by Allister Brimble. Even though the art is very recognizable (made by rasterizing 3d objects), both RCT 1-2 and TTD are very much Sawyer's games.

Little Jimmy thinks the ride was not fun

Little jimmy thinks the bathroom is dirty

Little jimmy has drowned

I played RCT2 many years ago. But what was most notable was that it had a DST bug that lost all your progress when daylight savings time changed.

But the game was great. Just I had to play some levels twice.

That was RCT1, and they released a patch quite quickly... I mean, at max half a year after the game released, obviously.

Now that you mention that again, I wonder what the underlying issue here was. Nothing in the game depends on the real time clock, and more importantly, how does reloading the saved progress at an arbitrary point in the future break things? I do remember though that poking around the game files I couldn't figure out back then where the progress is stored at all. When I moved to a new machine, I reinstalled the game and then copied over everything from the old machine, basically replacing the entire game, and still all progress was lost. I could still load the individual save games though–which I always saved right after passing the scenario, so nothing happened. Luckily I was only 4 or 5 parks in, so from then on I made sure to save individual scenarios right before passing them, never after, so the win condition would trigger again after loading them.

I believe it was even more than one game that had this problem. If the data would be stored in a file, then any kid would copy and edit it. So, it was put in shady places in the registry and other windows configs.

I loved rct and rct2 but Parkitect has been a worthy spiritual successor for me

I had no idea OpenRTC2 was written in JavaScript https://github.com/Limetric/OpenRCT2.org

OpenRTC2 is mostly C++[1]. Your link is to the source of their website.

[1] https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2

Thank you for correcting me!

I believe the original was handwritten in Assembly

It’s fun but reminds me I no longer have the patience for video games.

Same. I can't play any games for more than an hour.

Would LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE to see this ported to the Switch or released on Steam!

> released on Steam

Y tho

Edit: in fact RCT2 is on Steam, so I guess you buy that and then run OpenRCT2, pointing it to RCT2's resources.

> Ported to Steam

What does that even mean?

Released on steam*

First you would need a new, free graphics, sound effect, and music.

sad zoo tycoon never gets as much love :(

Like others have said, this is an engine reimplantation, not the game.

Like openmw, it requires the original game.

I think the title is misleading.

ITT everyone pretends they don't pirate.

Original RCT1 and 2 are frequently on sale for dirt cheap on GOG. No need to pirate.

Whoa a macOS version?

I mean, the Android version is more surprising, especially since the controls don't favor the touch screen. Though I've played OpenTTD on a tablet and it was pretty good, if a bit involved.

OpenRCT2 seems to use SDL, just like OpenTTD—which apparently allows for relatively easy porting on various platforms. Sergii Pylypenko (`pelya` on Github) ported several SDL games on Android aside from OpenTTD—e.g. Ur-Quan Masters.

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